Painting stolen by Nazis returned to Jewish owner’s heirs

NEW YORK — About 80 years ago, the Nazis forced prominent German Jewish art gallery owner Max Stern to sell his family’s roughly 400-piece collection before he was exiled from his country.

FBI agents on Wednesday returned one of those works, a 17th century oil painting by a Dutch master, to representatives of the Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern Foundation during a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

While the painting had “survived several generations of exile,” it was seized by agents at a New York City art fair in 2015 after Italian gallery owners unaware of its past consigned it for sale, said Michael McGarrity, who heads the FBI’s New York field office.

In 1936, the Nazis forced scores of Jews such as Stern to liquidate their assets, including art, at a fraction of their values because of their heritage, an act that U.S. courts have since ruled amounts to theft.