MONTREAL — After a protest by Concordia University, a German auction house withdrew from sale a painting being claimed by the estate of the late Montreal art dealer and collector Max Stern.

The Lempertz auction house in Dusseldorf announced that the work by the Flemish artist Alexander Adriaenssen (1587-1661), a still life of fish, wasn’t going on the block Nov. 21 as scheduled.

Lempertz’s legal counsel, Karl-Sax Feddersen, told the media that it’s now up to the owner to decide whether to enter talks on the painting’s restitution to the estate, but the auction house is “ready to facilitate negotiations.”

He said the still life is valued at between about $6,300 and $7,900.

Concordia, which has been spearheading the Stern restitution and education project for more than six years, complained to the media Nov. 20 that Lempertz was refusing to cancel the sale.

Lempertz is the same auction house that conducted the 1937 sale forced by the Nazis of the last 200 works in Stern’s Dusseldorf gallery. The estate claims the Jewish Stern was coerced between 1935 and 1937 into liquidating some 400 paintings before fleeing Germany.

The Adriaenssen painting’s resurfacing was brought to the estate’s attention by the London-based Art Loss Register the week before the scheduled sale.

Immediately thereafter, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York contacted Godelieve Spiessens, an expert in Belgian old masters, whose opinion is that the painting was one of the 200 auctioned off by Lempertz in 1937. The Lost Art Database in Germany also thinks it’s the same work.

“The estate has repeatedly pleaded with Lempertz to recognize the validity of the estate’s ownership of such looted artworks,” said Clarence Epstein, who heads up the Stern restitution project.

On at least two occasions in the past, Lempertz refused to withdraw Stern art from auction.

Last year, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that the 1937 auction was indeed a forced sale and that all of the contents of the catalogue for that auction legitimately belonged to Stern and must be returned.

Concordia, along with McGill University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, are the beneficiaries of the Stern estate. Stern, who died in 1987, owned the Dominion Gallery on Sherbrooke Street for four decades.