NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- For years, a large, richly colored painting depicting a moment of sexual violence has stopped visitors in Gallery 634 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Once viewed as an image of Tarquin attacking Lucretia, as in Roman legend, the 17th-century work attributed to Eustache Le Sueur has more recently been described as a portrayal of the rape of Tamar from the Old Testament.

Now newly discovered evidence suggests the painting’s history is as painful as its theme.

Old court records indicate the painting, purchased by the Met in 1984, is likely the same one a Jewish art dealer, Siegfried Aram, left behind when he fled Germany as Hitler took power in 1933.

The records, which recount the dealer’s unsuccessful effort to reclaim his painting for more than a decade after the war, were discovered by a researcher and photographer, Joachim Peter, who has spent years studying the history of Heilbronn, the German city where Aram once lived, including the treatment of its Jews and the devastation from Allied bombing.

Aram, the records show, argued in courtroom after courtroom that he was a victim of the Nazi era, a Jew put in an impossible position because of the persecution launched by Hitler. First forced to sell his home under duress for too little money to a German businessman, Oskar Sommer, he argued that Sommer then illegally walked off with his artwork as well.

Now, in response to questions from The New York Times, the Met is reviewing the painting’s history of ownership to determine what, if anything, it should do to resolve the situation.

“This is important new information that is worthy of a detailed investigation, which we will begin immediately,” the museum said in a statement. “The Met has a long history of working with claimants to research and find a just and fair solution in cases of art wrongfully appropriated during the Nazi era.”

Sommer’s family brought the painting to auction at Christies’ in London in 1983, two of Sommer’s daughters told The Times. It sold as Lot 45 to a trio of dealers for 108,000 pounds, or about $485,000 today. Now it could be worth as much as $1.5 million, one dealer estimated.

The listed provenance at auction made no mention of Aram, who had died five years earlier. It was described simply as “the property of a gentleman,” without any reference to previous owners.

The Met bought it months later from those dealers for an undisclosed price. The museum’s officials concluded at the time that the painting “has no known provenance prior to its appearance at auction at Christie’s, London, 2 December 1983.”

As much as the story of the painting is a question of ownership, it is also a vivid illustration of how much less equipped and attentive the world once was on the issue of art lost during the Nazi era.

Authorities after the war returned hundreds of thousands of artifacts that had been lost through displacement or Nazi looting. Museums and the art market tried to review works that came to market with patchy histories. But it was an imprecise process, without the digital databases that are so useful today.

Experts say that as time moved on, many people assumed, incorrectly, that most items had been returned.

“By the ’70s, ’80s, few people thought about those things anymore,” said Lynn H. Nicholas, an historian and expert on Nazi-looted art. “Unless somebody made a noise, it would not have even occurred to a dealer to go back and check.”

A Forgotten Dispute
Aram’s efforts might have remained buried inside the state archives in Baden-Württemberg were it not for Peter, who recreated, document by document, the dealer’s fight for his painting.

Aram had purchased the painting in London in the mid-1920s, according to court filings he made. He considered it to be “Tarquin and Lucretia” by the court painter for King Louis XIII of France, Simon Vouet, in whose studio Le Sueur had his early training.

When Aram fled Germany, his mother, Thekla, stayed in Berlin, tasked with selling the family’s properties, including Aram’s large home in Schapbach, in the Black Forest. It was a time when the Nazis were beginning to promote the boycott of Jewish businesses and to target enemies of the regime.

To sell the home, a distinctive property that later became the subject of a postcard, Aram’s mother negotiated with Sommer, a department store owner. The 1933 sales contract excluded the painting, which Aram said he had already arranged to sell to a collector in California. (The sales contract and a certified translation of the painting’s bill of sale to the American support that account and were later submitted in court by Aram’s lawyer.)

But Sommer said he was keeping the painting. He complained that the property was smaller than described, that he had not been properly informed of any exclusions and that Aram’s mother had tried to remove other items that were part of the deal. Sommer also threatened to sue.

