Art Institute of Chicago Returns a Metzinger to Family of Jewish Collector Following Further Provenance Research

The Art Institute of Chicago will return Jean Metzinger’s painting Woman with a Fan (1913) to the family of Jewish art collector Emanuel Lewenstein, the museum has announced.

The museum bought the painting from New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959, but despite research into its provenance, gaps remained, including its location before and during World War II. Working with the Mondex Corporation, which specializes in the recovery of art and other assets looted during World War II, the museum discovered that the painting was part of the Lewenstein collection, which was sold under duress in Amsterdam after the German invasion of the Netherlands.

The museum’s website describes the painting as “most likely” sold at Amsterdam auction house Frederik Muller in 1940, the year the Netherlands fell to the Nazis. Four Metzinger canvases and a drawing remain in the museum’s holdings.

“This return reflects our commitment to take decisive action when new research clarifies the provenance of a work,” said Jacques Schuhmacher, the museum’s executive director for provenance research, in a statement. “Our collaboration and shared research with Mondex was crucial to returning this painting to the Lewenstein heirs.”

“It is gratifying to see this painting returned to the Lewenstein family heirs, and the Art Institute of Chicago is to be congratulated for being an invaluable partner in making this return a reality,” added Stuart Eizenstat, counsel for Mondex and the architect of the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art and the 2009 Terezin Declaration. “Their proactive and collaborative work with the Mondex Corporation is truly a model for how a museum should apply research, provenance, and restitution practices as envisioned by the Washington Principles on Nazi Confiscated Art of 1998 and the Terezin Declaration of 2009.”

The museum established a dedicated in-house provenance research team in 2020. “Our goal is to ensure that there’s provenance information for every single object in our collection,” Schuhmacher told ARTnews in 2025. The museum also returned a stolen 12th-century Buddha statue to Nepal last year. In another case, it secured a temporary stay on a New York court’s order to restitute Egon Schiele’s drawing Russian War Prisoner to the family of its original owner, Fritz Grünbaum, who died in a Nazi concentration camp.