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. Despite provenance research, gaps remained — including where the canvas was located before and during World War II. Working with the Mondex Corporation, a firm specializing in the recovery of art and other assets looted during the war, the museum established that the painting belonged to the Lewenstein collection, sold under duress in Amsterdam after the German invasion of the Netherlands.

The museum's own website describes the work as "most likely" sold at the 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."

Stuart Eizenstat, counsel for Mondex and the architect of the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art and the 2009 Terezin Declaration, praised the institution's approach. "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," Eizenstat said. "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 Metzinger restitution is not an isolated gesture. The Art Institute 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 returned a stolen 12th-century Buddha statue to Nepal last year. In a separate 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.

The Lewenstein restitution, achieved through partnership rather than litigation, points to a growing expectation that museums apply the Washington Principles proactively — and the Schiele case pending in New York will test how far that model extends when heirs and institutions disagree.