Museum Of Fine Arts v. Seger-thomschitz

• Decision Date: 14 October 2010
• Docket Number: No. 09-1922.,09-1922.
• Parties: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. Claudia SEGER-THOMSCHITZ, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

623 F.3d 1

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, Plaintiff, Appellee,

v.Claudia SEGER-THOMSCHITZ, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 09-1922.

United States Court of Appeals,First Circuit.

Heard June 7, 2010.

Decided Oct. 14, 2010.

Thomas J. Hamilton, with whom J. Owen Todd, David H. Rich, and Todd & Weld LLP were on brief, for appellant.

Simon J. Frankel, with whom Theodore P. Metzler, Covington & Burling LLP, Robert J. Muldoon, Jr., Thomas Paul Gorman, and Sherin & Lodgen LLP were on brief, for appellee.

Before TORRUELLA and LIPEZ, Circuit Judges, and BARBADORO, ^* District Judge.

LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

Claudia Seger-Thomschitz, the sole surviving heir of Austrian-Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel, seeks to recover possession of Oskar Kokoschka's Two Nudes (Lovers) (“the Painting”), a valuable oil painting formerly owned by Reichel and now held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (“the MFA”). Seger-Thomschitz alleges that Reichel was forced to sell the Painting under duress after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and that good title never passed to the original purchaser or to the MFA. The MFA counters that the original transaction was valid and that Seger-Thomschitz's claim to the Painting is time-barred in any event.

After private negotiations between Seger-Thomschitz and the MFA proved fruitless, the MFA commenced this action for a declaratory judgment to “confirm its rightful ownership of the painting.” The district court granted summary judgment for the MFA on statute of limitations grounds, holding that Seger-Thomschitz's claims were time-barred. Having carefully reviewed the record, we now affirm that statute of limitations ruling.

I.

Oskar Reichel was a successful physician and art collector in Vienna during the first decades of the twentieth century. Before World War I, Dr. Reichel came to know Oskar Kokoschka, the celebrated Austrian expressionist, and became an early patron and collector of Kokoschka's work. Dr. Reichel acquired a number of Kokoschka paintings during that period, including Two Nudes (Lovers), which he purchased from Kokoschka in 1914 or 1915. The Painting is a self-portrait of the artist in an embrace with Viennese socialite (and widow of composer Gustav Mahler) Alma Mahler, with whom Kokoschka was having a tempestuous affair at the time. The MFA describes the Painting as “large and striking,” measuring more than three feet wide and five feet tall.

During the interwar period, Dr. Reichel lent the Painting on three occasions to Otto Kallir, ¹ the proprietor of the Neue Gallery in Vienna, for display and possible sale. Dr. Reichel and Kallir agreed to a sale price for the Painting on at least two of those occasions: $1,800 U.S. dollars (gross) in 1924 and 4,000 Austrian schillings (net to Dr. Reichel) in 1933. ² Although Dr. Reichel was able to sell six of his eleven Kokoschka works between the wars, he never sold the Painting, which remained in his possession until 1939 along with four other Kokoschka works.

Conditions for Dr. Reichel and other Austrian Jews rapidly deteriorated following the Anschluss-the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich in March 1938. Pursuant to Nazi regulations, Dr. Reichel was forced to file a declaration in June 1938 listing all of the valuable property he owned. One expert witness described the declaration as a “prelude to the formal Nazi confiscation and seizure of all Jewish-owned property in Austria and Germany.” Proceeds from the sale of declared property had to be deposited into a Nazi-controlled account and could be withdrawn only in limited amounts. In his 1938 property declaration, Dr. Reichel stated that he owned the Painting and four other Kokoschka works. He declared the combined value of the Painting and another work to be 250 Reichsmark.

Around the same time, Kallir, who was also Jewish, transferred ownership of his gallery to his non-Jewish secretary and moved to Paris. While Kallir was in Paris, Dr. Reichel agreed to transfer his remaining five Kokoschka works, including the Painting, to Kallir. The details of this transaction are sketchy. It is not clear whether Dr. Reichel received any consideration for the works at the time. Two contemporaneous notes indicate that Kallir agreed to purchase the five paintings for a total of 800 Swiss francs. However, Dr. Reichel's son Raimund later said that his father arranged for Kallir to send the proceeds of the transaction to another son, Hans, who had already immigrated to the United States. According to Raimund, Kallir sent Hans $250 for the five paintings in 1940 or 1941, and Hans forwarded half that sum to Raimund. The five Kokoschkas, including the Painting, were transferred from Dr. Reichel to a shipping company in Vienna, then exported to Paris.

