Contrary to a photo caption in Tuesday's New York Times, a landscape painting by Gustave Courbet long owned by the Art Institute of Chicago was never found to have been confiscated by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II.

"There is no evidence that Gustave Courbet's 'The Rock of Hautepierre' was seized by the Nazis," said Erin Hogan, the Art Institute's director of public affairs.

Painted around 1869, the work was owned in the 1920s by Jewish art collector Max Silberberg, who was killed by the Nazis, along with his wife Johanna, during the war. But the Art Institute's provenance research showed that he had sold the Courbet painting and other artworks at an auction at Berlin's Galerie Paul Graupe in 1935.

The Art Institute has been unable to learn the identity of the auction buyer; also unknown is the name of the private German collector who consigned the painting in 1964 for sale at another German auction house. It was bought there by a Swiss gallery, which sold it in 1965 to New York art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who sold it to the Art Institute two years later.

In 2001, the Art Institute announced an "equitable resolution" with Silberberg's last remaining relative in which the museum would retain title and possession of the painting. On Tuesday, Hogan declined to provide further details about the agreement, adding that Art Institute director James Cuno was unavailable for comment.

In an e-mail to the Times on Tuesday, Hogan also expressed concern that its readers might be left with the mistaken impression that the Art Institute was not among the museums which responded in a timely manner to a recent survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The Times reported that several American art museums failed to respond adequately to the survey, whose aim was to determine whether the institutions are doing enough to find out whether their collections may contain artworks stolen by the Nazis.

The Art Institute is doing plenty, according to a letter Cuno sent to Gideon Taylor, the conference's executive vice president, in April. In it, Cuno noted that the Art Institute has been actively investigating the provenance of thousands of objects from the Nazi era since 1997, even before the American Association of Museums (AAM) issued research guidelines.

In 2000, Cuno wrote, the Art Institute reached a purchase-and-donation agreement with the heirs of the Holocaust-era owner of "Bust of a Youth" (circa 1630), a sculpture by Francesco Mochi.

On behalf of the Art Institute and the museum association, Cuno will testify Thursday before a House of Representatives subcommittee about Holocaust-era assets in the United States.

By KEVIN NANCE Art Critic, Chicago Sun-Times