US Court asked to bring Russia into Yale v. Konowaloff settlement proceedings re: Van Gogh’s The Night Café

Following the 1918 confiscation by the Bolsheviks of the vast Morozov and Schukin collections of French Impressionist paintings, their sale was discouraged by decree of Vladimir Lenin of the Soviet Provisional Regime. Beginning in the 1930s the U.S.S.R. decided to sell various masterpieces of Western art in its possession to raise cash to deal with costs of industrialization and the overcoming adverse economic conditions. This, however, did not include paintings of the Morozov and Schukin collections, which were not deemed to have a very high value at the time. Of the over 300 Impressionist works of art in the Morozov-Schukin collections, only four were sold for relatively small amounts of money (less than $250,000)—the most prominent of which was “The Night Café” (valued today at about $200 million) and Cézanne’s “Lady in the Conservatory.” These paintings were sold indirectly to the Knoedler Gallery in New York, as it indicated it had a willing buyer, Mr. Stephen Clark. They were sold by the Soviet Union to an intermediary, the Matthieson Gallery in Berlin, in order to maintain secrecy and avoid scrutiny by both Soviet and American officials as well as the heirs. The Night Café painting was subsequently bequeathed in 1961 to Yale University. Andrew Carnduff Richie, one of the key personalities in the actual drama depicted in the current film, “The Monument Men”, was the curator of the Yale University Art Gallery at the time the painting was bequeathed to Yale by Stephen Clark.

Washington, D.C. — February 21, 2014