In 2019, Sotheby’s sold a work by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the master painter, that was left behind in Austria when a Jewish gallery owner fled the Nazis in 1938. Sotheby’s says that at the time of the sale it didn’t know that history, and so the auction catalog only mentioned that the work came from a “distinguished private collection” and had once been in the possession of the Galerie Wolfgang Böhler in Bensheim, Germany. But, according to court papers filed Friday, the painting had actually passed through the hands of Julius Böhler, a separate and unrelated art dealer in Munich whom American authorities described in 1946 as someone who had been “implicated in art looting activities.”Now three heirs of the Jewish gallery owner, Otto Fröhlich, are saying in the court papers that Sotheby’s “misled the public” by attributing the painting to the wrong gallery. This had the effect, the heirs said, of making a sale easier and “perpetuating the very cycle of injustice and exploitation that began in 1938 and that the international and national restitution laws and policies were designed to prevent.”Sotheby’s, in response, attributed the provenance attribution in the 2019 catalog to “human error.” The auction house said in a statement that it conducted new research after first hearing from the heirs and learned of an owner before Fröhlich who had been subject to Nazi persecution and whose heirs may have grounds for a claim.

---