Obscured by Smoke
A wonderful writer and friend of mine named Burl Gilyard died in May 2025. Burl’s career was varied and admirable, and you can read about it here.
His death made me recall that he is the only writer with whom I have collaborated in the creation of a magazine article. It began more than twenty years ago, when he and I decided we would enjoy writing something together. We focused on the story of a painting by the French artist Fernand Léger and a dispute over its ownership. We both wanted to see this tale reach publication.
We then successfully proposed the story to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, one of our local city magazines. Burl and I had fun strategizing, developing, and reporting the story together — it felt refreshing after each of us had done solitary journalism for so long. But when it came time to write the story, Burl found he was too deeply committed to other work to continue our collaborative project. Missing him, I wrote it on my own. I turned in the assignment in early 2005 and awaited its publication.
Readers never saw it. The publisher of Mpls.St.Paul, Burt Cohen, sat on the board of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Cohen objected to the story. The magazine killed it, and ever since it has occupied space in a succession of my hard drives.
So with a nod to Burl, I’ve decided to at last publish our story. You can read it below. Please note that this article was written in 2005, and three years later the Minneapolis Institute of Arts returned the Léger painting to its claimants.
Obscured by Smoke
For eight years, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the heirs of a Jewish art collector have disputed the ownership of a magnificent painting. Will the conflict reach resolution?
In October 1940, a team of Nazi foragers and French collaborators forced its way into a sumptuously decorated townhouse in Saint Germain-en-Laye, a western suburb of Paris, and began inspecting the premises. They found an astonishing collection of art: paintings by the old masters as well as by contemporary artists, Renaissance tapestries, rare manuscripts, sculptures, expensive furnishings, and Asian antiquities. The invaders were members of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a group charged with hunting down and pillaging the art collections of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. Over many months, the ERR team assembled an inventory of the items seized in the townhouse. It ran about 60 typed pages and included 1,202 works of art. Many of the older works, which pleased the aesthetics of the Nazi leadership, were saved for eventual inclusion in the collections of the conquerors. Impressionist, modernist, and cubist paintings — deemed degenerate by Nazi sensibilities — traveled to warehouses for sale or trade.
The owner of this art horde, a renowned collector named Alphonse Kann, did not witness the despoliation of his treasures. To avoid deportation and death, he had previously fled to England. He had never kept his own detailed inventory of his collection, and up until his death in 1948 he made repeated attempts to recover his property. He succeeded in gathering only about half of his possessions. The remaining items were lost and untraceable, and some of them — purchased with or without knowledge of their dark past — drifted into museums and private collections around the world.
Fifty-eight years after the theft of the Kann collection, in 1998, the collector’s great-nephew used newly available documents and research to make a startling allegation on national television. Francis Warin charged on ABC’s Nightline program that one of the prized possessions of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), a 1911 painting titled Smoke Over the Roofs by Fernand Léger, had been among the works sacked from the townhouse in Saint Germain-en-Laye. The museum should return the painting to him and the other Kann heirs, he said. (Several months earlier, Warin had written to the museum to raise the possibility that Smoke Over the Roofs was stolen.)
Since Warin made his claim, there have been two presidential elections and seven World Series. A director of the MIA has left his job, and some 3 million visitors have passed through the museum’s doors. Yet the legitimate ownership of Smoke Over the Roofs remains disputed. Long displayed in a gallery on the museum’s third floor, the painting is often skipped over by docents leading tour groups. Many browsers pass it by after a casual glance, as well.
Displayed in the museum near brighter and more extroverted works by Picasso and Matisse, Léger’s painting is subtle in its attractions, a blue-grey cityscape that captures light like submerged ice. And beneath its surface, deeper than any meaning with which Léger may have infused it, lies a tangle of complexities involving the difficulties in sorting out an old painting’s past, the responsibilities of museums versus the rights of individuals, and the dilemmas of righting tragedies of war when the passage of time has removed nearly all of the participants.
