It was lost to the family until this month.
After an odyssey that took it to different countries and into the hands of Nazis, thieves, art dealers, and collectors, the painting was returned Jan. 14 to the Gutmanns' grandson, Simon Goodman, by the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
Goodman, a Los Angeles man whose family had been searching for the artwork since the end of World War II, accepted it on behalf of his brother Nick, also of Los Angeles, and their 91-year-old aunt, Lili Gutmann of Florence, Italy. The piece had been donated to Rutgers in 1959 by an art collector.
"As lovely as the painting is, what's more important is the justice that's being done and the fact that we can close a chapter in this most unhappy saga of ours," Goodman said. "I can't verbalize how satisfying this is, especially since, in this instance, we came across very decent, sympathetic people at the Zimmerli and Rutgers.
"They've reaffirmed my faith in humanity, and getting back the painting has reaffirmed my faith in justice."
The Zimmerli "clearly wanted to do the right thing," said Suzanne Delehanty, director of the museum. "What happened in the Holocaust was one of the black moments in human history.
"You want to do anything you can to correct - in some small way - this historic wrong."
Surprising story
When Goodman's father died in 1994, the family learned a surprising story from his personal papers: Bernard Goodman had been on a quest for decades to retrieve the family's great art collection, plundered by the Nazis.
"My father didn't tell us what he had been doing," said Simon Goodman, 62. "I thought the whole issue of war reparations was over, and it wasn't."
A British soldier who anglicized the Gutmann name to Goodman, Bernard Goodman searched for the art with his sister Lili, running into many obstacles along the way.
