Nazi Loot Finder Sues, Hals Buyer Found Guilty - Hecto Feliciano sues Elaine Rosenberg, and Adam Williams is convicted of handling stolen property - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Raphael Rubinstein

On the very first page of The Lost Museum, his 1997 book about how the Nazis systematically looted private art collections during the occupation of France, Hector Feliciano thanks Elaine Rosenberg "for her friendship, ideas, hospitality, and for the unlimited access to the Paul Rosenberg archives she offered me." Apparently, Elaine Rosenberg's friendship wasn't as deep as Feliciano believed. In late May of this year, he filed a suit in New York State Supreme Court against her and the other heirs of Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg for defrauding him of millions of dollars.

According to Feliciano, Elaine Rosenberg, who is the widow of Rosenberg's son Alexandre, reneged on her verbal promise to pay him a finder's fee for the recovery of art works that had belonged to her father-in-law. He is claiming $6.8 million, which represents 17.5 percent of the estimated $39 million of looted art that the Rosenberg family has recovered since the publication of The Lost Museum. The Rosenbergs contend that they made no such promise to Feliciano and that, moreover, he was not responsible for actually recovering the stolen works, which include paintings by Matisse, Monet, Bonnard and Leger.

The case seems to hinge on how much importance one places on Feliciano's investigative scholarship. For instance, although he did not personally recover Matisse's Odalisque (1927), one of the works in question, the painting's presence in the Seattle Museum of Art came to light only because of its appearance in his book [see "Front Page," Dec. '00], where the daughter of the American collectors who had donated it to the museum happened to see it. Feliciano argues that without The Lost Museum and his extensive detective work into the contents and dispersal of Paul Rosenberg's collection, the missing art would never have been recovered. In a recent statement to the New York Times, Feliciano's lawyer, John Charles Thomas, depicted his client as naive: "It never occurred to him that someone who had reaped such a huge windfall would break a promise."

Just as Feliciano was filing his suit, another Nazi-loot-related case was drawing to a close in Pads. On July 6, a French court convicted Adam Williams, former head of Newhouse Galleries in New York, for handling a stolen painting, Frans Hals's Portrait of Pastor Adrianus Tegularius (1655-60), which was taken by the Nazis from Paris art collector Adolphe Schloss in 1943. The Hals, which is also discussed in The Lost Museum, was sold at auction in New York and London several times in the 1960s and '70s without the knowledge of the Schloss heirs. In 1989, Williams bought it at Christie's in London for $180,000. The following year he took the painting to an art fair in Paris, where it was recognized by one of the heirs and confiscated by the police. Williams claims to have been unaware of the painting's illicit history, but French prosecutors charged that its provenance was well known. After the British-born dealer was acquitted at his first trial, the decision was appealed. Williams faced up to five years in prison, but the court gave him an eight-month suspended sentence and ordered the Hals to be turned over to Adolphe Schloss's heirs.