The Degas painting
In October 1995 Simon Goodman found a photograph of one of the looted items in a 1994 exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "Landscape with Smokestacks" ("Paysage Avec Fumée de Cheminées," 1890), a pastel over monotype by Edgar Degas, was cited in the catalogue as belonging to Daniel C. Searle, a pharmaceutical billionaire living near Chicago.
Previously in the collection of Max Silberberg, who put it up for auction, Friedrich Gutmann had bought that work in 1931, and in 1939 sent it to the art firm of Paul Graupe et Cie in Paris for safekeeping. The painting reached New York from Switzerland in 1951 and was sold to American collector Emile Wolf. In 1987, it was purchased from Wolf by Searle for $850,000, after he obtained the advice of experts at the Art Institute of Chicago (where he was a life trustee), on which he "relied heavily." The work's provenance included the name of Hans Wendland, a German art dealer who "stands out like a sore thumb," Willi Korte, a legal expert in retrieving Nazi stolen art, told CBS News reporter Morley Safer in 1997. Wendland, Korte said, was responsible "more than anybody else… for smuggling plundered works of art, plundered by the Nazis in France, into Switzerland for sale." Korte agreed with Safer's summary, that "what you're saying is that that unwillingness to know, that turning a blind eye [to Nazi art plunder during World War II] still applies to these paintings?" Searle's lawyers maintained that Wendland's name was not well known in 1987; Douglas Druick, Searle Curator of European Painting and Prince Trust Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute, stated he had never heard of him.
After learning of the painting's current ownership (it was held in storage at the Art Institute), the Goodman brothers asked Searle for its return. In an interview they said they wanted "to see justice done," and to recover what they said belonged to them. Searle's position, initially summarized by his Chicago legal counsel Ralph Lerner in 1997, was that "There is sympathy… for any victim of the Nazi regime. Other than that, this case is no different from any other case involving stolen works of art." In 1998, Howard J. Trienens, a partner at the law firm defending Searle, said in an interview that the Goodmans "had no way of proving that they owned it, therefore why should Mr. Searle give it back?" He also wondered "If it is good policy to disrupt the art market by this kind of claim." At the same time, Searle himself expressed "some sympathy" for the Goodman family's feelings, adding, "I have a principle. And the principle is that I will not be extorted."
