Painting looted by Nazis causes US extradition fight

A Russian art dealer living in New York is fighting extradition to Poland to face charges accusing him of refusing to turn over an 18th-century painting taken from a Polish museum by the Nazis during World War II. Lawyers for Alexander Khochinskiy were in federal court in Manhattan on Monday to ask a judge to throw out an extradition complaint charging him with possessing stolen property. They argued there wasn’t enough evidence to show Khochinskiy knew the 1754 painting — “Girl with a Dove” by Antoine Pesne — was stolen, as required by an extradition treaty, and that he’s the legal owner anyway. Prosecutor Katherine Reilly conceded there were unanswered questions about how the painting ended up in Khochinskiy’s hands.

I doubt that anyone knows quite what happened to it, and I don’t think we need to know.

Prosecutor Katherine Reilly

At the end of the war, the Red Army recovered the painting and took it to a repository in the Soviet Union, the complaint says. In 2010, Khochinskiy contacted the Polish Embassy in Moscow in 2010, saying he had discovered that the painting was on the list of missing art objects, according to court papers filed by the government. He also suggested that it could be returned in exchange for a cash payment compensating his family for land his mother lost during the war, the papers add.Polish officials, once authenticating the painting at Khochinskiy’s gallery in Moscow, demanded that Khochinskiy return it without compensation in 2011.

Europe