Dr. Reichel and his wife Malvine suffered at the hands of the Nazis. They were forced to close the business Dr. Reichel had founded and to give up their family home and another property. Their eldest son was deported to Lodz, Poland, where he was killed. Malvine was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, and Dr. Reichel died of natural causes that same year. The two younger sons had emigrated by that time-Hans to the United States and Raimund to Argentina. Malvine survived the war and eventually joined Hans in the United States.

Meanwhile, Kallir had settled in New York, where he opened the Galerie St. Etienne. He brought the Painting with him and sold it to the Nierendorf Gallery for $1,500 in 1945. The Nierendorf Gallery then sold the Painting to the E.A. Silberman Galleries, which in turn sold the Painting to Sarah Reed Blodgett in 1947 or 1948. Blodgett kept the painting for many years, lending it out for exhibitions from time to time. She eventually bequeathed the Painting to the MFA, which acquired possession in 1973. ³ The Painting has been on almost continuous display at the MFA since then, though it has been loaned out many times for exhibitions in the United States and around the world.

Raimund moved back to Vienna in 1982. He executed a will in 1989, in which he designated Seger-Thomschitz as his sole heir. It is not clear how Raimund and Seger-Thomschitz knew each other. She is described in one document as his “select-niece,” but they are not blood relatives. When Raimund died in 1997, Seger-Thomschitz became the sole surviving heir of Dr. Reichel. ⁴

Seger-Thomschitz says that she “first learned that the Nazis confiscated artworks from Oskar Reichel in the Fall of 2003 when the Museums of Vienna contacted her concerning their intent to return to her as the sole heir of Oskar Reichel four artworks in their collection by the artist Anton Romako....” The restitution of the Romako works was pursuant to a municipal resolution that Vienna had passed in 1999, which in turn implemented a 1998 national art restitution law. One municipal document notes that “it seemed quite proper” to return the works to Seger-Thomschitz because Dr. Reichel “had to sell [them] due to his persecution as a Jew.” Notably, Dr. Reichel appears to have sold the Romako works around the same time that he sold the Painting, and under similar circumstances. He sold three of the four Romakos to the Neue Gallery in 1939 “for only small equivalent amounts,” and he sold the fourth to the Neue Gallery in 1942. The gallery, by then under the direction of Otto Kallir's former secretary, subsequently sold the Romakos to the city.

Following her correspondence with the Museums of Vienna, Seger-Thomschitz retained a Viennese attorney, Erich Unterer-who had also been Raimund Reichel's attorney-“for purposes of handling the restitution of any artworks that Oskar Reichel may have lost due to Nazi persecution.” Seger-Thomschitz and Unterer initially thought that all of the artwork Dr. Reichel lost during the Nazi era had been returned. In 2006, however, an American attorney “began a colloquy” with Seger-Thomschitz and alerted her to the possibility that other works formerly owned by Dr. Reichel might be located outside Austria. Seger-Thomschitz retained the attorney, whose firm then sent a letter to the MFA on March 12, 2007, demanding the return of the Painting.

When confronted with Seger-Thomschitz's claim to the Painting, the MFA undertook “an exhaustive effort to research and document the provenance of the Painting in order to ascertain whether the claim ... appeared valid or not.” An MFA curator and an independent provenance researcher spent eighteen months researching the Painting's history, during which time they visited approximately ten museums and governmental archives around the world and corresponded with numerous other museums and archives. Based on that research, the MFA concluded that the original transfer of the Painting from Dr. Reichel to Kallir was valid and that it would retain the Painting in its collection. It commenced an action against Seger-Thomschitz in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on January 22, 2008, seeking a declaratory judgment to “confirm its rightful ownership of the painting.” Seger-Thomschitz answered the complaint in May of that same year and asserted counterclaims for conversion, replevin, and other state law causes of action.

In September 2008, the MFA filed a motion for summary judgment arguing that all of Seger-Thomschitz's counterclaims were time-barred as a matter of law. Seger-Thomschitz opposed the motion for summary judgment and also filed a motion to amend her answer to add a theory of fraudulent concealment (which might have extended the limitations period, see Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 260, § 12) and an accompanying affidavit requesting the postponement of summary judgment proceedings so that she could have extra time to conduct discovery on the fraudulent concealment theory, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(f).

The district court granted the motion for summary judgment and denied the motion to amend. See Museum of Fine Arts, Boston v. Seger-Thomschitz, No. 08-10097, 2009 WL 6506658 (D.Mas...