This Cubist Painting With a Mysterious Provenance Hung in the Art Institute of Chicago for Decades. Now, the Museum Will Return It to Its Rightful Jewish Heirs

Infrared imaging links the 20th-century Jean Metzinger work to a collector whose pieces were forcibly auctioned under Nazi orders during World War II

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

September 23, 2026 4:18 p.m.

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The Art Institute of Chicago announced this week that it will return an early 20th-century painting to the family of its former owner, after concluding that the artwork had been forcibly sold during World War II under the influence of the Nazi Party.  

Woman With a Fan, painted in 1913 in Paris by Jean Metzinger, was an important early work during the city’s burgeoning Cubist movement. But records detailing the piece’s subsequent provenance, particularly in wartime, were incomplete. Now, new research—led by an infrared analysis of the painting’s backside—offers the clearest proof yet that it was held by, and then seized from, a Jewish art collector.  

“This return reflects our commitment to take decisive action when new research clarifies the provenance of a work,” Jacques Schuhmacher, the executive director of the museum’s provenance research department, says in a statement.

In May 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, where Woman With a Fan was part of the collection of Emanuel Lewenstein, a Jewish art collector and the director of a successful sewing machine company. Just three months later, the painting was among more than 150 artworks—including many from the famous Goudstikker collection and some that had been on loan to the Stedelijk Museum—sold at the Frederik Muller auction house in Amsterdam.  

“No answer has been found to the question [of] who brought the Lewenstein collection to the auction, nor do we know who received the proceeds,” reads the website of the Mondex Corporation, a Toronto-based company that focuses on the restitution of art looted during the Holocaust.

The painting’s location was not pinpointed again until the mid-1950s. In 1959, the Art Institute bought it from a gallery in New York, and it has hung in the Chicago museum—with the exception of trips to Iowa and Texas during an exhibition in 1985 and ’86—ever since.  

The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world’s largest art provenance research departments. Using infrared imaging, historians identified a faint name written in pencil on the back of the painting: that of Paul Citroen, an early 20th-century art dealer. This crystallized the history of the painting’s early exchanges: Citroen had acquired the piece from Metzinger’s gallery in 1919, then sold it in 1928 to Lewenstein, his cousin. Though Lewenstein died in 1930, his collection remained under the control of his wife and children until the Nazi occupation.  

“In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it’s appropriate to view the sale as a result of Nazi persecution and therefore a forced sale: It was either confiscated or sold under pressure,” Schuhmacher tells the Art Newspaper’s Catherine Hickley.

The museum’s decision to return the painting comes as the fate of another work in its collection—Russian War Prisoner, a 1916 watercolor and pencil drawing by Egon Schiele—is debated in court. The piece, believed to have been stolen by Nazis, was seized by investigators in 2023 though permitted to remain at the museum.  

The Art Institute has refuted officials’ claims to the drawing. Last week, an appellate court sided with the museum, concluding that the seizure was ordered on improper grounds.  

“We are confident in our extensive research, which indicates very different facts for each of the two works,” the museum said in a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times’ Ambar Colón. “Evidence indicates the Metzinger painting was seized from the family and forcibly sold, while evidence related to the Schiele drawing indicates it was never seized, stayed within the family and was ultimately sold by the family more than ten years after the war.”

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.