French court bailiffs in February seized more than 100 works attributed to Russian avant-garde artists at an art laboratory in Paris on suspicion they were stolen from a private collector, according to his lawyer.
The lawyer at the international firm Dentons in Frankfurt who is representing the collector, a businessman and investor of Palestinian origin living in Israel named Uthman Khatib, says the seized works are estimated to be worth more than €100m. They include paintings attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova, says the lawyer, who asked not to be identified.
The paintings were stolen from a storage facility rented by Khatib in Wiesbaden, central Germany, in December 2019, the collector says, according to German court documents seen by The Art Newspaper. The Paris raid follows a similar operation at a Frankfurt storage facility last year, where bailiffs seized hundreds of works that Khatib says belong to him. The Dentons lawyer would not give a precise number, but said “several hundred” works have been recovered in total.
The Khatib family is seeking the return of around 900 works altogether, according to Khatib’s son, Castro Ben Leon Lawrence Jayyusi, who is leading the family’s quest to trace and recover the lost art. He has secured funding from the Prague-based litigation financier LitFin to pursue the art, some of which he says has been sold at auction in Israel, France and Monaco over the past year.
“We will follow the perpetrators around the world,” Jayyusi says. “We will continue to recover our property and encourage anyone who is considering buying Russian avant-garde works to diligently check its provenance and make sure it is not a stolen piece belonging to our family.”
The alleged theft and seizures are likely to further cloud the troubled market for Russian avant-garde art, which has long been riddled with pitfalls for collectors because of the large number of fakes in circulation.
In 2015 Khatib bought 49% of an 1,800-strong collection of paintings from Itzhak Zarug, an Israeli art dealer who owned a gallery in Wiesbaden. At the time of the purchase, the works had been confiscated by the Wiesbaden public prosecutor’s office on suspicion they were forgeries.
Zarug was held on remand in prison on suspicion of running a forgery ring. But in 2018 a court in Wiesbaden dropped charges of forgery and criminal conspiracy against him, though he and a colleague were convicted on lesser charges of falsifying the provenance of works and selling a work proven to be a forgery.
The authorities returned the collection—including the 49% owned by Khatib—to Zarug in 2019. But shortly after its return, the art was stolen from Khatib’s storage facility in Wiesbaden, court documents state, citing Khatib.
Under his agreement with Zarug, Khatib owns 871 works, according to Jayyusi. Jayyusi says he knows the identity of the thief and first attempted to recover the works by negotiation, before taking legal action. But three years later, in 2022, he had still not recovered any of his family’s missing art and, Jayyusi says, some works began to resurface at auction houses in Israel and France.
Last year, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court issued a ruling allowing bailiffs to seize works owned by Khatib at a storage facility in the city. On Khatib’s behalf, Dentons also contacted an auction house in France and one in Israel.
The Paris raid was authorised by the Juge de l’exécution du Tribunal judiciaire, an enforcement judge who can grant permissions for urgent action before court hearings have occurred.