The Guelph Treasure was acquired by a German state collection in 1935 from a consortium of Jewish art dealers. Their descendants say the sale was forced, but a Berlin museum claims the deal was fair.
After hundreds of years residing in a cathedral in Braunschweig, Germany, the Guelph Treasure has had a comparatively active century. The trove of medieval religious art was sold just before the stock market crash in 1929, sent to the United States and back, then split up and sold. All 82 pieces have changed hands at least twice.
Now, it is the subject of a U. S. Supreme Court case that could see 42 pieces, estimated to be worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, on the move again.
The dispute centers on a transaction in 1935, when a consortium of Jewish art dealers that bought the entire collection in 1929 sold those 42 pieces to a German museum. For more than a decade, descendants of those dealers have claimed that the sale was made under duress and that the price paid — the equivalent of about $20 million today — was far below value. At least one of the dealers lived in Germany, then under Nazis rule, at the time of the sale, raising the possibility that his life was under threat while the deal was being brokered, descendants of consortium members say.
The 42 pieces that were sold ended up in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. In 2014, a German arbitration commission that specializes in Nazi-looted art ruled that the museum had acquired the collection legitimately and did not need to return them.
After the families took the case to an American court, museum administrators and the German government turned to the Supreme Court, hoping it would confirm the case was outside its jurisdiction. The U. S. Solicitor General wrote an amicus brief supporting the German position, as it frequently does with cases involving foreign affairs.
The justices announced this month that they would decide whether the case could proceed and are expected to make a ruling later this year.
