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The plunder was so great, the U.S. government later estimated, that by 1945, German forces had seized or coerced the sale of one-fifth of all the world's Western art. Some of the thousands of looted works were brought back to the Reich. But others were shipped abroad, principally to New York, where the art market continued to function even as fighting raged in Europe. One painting cited by the U.S. Treasury, Van Gogh's The Man Is at Sea, was apparently slipped out of France by a New York dealer who then sold it to Hollywood idol Errol Flynn for $48,000. "The paintings came to America because for more than 10 years during and after the war there was no place else to sell them," notes Willi Korte, a consultant on Holocaust losses to the Senate Banking Committee.
The odyssey of the Goodman family's Degas may have much in common with hundreds of lost works. Landscape with Smokestacks first came into the family on June 9, 1932, when it was acquired at a Paris auction for 10,000 francs (U.S. dollar equivalent at that time, $740) by Simon's grandfather, Friedrich Gutmann, a German-Jewish banker living in Holland. With the onset of World War II, part of the family collection, which included 10 Old Masters and several other Impressionist canvases, was sent to France for safekeeping, only to be seized there by the Nazis. When Germany invaded the Low Countries, Gutmann and his wife Louise were taken away. She later died at Auschwitz. He was beaten to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp after refusing to transfer assets to his captors.
After the war the Gutmanns' surviving children, Lili and Bernard, began to hunt for the paintings they had grown up with. Bernard, who became virtually obsessed with the search, eventually concluded that most of the artwork, including the Degas, had been carried off by Soviet troops at the war's end. When Bernard died in 1994, his sister Lili and his sons Simon and Nick took up the quest. By chance, they stumbled onto one of the family's Renoirs, an orchard scene entitled Le Poirier, in an old auction catalog of Parke-Bernet, the corporate predecessor of Sotheby's. That painting is now in London, where the family is trying to get it back. As for the Degas, it turned up in the catalog for a 1993 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that listed the owner as Daniel Searle, a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Goodmans contacted Searle and presented him with a detailed record of their claim to the painting. When he refused to give it up, they sued.
Searle's lawyers maintain that the Degas was legitimately sold by Friedrich Gutmann, not stolen by the Nazis. They also point out that the canvas has been exhibited over the years at major museums around the country, as well as featured in numerous art books, and that their client was unaware of the painting's disputed provenance when he bought it. Asks his lawyer, Howard Trienans: "At what point is it safe for an honest man to buy a painting from a reputable dealer?"