In interviews, Sommer’s daughters denied their father might have done anything to exploit the vulnerabilities of Jews. They said, rather, that he had spoken of having sheltered persecuted Jews. A German historian, Gabriele Clemens, said Sommer, who died in 1966, once resigned a post in protest of the Nazis. There is a plaque commemorating his life in his hometown, Trier, where his family has run a department store for generations.

But Aram, in court papers, argued that he had been taken advantage of because of his religion. The property, an estate with multiple buildings, that he sold to Sommer for 70,000 Reichsmarks was resold five years later for 195,000.

Aram said his mother was so upset by the negotiations with Sommer that she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills before fleeing to Italy, where she died of cancer in 1934. Even in the United States, Aram felt pursued, according to his letters and court records. Nazi diplomats were tracking him, he wrote, and he feared they might try to spirit him back to Germany.

He moved around a lot, to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, and finally New York, where he opened a gallery in the late 1930s. He said in letters that someone once scratched swastikas on its windows and that he was beaten on the street by two men yelling anti-Semitic slurs.

Still, his profile as a dealer grew with major collectors and important museums, who often bought his inventory. And he never stopped battling to reclaim the painting that had hung in his home in Schapbach.

In postwar Germany, courts and government agencies oversaw the many claims brought by displaced Jews. Though Aram fought in several arenas, his case was never decided on the merits.

One German judge agreed he had never turned over the painting, but ruled the issue moot based on the erroneous assumption, fueled by Sommer, that it was no longer in the businessman’s possession. In an appeal, Aram received another $7,000 (about $70,000 today) from Sommer in a settlement over the house price, but the painting’s ownership remained in dispute.

A subsequent effort to sue the government failed when the state said that because it had not confiscated the painting, it could not be held responsible.

A Different Era
What, if any, of this history Christie’s understood at the time of the auction remains unclear.

Asked what research it had done on the painting’s history, Christie’s said in a statement that “details of previous ownership and title would have been assessed at the time.” It said its client confidentiality policy precluded disclosing who had consigned it for sale. It noted, though, that “in the early 1980s, the vital databases, registries, and digitized records necessary for thorough restitution research did not yet exist” and that today it has its own restitution department.

One of the dealers who bought the work, Guy Stair Sainty, said there was no indication at the time that the painting had a disputed ownership.

“You bought something in Christie’s or Sotheby’s and you didn’t even think about it,” Sainty said. “Unless you had a suspicion then, you had no reason to check, but nowadays we don’t buy a painting without looking.”

Restitution efforts revived greatly in the late 1990s as scholars like Nicholas focused on the scope of Nazi looting, and the fall of the Berlin Wall made clear the scale of displaced works in Eastern Europe. Some Jewish families began to pursue claims.

When the Met purchased the painting in 1984, its acquisition policies were not as strict as they are today. Today, for works likely to have been in German-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945, the Met’s policy requires that “where information is incomplete for a gift, bequest or purchase, curatorial staff should undertake additional research prudent or necessary to resolve the Nazi-era provenance of the work.”

It is unclear what would happen if the Met’s review concludes it is indeed Aram’s painting. Though the Met has returned works before, no heirs of Aram have come forward. At the least, the Met would likely provide visitors with a fuller account of its history.

The painting had been retitled by the time the Met purchased it as experts came to believe it depicted not Tarquin and Lucretia, but the rape of Tamar, a daughter of King David, by her half brother Amnon; and that Le Sueur, not Vouet, had painted it.

The tragedy of Lucretia, the virtuous noblewoman who kills herself after being raped by royalty, had been a popular subject for artists and is said to have led to the rebellion that paved the way for the Roman republic.

In the legend, Tarquin threatens to kill her male servant, and place them in bed together as lovers, if she refuses to sleep with him. Among the reasons the Met came to reject the Lucretia description was the gender of the servant in the painting — female, not male as in the legend.

Peter, 53, continues to believe otherwise. A part-time teacher, he is preparing a book on Nazi-looted art and notes the attacker wields a dagger, which is absent from the Tamar story, but typically held by Tarquin. What is more, he believes the subject of Lucretia spoke to Aram.

“For Aram the subject had personal meaning since he was facing tyranny himself,” he said. “He had hopes for equal Jewish rights. He could deeply relate to the hope for a rising republic.”

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