French court bailiffs seized more than 100 works by Russian avant-garde artists from an art laboratory in Paris in February, suspecting they were stolen from a private collector, according to their lawyers.
Uthman Khatib, a lawyer representing the Frankfurt-based international law firm Dentons and a Palestinian businessman and investor living in Israel, said the seized works were estimated to be worth more than 100 million euros. The lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they included paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova.
According to German court documents seen by The Art Newspaper, the collector claims the paintings were stolen from Khatib’s rented storage facility in Wiesbaden, central Germany, in December 2019. The Paris raid follows a similar operation last year at a storage facility in Frankfurt, where bailiffs seized hundreds of works that Khatib claimed belonged to him. Lawyers at Dentons did not disclose specific figures but said “hundreds” of works had been recovered in total.
The Khatib family is seeking About 900 works of art were returned. He has secured funding from Prague-based litigation financier LitFin to pursue the artworks, some of which he said had been sold at auctions in Israel, France and Monaco last year.
“We will track down the perpetrators around the world,” Jayusi said. “We will continue to recover our property and encourage anyone considering purchasing a Russian avant-garde work to carefully check its provenance to ensure it is not a stolen work belonging to our family.”
The alleged thefts and seizures are likely to further cast a pall over Russia’s troubled avant-garde art market, which has long presented a number of pitfalls for collectors due to the large number of fakes circulating.
In 2015, Khatib purchased 49% of the 1,800-painting collection from Israeli art dealer Itzhak Zarug, who owns a gallery in Wiesbaden. At the time of purchase, the works had been confiscated by the Wiesbaden prosecutor’s office on suspicion that they were fakes.
Zaruq was remanded in prison for allegedly running a counterfeiting ring. But in 2018, a Wiesbaden court dropped charges of forgery and criminal conspiracy against him, although he and a colleague were convicted of lesser charges of falsifying the provenance of works and selling works that proved to be forgeries. .
Authorities returned the collection, including 49% of the collection owned by Khatib, to Zalugh in 2019. But court documents quoted Khatib as saying that shortly after their return, the artworks were stolen from Khatib’s storage facility in Wiesbaden.
Jayyusi said that under the agreement with Zarug, Khatib owns 871 works. Jayyusi said he knew the identity of the thieves and first tried to negotiate to recover the works before taking legal action. But three years later, in 2022, he still hasn’t recovered any of his family’s lost art, Jayosi said, and some pieces are starting to resurface at auction houses in Israel and France.
Last year, Frankfurt’s Higher Regional Court issued a ruling allowing bailiffs to seize works owned by Khatib in a warehouse in the city. Dentons also contacted an auction house in France and an auction house in Israel on Khatib’s behalf.
The Paris raids were authorized by the tribunal’s magistrate, an executive judge who can authorize emergency action before a court hearing.
