Judge rules dealer David Nahmad must return $30m Nazi-looted Modigliani

The New York Supreme Court ruled that Lebanese billionaire art dealer David Nahmad must return Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With a Cane (1918), a painting estimated to be worth up to $30 million, to the heirs of Jewish dealer Oscar Stettiner. Judge Joel M. Cohen found that Stettiner owned or had a superior right to the work before it was unlawfully seized after he fled Paris in 1939, and that he never voluntarily relinquished it—facts also established in a French court in 1946. Nahmad bought the painting at Christie’s in 1996 for $3.2 million, and it has been stored in Switzerland; the New York lawsuit was filed in 2015 by Stettiner’s grandson Philippe Maestracci and the restitution firm Mondex. Cohen wrote that Nahmad failed to raise material factual disputes about ownership, while noting the 1996 sale’s provenance was fallacious though not necessarily due to Nahmad’s actions.

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