French authorities seize Russian avant-garde paintings stolen from a collector

French bailiffs seized more than 100 avant-garde works from an art laboratory in Paris in February after suspecting they had been stolen from a private collector.

According to the Art Newspaper, international law firm Dentons in Frankfurt claims that the works belong to its client, Usman Khatib, a businessman and investor of Palestinian origin living in Israel. The collection is valued at more than 100 million euros (about 10 billion rubles) and includes paintings attributed to Wassily Kandinsky , Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova . The collector claims the paintings were stolen from a storage unit he rented in Wiesbaden, Germany, in December 2019.

Last year, bailiffs seized a collection of works from a Frankfurt storage facility that Khatib said also belonged to him. Khatib’s lawyer did not specify the exact number of works seized, saying in an interview with Art Newspaper that there were "several hundred."

Khatib’s son, Castro Ben Leon Lawrence Jayyusi, is leading a campaign to recover some 900 works of art lost around the world. Some of the works from the family collection, Jayusi said, have been sold over the past year at auctions in Israel, France and Monaco. His efforts are funded by Prague-based litigation finance company LitFin Capital.

Khatib purchased 871 works from a collection of 1,800 paintings in 2015 from Itzhak Zarug, an Israeli art dealer who runs a gallery in Wiesbaden. Suspecting that they were fakes, the Wiesbaden prosecutor’s office seized the works after their acquisition.

Although Zarug was in prison on suspicion of leading a gang of counterfeiters, in 2018 a Wiesbaden court cleared him of counterfeiting and conspiracy charges. However, Zarug and his colleague were convicted of lesser charges for falsifying the origin and selling counterfeit works.

In 2019, authorities returned Zarug’s collection, which also included a piece belonging to Khatib. The artwork was subsequently stolen from Khatib’s storage facility in Wiesbaden, according to court documents.

Jayusi claims that he knows the thief and tried to negotiate the return of the collection; his calls were not heard, and he went to court. By 2022, none of the works had been returned and they were reportedly being sold at auction.

In 2023, Frankfurt’s highest regional court ruled that bailiffs could remove Khatib’s works from storage. The Khatib family’s legal team has already contacted two auction houses in France and Israel, respectively, that are believed to be in possession of works from the lost collection.

“We will pursue criminals all over the world,” says Jayusi in an interview with Art Newspaper. “We will continue to reclaim our property and encourage anyone considering purchasing Russian avant-garde works to carefully check their provenance and ensure that it is not a stolen item belonging to our family.”