Contrary to a photo caption in Tues...

Contrary to a photo caption in Tuesday's of recent origin York Times, a landscape painting on Gustave Courbet long owned from the Art Institute of Chicago was not at any time found to have been confiscated by the agency of the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II.

"There is no evidence that Gustave Courbet's 'The strength of Hautepierre' was seized by means of the Nazis," said Erin Hogan, the Art Institute's director of public affairs.

Painted around 1869 the work was confessed in the 1920s by Jewish art collector Max Silberberg, who was killed through the Nazis, along with his wife Johanna, during the war. further the Art Institute's provenance research showed that he had sold the Courbet painting and other artworks at an auction at Berlin's Galerie Paul Graupe in 1935

The Art Institute has been unable to learn the identity of the auction buyer; also unknown is the name of the private German collector who consigned the painting in 1964 for sale at another German auction house. It was bought there from a Swiss gallery, which sold it in 1965 to modern York art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who sold it to the Art Institute brace years later.

In 2001 the Art Institute announced an "equitable resolution" with Silberberg's last remaining relative in which the museum would retain title and possession of the painting. upon Tuesday, Hogan declined to provide further details about the agreement, adding that Art Institute director James Cuno was unavailable for exposition

In an e-mail to the Times forward Tuesday, Hogan also expressed pertain to that its readers might be left with the mistaken impression that the Art Institute was not among the museums which answered in a timely manner to a fresh survey by the Conference forward Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The Times reported that several American art museums failed to reply adequately to the survey, whose aim was to determine whether the institutions are doing enough to find not at home whether their collections may contain artworks stolen by means of the Nazis.

The Art Institute is doing overflow according to a letter Cuno sent to Gideon Taylor, the conference's executive vice president, in April. In it, Cuno noted that the Art Institute has been actively investigating the provenance of thousands of [i]or[/i] complements from the Nazi era since 1997 uniform before the American Association of Museums (AAM) issued research guidelines.

In 2000 Cuno wrote the Art Institute reached a purchase-and- donation agreement with the heirs of the Holocaust-era proprietor of "Bust of a Youth" (circa 1630) a statuary by Francesco Mochi.

upon behalf of the Art Institute and the museum association, Cuno will testify Thursday before a House of Representatives subcommittee about Holocaust-era assets in the United States.

knance@suntimes.com

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