Nobody disputes that the MIA acquired Smoke Over the Roofs legitimately and without any suspicion that a well-known victim of the Nazis’ massive scheme to steal art during World War II had once owned the painting. A wealthy General Mills executive, MIA trustee, and art collector named Putnam Dana McMillan bequeathed the canvas to the museum upon his death at age 79 in 1961, along with much other art and a fund of money intended for the future purchases. (The painting first appeared in the MIA galleries as early as 1954, on loan from its owner.) McMillan, who had no children and never married, received posthumous praise from then-MIA director Carl J. Weinhardt, Jr., as “an orderly man who lived a beautifully ordered life.” Others called him lonely, reserved, and shy. He devoted his spare time to the pursuit of art throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and Oskar Kokoschka had painted his portrait. Landscapes created between 1890 and 1925 especially attracted his interest, and it may not be a coincidence that his land holding company owned title to all of his paintings before his death. At the time of McMillan’s bequest, the museum estimated the value of Smoke Over the Roofs at $3,500. (Its value today may exceed $4 million.)
The MIA’s curatorial file on Smoke Over the Roofs indicates that McMillan had purchased the Léger painting in 1951 from the Buchholz Gallery of New York City. Art dealer Curt Valentin had opened that gallery some twenty years earlier, naming it after his German mentor, Karl Buchholz. During World War II, Buchholz was one of four art dealers to whom the Nazis assigned the task of selling unwanted art seized from Jewish collectors. One historian of Nazi art theft has asserted that Valentin acquired some of his New York inventory at cheap prices from Buchholz and other fences of looted art.
Valentin, however, did not receive Smoke Over the Roofs directly from Buchholz. Instead, he bought it in 1949 from Galerie Leiris in Paris, an establishment that owed its existence to the threat of wartime art theft. Its founder was Louise Leiris, the Catholic sister-in-law of a Jewish art dealer named Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, whose art inventory was threatened by the Nazi invasion of France. Kahnweiler sold his inventory to Leiris in 1941 to avoid Nazi confiscation. A 1997 MIA staff memorandum noted that in an examination of the back of Smoke Over the Roofs, museum director Evan Maurer had detected the label of Galerie Simon, the business Kahnweiler operated before he sold his art to Leiris, underneath the label for Galerie Leiris. Exactly how Kahnweiler or Leiris came by the Léger painting is a mystery — and any determination of the true ownership of the canvas depends upon that mystery’s solution.
Fernand Léger, who was born in 1881, initially felt drawn to French Impressionism when he began his work as an artist. When he was in his late twenties, however, he first encountered the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, and they sent him on a new course. (He destroyed most of the impressionism-influenced paintings he completed before 1909.) He completed Smoke Over the Roofs in 1911, when he had at last reached maturity as an artist, and it is one of a half-dozen paintings that show the view he enjoyed from the window of his apartment on the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie in Paris.
Léger’s description of his artistic aims in the series shows that he was trying to contrast many levels of richness of intensity within the pictures: “I take the visual effects of smoke rising round and curling between the houses… Accentuate those curves with the greatest possible variety without losing their unity: frame them in relation to the hard and dry area of the houses, dead surfaces which will come alive because they will be colored differently to the central mass and are in opposition to lively forms.” More prosaically, an MIA promotional article about the painting from about 1961 asserted, “The smoke and clouds hovering over the roof tops suggest an industrial landscape typical of the 20th century.”
Smoke Over the Roofs appealed to Alphonse Kann, a cultured and fussy patron of modern art who served as a model for Charles Swann, the character created for Remembrance of Things Past by Kann’s childhood friend, Marcel Proust. “A key figure in the French art-collecting world, Kann was a difficult and irascible man respected and admired for his sure eye and exceptional taste,” wrote Hector Feliciano in The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art. “In his townhouse, Kann displayed a Matisse next to a Gothic tapestry, or would place pre-Columbian art side by side with medieval or Renaissance sculpture, or hang a Bonnard next to archaic Chinese bronzes.”
In 1927, Kann shocked the art world by pruning his collection of many of his paintings from the eighteenth century and earlier to focus on acquiring modern art. He may have purchased Smoke Over the Roofs after this selloff. When the Nazis arrived in France, Kann’s decision to specialize in modern paintings proved calamitous: uninterested in cubist and abstract art, the Germans dispersed the collection to obtain quick cash. The Léger, if Kann owned it in October 1940, was scattered with the rest.
“I’m not fond of Léger, except for the one period represented at the MIA,” says Sandra Chai, a Minneapolis native who now teaches at Syracuse University in New York as an assistant professor of fine arts specializing in impressionism, post-impressionism, and conflicts between art claimants and museums. She grew up studying the MIA’s magnificent collection of post-impressionist art. “That period is interesting, and lyrical, and beautiful. Smoke Over the Roofs is a beautiful work, close to what Picasso and Braque were doing with cubism. Later Léger went off to paint in his own form of cubism, a style often related to mechanized society and urban imagery. Léger was not the most important of the artists associated with cubism — Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris were more important — but he was a major artist and this painting is worth disputing.”
