Heirs Demand Sotheby's Pull $180 Million Van Gogh Over Nazi-Era Sale

A Van Gogh carrying a $180 million estimate — the highest of the fall auction season — is now the object of a Nazi-era restitution claim filed days before its scheduled Wednesday sale in Manhattan.

The heirs of German-Jewish publisher Samuel Fischer have asked Sotheby's to withdraw "Châtaigniers en Fleurs (Blossoming Chestnut Trees)," painted in 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise. They argue the work was sold under duress in 1936 as a consequence of Nazi persecution. The estimate exceeds any price ever paid at auction for a Van Gogh, and the lot carries a financial guarantee (an advance payment by the auction house or a third party ensuring the work sells) from Sotheby's itself.

Sotheby's isn't conceding anything. "While our research to date has not established that the painting was sold under duress, we recognize the importance of engaging thoughtfully and constructively with the family and are committed to working toward a mutually satisfactory resolution," the auction house said in a statement. It did not say whether the painting would be auctioned as scheduled.

What do the heirs claim?

The heirs, who live in the United States, say the painting was sold in Amsterdam because of financial losses their family's publishing company suffered under the Nazis. Their Berlin lawyer, Gunnar Schnabel, urged Sotheby's in a Nov. 12 email to Marco Toracca, head of Sotheby's restitution department, to prove beyond doubt that the painting fetched market value in 1936 and that the family "would have wanted to carry out the sale even without Nazi rule."

"Otherwise," Schnabel wrote, "no auction may take place." He added that his client "is prepared to work toward a fair and just solution in the spirit of the 1998 Washington Principles," the international guidelines for handling Nazi-looted art.

Whose painting is it?

The Van Gogh belongs to the Blaquier-Arrieta collection. Philip Hook, a former Sotheby's executive and author, described it in the sale announcement as "the stuff of legend: whispered about, kept from public view." Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier of Buenos Aires, sole heir to the Ledesma sugar fortune, began collecting Impressionist and modern art in the 1960s and bought the Van Gogh in 1975.

Twelve works from the collection — including paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas — are on offer next week, together expected to raise around $450 million. The Van Gogh graces the catalog cover.

Why the 1936 sale matters

According to the Sotheby's catalog, Samuel Fischer, founder of S. Fischer Verlag — whose authors included Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Alfred Döblin — bought the painting from a Paris gallery in 1909. After his death in 1934, his son-in-law Gottfried Bermann Fischer took over the firm. Under the Nazis, many of its authors faced publishing bans; the company split in two, and Bermann Fischer left Berlin for Vienna.

The family deposited the Van Gogh and two Cézannes with dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt at Amsterdam's Paul Cassirer gallery in 1932 or 1933. The Van Gogh traveled to exhibitions in Rotterdam in 1933 and Bern in 1934. In 1936 — three months after the family left Berlin, Schnabel says, and after they were forced to pay the Nazi "Reich flight tax" on emigrants — Feilchenfeldt sold it to a Parisian collector.

After the war, Bermann Fischer regained his publishing company and sought compensation for confiscated assets, but never claimed the Amsterdam paintings: at the time, there was no legal basis for compensation for art sales in territory outside Nazi rule, and the Netherlands qualified.

That legal gap has narrowed. In recent years, claims for duress sales outside Nazi-ruled territory have increasingly led to settlements. Last year the Bern Museum of Fine Arts agreed to return an Alfred Sisley to the heirs of Carl Sachs, who fled to Switzerland in 1939 and sold the work there the next year, after finding "anomalies with the sale in Switzerland." The museum said it uses the term "Nazi-persecution-related loss" to cover transactions "ranging from direct confiscation by the authorities to legal transactions under unfavorable conditions."

Is there a precedent in the family?

There is, and it cuts both ways. In 2007, Christie's offered a Cézanne portrait from the Fischer collection — also deposited with Feilchenfeldt and also sold in 1936. Gisela Bermann Fischer, who handled the family's claims until her death in 2014, wrote that she did not oppose that sale. But she reserved "all rights" regarding "any other painting sold by my father under duress due to the persecution by Nazi Germany," adding that her withdrawal "will in no way set a precedent."

The next generation of heirs has now invoked exactly that reservation. If the painting sells Wednesday, it should easily pass the artist's current auction record of $117.2 million, set in 2022 at Christie's Paul Allen sale — roughly $133 million today. Whether it sells at all may now depend on how Sotheby's weighs a 2007 letter against a growing body of settlements.