Sun, Mar 18
02:00PM
Sun, Mar 18
02:00PM
panel discussion
The Return of the Basket Weavers: How the Toren family recovered a stolen Max Liebermann painting
Max Liebermann’s oil painting, “The Basket Weavers” was once part of the extensive art collection of David Friedmann in Breslau, Silesia, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). After the spectacular discovery of over 1,000 looted works of art in a Munich apartment became public in 2013, Friedmann’s grandnephew David Toren learned that several of his family’s paintings had been among those owned by the infamous Nazi art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt. One of the paintings, Max Liebermann’s “Two Riders on the Beach” was among those recovered in the apartment of Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius. Toren sued the German government for the “Riders” and became one of the very few heirs to recover stolen work from the Gurlitt stash. “The Basketweavers” remained missing; it had been sold at auction in 2000 to an anonymous collector in Israel. After a successful lawsuit to force the auction house to reveal the identity of the buyer, Toren recovered the painting, which is now on temporary display at the Center for Jewish History.
David Toren, a retired New York attorney who was born in 1925 and escaped Germany on a Kindertransport to Sweden in 1939, will join his son Peter Toren for a discussion of this unique and ongoing restitution case, with an opportunity to view the “Basketweavers.”
Presented by:
panel discussion
