Dealers and auction houses understand they have a responsibility to undertake due diligence when operating in the secondary market. But how should they address unresolvable gaps in their provenance research and how liable are they when these gaps cannot be filled? 

These were questions directed at René Gimpel, a fourth-generation member of one of Europe’s longest running family art businesses, who shared his own family’s experience of forced sales and confiscations by the Nazis during a panel discussion on 'The Realities of Restitution' at an Insiders/Outsiders Festival event, organised this morning at Sotheby’s in London. 

While a dealer may set out in good faith to provide a full provenance history, achieving it can be more of a problem.  Gimpel and other dealers attending the event voiced their concern how they should go about meeting buyer expectations, when more and more buyers expect to see an unbroken provenance history.  Under pressure from trustees, dealers are finding that institutional buyers can be even more demanding - in their case, concerned over potential claims for restitution and risks from unwittingly supporting a trade in looted art. 

Filling every hole in a provenance history is often unrealistic, but the issues it raises are legitimate.  Dealers and auction house are right to question at what point they become liable when holes cannot be filled. 

Currently, there are no internationally accepted guidelines, protocols or standards to help resolve these questions.  But everyone on this panel agreed there's a pressing need for an industry-wide consensus about where a dealer's liability starts and how far it should extend. 

Also raised by Gimpel and attracting growing concern are the legal and policy implications of the recent Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation ruling. In this case, the decision of the court went in favour of the current, good faith owner of the looted painting, instead of the legitimate heirs of the original owner - even though all parties recognised the work had been stolen by the Nazis. 

The Gimpel family have been at the centre of several restitution claims, not all of which have been successful. Paintings from the Gimpel family’s business in Paris comprised important Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and earlier French works. The contents of the family’s apartment, a bank safe in Nice and some 82 crates of work placed in storage, were all confiscated by the Nazis in 1942 and were never returned. Claire Gimpel, granddaughter of the original Jewish art collector René Gimpel, has spent the last six years unsuccessfully negotiating with Service des Musées de France, the French museum authority, for the return of three paintings by André Derain. The family claim to have all the evidence proving these three works were all subject to a forced sale, but so far, all her attempts to recover these works have been resisted.

A small number of works of the family’s collection did reach London in 1946 and helped establish the London-based firm of Gimpel Fils, which since that date has been highly influential in the London art world for supporting modern British artists and the avant-garde.

Shauna Isaac, who served on the Working Group for the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, also spoke at the Insiders/Outsiders event. Her family secured a landmark restitution victory with their claim over a 1912 Egon Schiele painting, Portrait of Wally . The painting was taken under duress from Jewish art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray by Friedrich Welz in 1939 and was later acquired by the rapacious Austrian collector, Rudolph Leopold. Leopold, amassed a huge collection of Schiele’s works, all of which were purchased by the Austrian Government and used to create the Leopold Museum in Vienna. After years of litigation and facing much publicity, the Museum agreed in 2010 to pay $19 million to Bondi’s heirs in full settlement of their claims to the painting.

Photo: Sotheby's, New Bond Street, London