This Cubist Painting With a Mysterious Provenance Hung in the Art Institute of Chicago for Decades. Now, the Museum Will Return It to Its Rightful Jewish Heirs

The Art Institute of Chicago announced this week that it will return an early 20th-century painting to the family of its former owner, after concluding that the artwork had been forcibly sold during World War II under the influence of the Nazi Party. Woman With a Fan, painted in 1913 in Paris by Jean Metzinger, was an important early work during the city’s burgeoning Cubist movement. But records detailing the piece’s subsequent provenance, particularly in wartime, were incomplete.

Now, new research—led by an infrared analysis of the painting’s backside—offers the clearest proof yet that it was held by, and then seized from, a Jewish art collector. In May 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, where Woman With a Fan was part of the collection of Emanuel Lewenstein, a Jewish art collector and the director of a successful sewing machine company. Just three months later, the painting was among more than 150 artworks—including many from the famous Goudstikker collection and some that had been on loan to the Stedelijk Museum—sold at the Frederik Muller auction house in Amsterdam.

The painting’s location was not pinpointed again until the mid-1950s. In 1959, the Art Institute bought it from a gallery in New York, and it has hung in the Chicago museum—with the exception of trips to Iowa and Texas during an exhibition in 1985 and ’86—ever since. The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world’s largest art provenance research departments.

Using infrared imaging, historians identified a faint name written in pencil on the back of the painting: that of Paul Citroen, an early 20th-century art dealer. This crystallized the history of the painting’s early exchanges: Citroen had acquired the piece from Metzinger’s gallery in 1919, then sold it in 1928 to Lewenstein, his cousin. Though Lewenstein died in 1930, his collection remained under the control of his wife and children until the Nazi occupation.

The museum’s decision to return the painting comes as the fate of another work in its collection—Russian War Prisoner, a 1916 watercolor and pencil drawing by Egon Schiele—is debated in court. The piece, believed to have been stolen by Nazis, was seized by investigators in 2023 though permitted to remain at the museum. The Art Institute has refuted officials’ claims to the drawing.

Last week, an appellate court sided with the museum, concluding that the seizure was ordered on improper grounds. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.