Moll, a pupil of Matisse, is believed to have sat for 10 three-hour sessions for the portrait. In 1908 Matisse painted a portrait of a woman called Margarete Moll (who went by the name of Greta.) The descendants of Margarete Moll, her three grandchildren (Oliver Williams and Margarete Green, of the United Kingdom, and Iris Filmer, of Germany), claim that the painting was illegally taken towards the end of World War II and then displayed in the National Gallery. The painting is considered a masterpiece of Matisse’s fauve period.
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By 1944, as the war raged, Greta Moll watched her home in Berlin burn to the ground after an allied attack. The family claims the National Gallery of Art’s refusal to return the painting to them violates NY and worldwide law, along with Great Britain’s obligations under a 1970 UNESCO Convention not to acquire cultural property lost or stolen during World War II and its aftermath. From 1933 on, Oskar and Greta Moll were prohibited by the Nazis from exhibiting their art in Germany. The 1908 painting of Moll has been in the museum’s collection since 1979.
But the Nazis were fiercely critical of the Molls’ art work, labelling it degenerate and bourgeois. Greta Moll, left as the sole owner of the painting, believed it was still in danger after Germany fell to the allies and chose to move it outside the country altogether before she moved to the U.K.to live with her daughter’s family in Wales, according to the suit. But by then she’d moved the painting and other valuables to a friend’s house outside the city.
Moll lived in Germany during the war and gave the painting to her husband Oskar’s art student, who lived in Switzerland, for safe-keeping from looters after the conflict ended, according to the complaint. Greta his widow came to Britain to be with her daughter. The work was then sold in 1949 to a gallery in New York, Knoedler & Co., which is now closed. The family also says they never transferred the title of the painting, and they blame the museum for not investigating the painting’s provenance.
The student ran off with the painting and the work passed through the hands of USA art galleries until it was bought in 1979 by the National Gallery in London, it is claimed.
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The plaintiffs brought the suit in NY because the Museums and Galleries Act of 1992 “generally prohibits the disposal of objects that are the property of the National Gallery”, they write. Representatives from the National Gallery of Art, London did not immediately return requests for comment.
