A: Is for art lost then found

With all the films out this year about the holocaust, my guess is a new one is in the making after what has been happening at the MoMA and the Guggenheim. Two paintings, which both date from the early 1900s, were sold to the Jewish art dealer Justin Thannhauser in 1934 or 1935. Thannhauser fled Germany and spent much of the war in Switzerland. He kept "Le Moulin de la Galette" until 1963, when he gave it to the Guggenheim museum. He sold "Boy Leading a Horse" to former MoMA chairman William Paley in 1936. Paley gave it to MoMA in 1964, according to the museum's Web site. Julius H. Schoep, alleged that his family was forced by the Nazis to part with them. Before his death, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy took steps that his heir Julius H. Schoeps said were intended to protect his estate and art collection. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was Schoeps' great-uncle. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff concluded last week that the family of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who died in 1935, had produced enough evidence that the paintings had been sold under Nazi duress for the case to go to trial. The museums had denied that the paintings were obtained under duress, boasting in a letter to Rakoff two weeks ago that they looked forward to a trial. Rakoff said the heirs insisted that the museums should have known they had acquired the paintings under suspicious circumstances. Gregory Joseph, a lawyer for the museums, said the museums had offered to settle the case in August but a deal had been unlikely until the judge's ruling last week. He said settlement discussions resumed promptly after the opinion was released. In an unusual reprimand, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff strongly urged both sides to release terms of the settlement saying the heirs invoked "the weight of history on their behalf," and it would be "extraordinarily unfortunate that the public would be left without knowing what the truth is." And these are the F.A.C.T.S.