Word: klee
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Since the day that West Berlin authorities appropriated $10,500 from the municipal lottery funds to buy it last spring, the small painting by Paul Klee had firmly established itself in the affections of Berliners. Klee has become one of the most sought-after of all European modernists, and this was the first painting of his that West Berlin had been able to acquire since 1945. Titled Jungwaldta-fel-a Kleeish word construction meaning "Panel of Young Trees''-it was filled with echoing mysteries showing the old master of fantasy at his best. Last week Berlin got shocking...
...been for some enterprising detective work by Chicago Art Dealer Richard Feigen. the embarrassing case of the stolen Klee might never have come up. But one day last spring, Feigen was visiting the Colorado ranch of Walter Maitland. the son of a prominent Los Angeles collector who died four years...
From Maitland's description of the painting, Feigen realized that it might be a first-rate Klee. He decided to see if he could find it. sent a letter to ten top international art magazines telling about the theft and reporting that the Maitlands wanted the painting back. Professor Leopold Reidemeister, general director of West Berlin's municipal museums, learned the sad news by reading Feigen's appeal in London's Burlington Magazine...
Reidemeister had bought the Klee from the notable dealer Gunther Franke of Munich. An old friend of Klee's. Franke had himself bought the painting in good faith from an American who said it had come from a private collection. Last week Franke wired Feigen that the American was a "J. Alex Greene." Two days later...
...Manhattan, the FBI picked up Joel Alexander Greene, who calls himself "a private art dealer." As a student at U.C.L.A., Greene said, he had simply walked into the gallery where the Klee was hanging and slipped it into a portfolio...