Several complications muddy the dispute between Kann’s heirs and the MIA. The international art trade is similar to the world’s drug trafficking business in its size, complexity, and secrecy. Individual works of art can drop out of sight for years before resurfacing. That’s one reason why the whereabouts of an estimated 40,000 artworks that vanished during World War II remain unknown.
In addition, establishing the provenance, or ownership history, of any work of art requires time-consuming research, and in many cases a full accounting of the work’s past remains elusive. Some purchasers of art demand anonymity, and dealers try hard to accommodate them. “An easy provenance is something like the Sistine Chapel, which was painted for the papacy and has never gone anywhere, because it can’t,” MIA paintings curator Patrick Noon told the Star Tribune back in 1998, when the Léger controversy was young. “But most objects move around and their histories can be complex.” (Noon would not answer questions for this article, and the MIA declined to offer any other staff members for comment. Similarly, Stephen Sommerstein, a Brooklyn attorney representing Francis Warin and the Kann heirs, refused to be interviewed.)
Works held in Europe during World War II are many times more difficult to document because of the widespread destruction of records and the secrecy with which the Soviets and other governments have concealed some information. Skimpy documentation can lead researchers to false conclusions, such as when an art historian alleged in the 1980s that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art held a painting by Chardin that had been stolen by the Nazis. As it turned out, the painting, which the Nazis had seized, had been restored after the war to its owners, who sold it to the museum.
Many American art museums have established publicly accessible lists on the Internet that describe items from their collections with provenance gaps from the Nazi era. There are currently 14,713 works from 119 museums in a national database. The MIA’s registry includes 73 artworks, including Smoke Over the Roofs. Because most art created before 1945 has an incomplete provenance, the gaps in themselves prove nothing.
To further tangle the issue, claimants who think they’re in pursuit of stolen works sometimes subscribe to different standards of justice than do the museums that hold the art. No reputable museum will struggle to keep a painting or sculpture proven to be stolen, but if the evidence of theft is less than ironclad, or if gaps in the provenance make it possible that a piece of art left its past owner legitimately, museums will assert their duty to maintain its availability to the public. Claimants aspire to own; museums have a mission to educate and conserve. That distinction can make the courts unsuitable places for the settlement of ownership disputes. “Claimants have a right to their property, but in museums the art benefits more people,” Chai observes. “Although there have been meetings among museum directors to establish rules for return, every case is different. You need to have flexible rules.”
Despite these complications, the Kann heirs have laid out a case for the return of the painting. When he first made his claim, Warin charged that in October 1942, a Parisian advertisement had promoted an auction of Kann’s possessions, which included paintings by Ernst, Picasso, Léger, and others. At that sale, he maintained, the Galerie Leiris acquired Smoke Over the Roofs. A letter from the Parisian art dealer Leonce Rosenberg allegedly confirms Smoke Over the Roofsas one of the items auctioned. After buying the painting cheaply, Warin believes, Leiris kept it off the market until the end of the war. Kann himself clearly considered Smoke Over the Roofs stolen, because he filed a claim for it with the French government in 1945.
He never saw it again, along with many of his prized possessions. But starting in the mid-1990s, Warin has led the Kann heirs in pursuit of the lost family art that his grand-uncle failed to recover. Several of their claims have proven successful. In 1997, the French government returned to the Kann heirs Landscape of Meudon, a cubist painting by Albert Gleizes. The following year, the Pompidou Center gave back a Braque cubist work. Other Kann artworks were traced to a private collection in Japan and the Copenhagen Museum of Sculpture. Besides the Léger painting in Minneapolis, one other Kann claim against an American museum is still pending, for Still Life: Job, a painting by Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But the Kann family claim most comparable to the MIA dispute is the case of Brook with Aloes, a 1907 painting by Henri Matisse held for decades by the Menil Collection in Houston and valued at $5 million. In 1999, Warin presented the museum with evidence that the ERR’s inventory specifically listed the painting, which Kann purchased in 1908, as one of the artworks captured from the St. Germain-en-Laye townhouse in 1940. There was a six-year gap in the painting’s provenance from 1940 to 1946, after which the Hugo Gallery of New York offered it for sale. That gallery sold Brook with Aloes in 1950 to John and Dominique de Menil, benefactors of the Menil Collection.
