Friedrich Gutmann

Legal action

A year of correspondence between the Goodmans and Searle's lawyers proved unproductive, and in 1996 the Goodmans filed suit against Searle, first in New York and later in Chicago. The suit was believed to be the first instance in the United States of an individual suing for art stolen during the war, and a "turning point" in helping to bring the subject of Nazi plunder "under the international spotlight."

On October 31, 1997, a conference call between the principals failed to achieve a settlement, and the judge postponed the trial to 1998. The request by Searle's lawyers to dismiss the case was rejected by a federal court district judge on July 30, 1998, and a date for a jury trial set for September 9. A segment on the CBS news program 60 Minutes aired across the United States on January 19, 1997; on August 10, 1998, a second program, "Making a Killing," was shown in Chicago on PBS' WTTW-TV. Termed "a powerful British-made documentary on the dispute" by a Chicago newspaper, it "leaves little doubt that a jury… would likely have little sympathy with Searle's ongoing refusal to confront the evidence that the Degas he had purchased in good faith had been stolen by the Nazis."

Growing criticism of the Searle position in Chicago, the decision of the National Gallery of London to review the provenance of its entire collection to determine if any works had been looted by the Nazis (the first art gallery to do so), and the return by German authorities of a looted Van Gogh, preceded an ultimate out of court settlement of the case.