In a dramatic turn of events, French court bailiffs have seized over 100 avant-garde artworks from an art laboratory in Paris, following suspicions that they were stolen from a private collector. The collection, estimated to be worth more than €100 million ($1.08 million), includes paintings attributed to renowned artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Natalia Goncharova.
According to reports from the Art Newspaper, the international law firm Dentons, based in Frankfurt, claims that the works belong to their client, Uthman Khatib, a businessman and investor of Palestinian origin residing in Israel. Khatib alleges that the paintings were stolen from a storage facility he rented in Wiesbaden, Germany, in December 2019. This seizure follows a previous incident where bailiffs confiscated a collection of works from a storage facility in Frankfurt, also claimed by Khatib.
Leading the charge to reclaim the lost artworks is Khatib’s son, Castro Ben Leon Lawrence Jayyusi. Jayyusi, who heads the campaign to regain roughly 900 total lost works of art worldwide, asserts that some of the family collection’s pieces were sold at auctions in Israel, France, and Monaco within the last year. Their efforts are supported by LitFin Capital, a Prague-based litigation financier.
The intricate saga surrounding the missing artworks dates back to 2015 when Khatib acquired 871 works from an art dealer named Itzhak Zarug, who operated a gallery in Wiesbaden, Germany. The authenticity of these works was soon called into question, leading to their seizure by the Wiesbaden public prosecutor’s office upon acquisition.
Despite Zarug’s imprisonment on suspicion of leading a forgery ring, charges of forgery and criminal conspiracy against him were dropped in 2018. However, he and a colleague were convicted of lesser charges related to falsifying provenance and selling forged artworks.
In 2019, authorities returned the seized collection, including Khatib’s portion, to Zarug. Subsequently, the artworks were taken from Khatib’s storage facility in Wiesbaden, as detailed in court documents. Despite attempts by Jayyusi to negotiate the collection’s return, legal action became necessary as the appeals went unheeded.
Following a ruling by the Frankfurt higher regional court in 2023 permitting bailiffs to remove Khatib’s works from a storage facility, the family’s legal team has reached out to auction houses in France and Israel, suspected to have possessed pieces from the lost collection.
“We will follow the perpetrators around the world,” Jayyusi asserted. “We will continue to recover our property and encourage anyone who is considering buying Russian avant-garde work to diligently check its provenance and make sure it is not a stolen piece belonging to our family.”
As the legal battle unfolds and investigations continue, the case underscores the importance of due diligence in verifying the provenance of artworks and the persistent efforts to combat art theft and forgery in the international art market.