Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Serge Sabarsky" in English language version.
A grandson of a Viennese woman who died in the Holocaust contends that a Gustav Klimt painting in the private collection of Leonard A. Lauder, the New York cosmetics magnate, was looted during World War II, and is seeking restitution.
The signed oil painting, Blooming Meadow (1906), was purchased by Mr. Lauder in 1983 from Serge Sabarsky, a longtime New York dealer in Austrian and German art. Mr. Sabarsky, together with Mr. Lauder's brother, Ronald, was a founder of the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue, which opens a Klimt retrospective next month. (The painting is not in the show.) Leonard Lauder said yesterday that the painting never belonged to the claimant's grandmother and that the argument was without merit.
Charlotte's sister, said in a corresponding affidavit that some works in Westheim's were destroyed during an air raid in Berlin on March 1, 1943, though she "could not by any stretch of the imagination say today how many and which of Mr. Westheim's paintings were burned." In the recent suit, Margit claimed that Melitta's claims in this affidavit were false. In 1973, following Westheim's death, his wife, Marianna Frenk-Westheim, took legal action against Weidler. Frenk-Westheim learned of the sale of a painting—Oskar Kokoschka's portrait Robert Freund II (1931)—from Westheim's collection, and she alleged that Weidler had sold it through Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York.