Although the Houston museum could never definitively clear up the painting’s whereabouts during the years of the gap in provenance, its top officials believed that reaching a settlement with the Kann heirs was the right thing to do. The museum and the heirs shared provenance research and worked together. In 2002 the parties signed an agreement, its financial terms confidential, that allowed the museum to retain possession of the Matisse painting. “These kinds of issues are not rare in the microcosm of the museum world,” explains Matthew Drutt, the Menil’s chief curator and a specialist in conflicts of provenance and restitution. “There’s quite a bit of it going on at the moment.”
Drutt acknowledges that “research of this kind is always difficult, and you’re often working against a clock that’s not always in favor of the museum. We’re sort of guilty until proven innocent. The presumption is that the museum had the chance to examine the work’s provenance before, but didn’t, and now the claimants want it done. Art research is not usually time-based. If someone’s telling you that you have six months to come up with answers, you may exhaust your options.” In the Menil’s dealings with the Kann heirs, however, “the urgency of the claims changed as the two parties became less litigious,” he adds.
But now, seven years after the Kann heirs raised their claim against the MIA, any negotiations between the opposing sides appear to have stalled. The standoff may be growing more prone to litigation. “The heirs have made a claim, and the burden is on them to prove it,” Chai says. “And rightly so — it shouldn’t be that anyone can walk into a museum and claim that a painting is theirs.”
Have Warin and his relatives proven their case? The MIA clearly does not think so.
Back in 1998, when Warin first made his charges public, MIA director Evan Maurer said the institution was sympathetic to the Kann family’s efforts and condemned the wartime confiscation of art. “There’s no statute of limitations on doing the right thing, and the MIA will do the research necessary to establish the truth of these claims,” he declared. At the completion of the research, the museum’s would release its findings to the public, a museum spokeswoman said.
The MIA began its research by combing its own records and expanding the field of its search for information to Kahnweiler and Buchholz archives in Europe, as well as auction records, catalogue listings, and other manuscripts on both sides of the Atlantic. “You can spend months pursuing a particular line of research and run into a brick wall,” curator Patrick Noon explained seven years ago. “If someone would show you a photo of your picture on a wall with Hermann Goering standing under it, then, gosh, you’d throw your cards down. But it’s very rare to have that kind of documentation.”
Three years after initiating the research, the MIA declared its work over and sent a letter to the Kann heirs formally denying their claim on Smoke Over the Roofs. There was no announcement of this decision, and the museum has not made its findings available to the public. “We feel that this painting is rightfully the property of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,” Maurer told the St. Paul Pioneer Press a year after closing the case. “While once in the collection of Alphonse Kann, the records show it was not confiscated by the Nazis. We have determined it was sold prior to 1940.”
Because the MIA will not release the documentation that led it to the conclusion that Kann sold the painting before October 1940, it is impossible to evaluate the museum’s assertion. Warin and the other Kann heirs clearly do not accept it. They made no reply to the MIA’s letter for at least a year.
After that, though, the parties may have resumed contact or negotiations. In 2003, Patrick Noon acknowledged that the MIA was again researching the claim. Were the two sides negotiating a settlement? Have they carried their discussions into 2005? Neither will say. The American Association of Museums advises institutions to seek mediated solutions to Nazi-era restitution claims over litigation. But if the claim lands in the courts, there will be losers: the museum, the family, or the public. Some court decisions have sided with innocent owners like the MIA, especially if the claimants have waited too long or not made enough effort over the years to recover their property. And the legal expenses alone may exceed the value of the painting.
“Every genuine work of art,” declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, “has as much reason for being as the earth and the sea.” The reason for being of Léger’s marvelous painting will remain less apparent to all of us until the distracting questions of its ownership and past are answered. Ultimately, if the case stays out of court, the decision on whether to settle in the face of inconclusive evidence will be up the collective conscience of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “Personally, I’m on the side of the museum,” admits Sandra Chai. “They did not try to deceive anyone, and if the painting is indeed stolen, they are victims themselves. The original owner is dead and will not benefit from its recovery. In many cases like this, the claimants are distant heirs and relatives, and I would prefer to see works remain in public collections rather than disappear.”
