After more than a decade of litigation, countless filings, and one spectacular leak of offshore secrets, the saga of Seated Man with a Cane (1918) by Amedeo Modigliani seems to have finally reached its conclusion. In a recent decision by the New York Supreme Court, the painting has been ordered to be returned to the heir of its original owner.
The story begins, as these stories often do, in pre-war Paris. The work belonged to Oscar Stettiner, a Jewish art dealer who fled France in 1939 as Nazi forces advanced. In his absence, his gallery was dismantled by the Nazis and the painting was swept into the opaque and opportunistic wartime art market.
In July 1944, it was auctioned in Paris and purchased by one John Van der Klip.
After the war, in 1946, Stettiner returned to Paris and did what one might reasonably expect: he went to court to reclaim the painting and won. But the victory proved frustratingly hollow. By 1947, John Van der Klip claimed he no longer had the painting, having allegedly sold it to an American official. This would later prove to be false, and the painting remained with his family.
Stettiner passed away a few years later, never having retrieved his looted Modigliani.
The work remained out of sight for decades, only to resurface in 1996 at Christie’s in London, where it sold for £2 million to a Panamanian entity called the International Art Center (IAC). The painting was then exhibited at prestigious venues, including the Helly Nahmad Gallery.
In 2009, Stettiner’s heir, Philippe Maestracci, became aware of the painting’s location when it failed to sell at Sotheby’s in New York and demanded that the Helly Nahmad Gallery return the work. Maestracci’s attempts to engage with the Gallery and the Nahmad family proved unsuccessful, and his demands went unanswered.
Legal action was eventually initiated in 2011 against the Helly Nahmad Gallery. The Gallery and the Nahmad family maintained that they did not own the painting, claiming instead that it belonged the IAC, a separate entity.
Maestracci amended his lawsuit to include the IAC as a co-defendant alongside the Helly Nahmad Gallery. However, given that the Helly Nahmad Gallery did not own or possess the painting and the IAC was a foreign entity of which little was known due to its Panamanian status, Maestracci did not stand a chance in court and ultimately withdrew his claim.
In 2014, Maestracci tried again, arguing that the IAC was merely a shell company for the Nahmad family. He alleged that many Nahmad family members were “agents” of the Panamanian company. The Nahmad family’s lawyers would dismiss these claims as having “no substance whatsoever”.
Then, when all hope was almost lost, deus ex machina.
The 2016 Panama Papers leak did what years of litigation could not: it connected the dots. The documents revealed that the IAC was not an independent entity but a company wholly controlled by the Nahmad family.
With that, the case shifted fundamentally. The defence could no longer rely on jurisdictional sleight of hand. The argument had to be made on the merits.
Both sides moved for summary judgment. Under New York law, this requires showing that there are no material facts in dispute and that the case can be decided as a matter of law. The burden to prove that this lay initially with the claimant, Maestracci.
The court found that he had established a strong case: that Stettiner owned, or at least had a superior right to possess, the painting prior to its seizure, and that he never voluntarily gave it up. In fact, the Court noted that the evidentiary record was “unusually strong for a case of this type”. It included documents proving the painting was exhibited at the 1930 Venice Biennale, a 1946 French court decision recognising Stettiner’s right to restitution, documentation showing the painting’s forced sale during the Nazi occupation of France, and archival material (such as a Wildenstein record explicitly marking the work as “stolen” and linked to the Stettiner family).
Perhaps most damagingly, when the painting resurfaced in 1996, it was still in the hands of Van der Klip’s descendants, who acknowledged they had inherited it from the original wartime purchaser. The chain of custody, while long obscured, was ultimately traceable.
The burden then shifted to the Nahmads. And here, the court was unimpressed. Their counter-arguments, it held, were speculative and insufficient to raise a genuine issue requiring trial.
The court ultimately granted the heir’s motion for summary judgment and declared that the Stettiner estate is entitled to possession of Seated Man With a Cane, closing a chapter that began with wartime dispossession and stretched across nearly a century.
What happens next is, in some ways, the more intriguing question. The painting, now valued at around USD 25 million, may remain in private hands, return to the market with a newly clarified (and commercially advantageous!) provenance, or enter a museum, where its history becomes part of its meaning.
More broadly, the case lands at an awkward moment for an industry long reliant on discretion, complexity, and strategic ambiguity. Offshore structures, once clever, now read like evidence. You can build an elaborate structure to avoid a claim, but eventually, the paperwork catches up with you.
For galleries, collectors, and museums, the lesson here is not simply legal but practical.
Red flags in the provenance can no longer be treated as minor inconveniences or quietly ignored where they prove difficult to resolve. Where uncertainty exists, it is increasingly expected that it be addressed, and addressed early. The careful audit of a collection can prove far less costly than years of litigation, both financially and reputationally. The alternative, as this case demonstrates, is not just legal exposure but the kind of public scrutiny that tends to linger long after the matter is resolved.
Patrick McGranaghan, Pierre Valentin