It was the third police raid on the institute, and at the end of it the investigators carried away armloads of art, including Degas drawings, a bronze sculpture by Rembrandt Bugatti and an Impressionist painting of a Normandy cottage by Berthe Morisot. All had been reported missing or stolen, some by Jewish families whose property was looted by the Nazis, and others by heirs who said their treasures had vanished during the settlement of their family estates.
The seizure of about 30 works has put an uncomfortable focus on the Wildenstein family, a discreet dynasty of French Jewish art dealers stretching back five generations whose name has long been one of the most prestigious in the international art world.
At the center of the current wave of troubles is Guy Wildenstein, 65, the president of Wildenstein & Company, an operation with spaces in New York, Tokyo and Paris. The family has faced controversies in the past, and lawsuits too, but never of the number or magnitude of those on the docket now. Mr. Wildenstein was summoned to Paris from New York to face questioning this week by French antifraud investigators who discovered the artworks while investigating money-laundering and tax evasion alleged in a criminal lawsuit against him.
Mr. Wildenstein, who holds dual French and American citizenship, is enmeshed in at least a half-dozen lawsuits; some, provoked by the raid, are being brought by heirs who claim the artwork was stolen from their families.
Also seeking answers is the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a prestigious French cultural society that has filed a legal complaint seeking an inquiry about a missing painting; Mr. Wildenstein’s father, Daniel, and grandfather Georges were elected members.
Mr. Wildenstein has declined to speak publicly about the inquiry or the suits. His newly hired spokesman in Paris, Matthias Leridon, said by telephone on Friday that Mr. Wildenstein “will not answer by using the media.”
“Let’s be calm and quiet and wait for the questions coming from the judges, and after he will express himself,” Mr. Leridon said, noting that Mr. Wildenstein has been called to answer questions at this point as a witness and not as a suspect.
In February, before hiring Mr. Leridon, Mr. Wildenstein issued a statement to the French magazine Le Point, after it published an article about the raids. The statement, which appeared in the magazine that month, said that the presence of the Morisot painting in the Wildenstein Institute vault could have been the “result of an error or oversight under my father’s operations.”
“In all serenity I will respond when the moment comes to the competent authorities,” he wrote in his letter to the magazine.
A Last Salvo
The flurry of legal attacks and the raid grew out of a criminal lawsuit filed in Paris in September by Mr. Wildenstein’s stepmother, Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, who, before she died in November, fired a last salvo in a fight stretching over almost a decade for a larger share of the inheritance from the estate of her husband, Daniel Wildenstein, who died in 2001. She accused Guy Wildenstein of tax evasion and money laundering to mask the size of the family fortune by shuffling, for example, the ownership titles of Impressionist paintings, including 19 valuable works by Bonnard, to anonymous trusts in the Bahamas and by storing art in a vault in Geneva beyond the reach of tax authorities.
Under the French legal system, criminal lawsuits are investigated by independent magistrates who are appointed by criminal judges and who have the power to gather evidence and refer the matter to courts for prosecution. Magistrates ordered the raid on the Wildenstein Institute, a nonprofit French organization founded by the family to conduct art research and publish catalogs tracking the work of prominent artists.
Five Generations
Carol Vogel reported from New York.
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