By Nina Metz – September 22, 2026
For the past 30 years, descendants of Jewish art collectors whose works were looted by the Nazis during World War II have sought to reclaim stolen works of art.
On Tuesday, the Art Institute of Chicago announced it is returning a 1913 painting, “Woman with a Fan” by Jean Metzinger, to the heirs of its original owner.
The Art Institute conducted its research in collaboration with the Mondex Corp., a Canadian company founded in 1993 that specializes in the recovery of artworks and cultural artifacts. Mondex represents the heirs in this case.
According to information on the Mondex website, the Jewish art collector Emanuel Lewenstein had a passion for art and a family fortune derived from a sewing machine company. That wealth enabled him to collect paintings, drawings and prints, mostly by Dutch contemporary artists. His collection also contained the works of old masters, “including an impressive collection of Rembrandt prints, which he likely inherited from his father.”
Lewenstein died in 1930. When his wife died seven years later, the art collection went to their two adult children, Wilhelmine and Robert, who both eventually fled the country because of the Nazi invasion. The art remained behind and was then sold by an auction house “notorious for having organized the sales of artworks, which had been looted during the war,” per Mondex.
Provenance research is the work of unearthing the history of an artwork’s ownership, which can be “very challenging and difficult,” Schuhmacher said. “The information that you need to be able to tell these stories is often scattered across archives around the world.
Because of that gap, the museum listed the painting on its website as well as on a dedicated portal “in the hope that somebody would come forward and help us fill this gap,” said Schumacher. “And that is exactly what happened when Mondex contacted us and shared information about the family history that wasn’t previously known to us.”
The key to unraveling the mystery was not found in an archive, but on the back of the painting itself.
“We discovered very, very faint handwriting in pencil. And thanks to the help from our conservators and technical imaging experts, we were able to take infrared photography, which allowed us to see a name: Paul Citroen.”
Citroen was Lewenstein’s cousin. According to Mondex, he had an “important influence” on the development of Emanuel’s collection.
Making this discovery, Schumacher said, “allowed us to connect our painting to the Lewenstein family. And then we have the same painting, which appears in the auction catalog, of a forced sale that took place in 1940 during the Nazi occupation.
Originally published in the Chicago Tribune, September 22, 2026.