Fight for Nazi-stolen painting comes to court

LOS ANGELES/The Los Angeles Times – For 25 years, a painting by the Impressionist master Camille Pissarro has hung on a museum wall in Spain.

The artwork’s dark past is no secret. In 1939, months before the start of World War II, Nazi officials forced a Jewish woman to trade it for her freedom as she tried to flee Germany.

But despite commitments to international agreements that called to work towards returning artwork looted by the Nazis, Spain has waged a relentless legal battle in US courts against descendants of the woman, Lilly Cassirer, to keep the masterpiece. It is valued at $30 million.

The fight has stretched well into its second decade as attorneys for Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum spent years first trying to have the case thrown out of the courts, and then argued that the museum retains ownership of the painting.

Claude Cassirer, Lilly Cassirer’s grandson, filed the lawsuit in 2005 but died several years ago. His daughter then died this year, leaving his son, David, to carry on the case.

Now, a federal judge in Los Angeles is set to decide who has the rightful claim to the painting.

On Tuesday, high-profile attorneys for the museum and Cassirer are scheduled to begin trial before US District Judge John F. Walter. Walter, who will hear the case without a jury, must interpret the intricacies of Spain’s property laws to decide the painting’s owner. Whichever side prevails, an appeal is almost certain.

The case is one of several filed in US courts by American descendants of European Jews. In perhaps the most well-known legal skirmish, the US Supreme Court in 2004 ruled Austria could not use sovereign immunity to avoid a lawsuit by Maria Altmann, a Los Angeles woman seeking the return of a few Gustav Klimt paintings valued at $150 million.

This year, an appeals court brought an apparent end to an 11-year legal saga involving Renaissance paintings of Adam and Eve, which were seized by the Nazis from a Dutch Jewish art dealer. Walter ruled that the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California should keep the artwork, because the Dutch government had been the valid owner when it sold the paintings.

The current trial is playing out as European nations, the US and others take stock of the uneven effort to rectify the damage that the Third Reich inflicted with its organized campaign to plunder art and other valuables from families and museums. Last week, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the signing of agreements describing the importance of returning Nazi-looted art, experts gathered in Berlin to measure the work that remains to be done.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a State Department adviser on Holocaust issues and a leading figure in the campaign to return looted art, said that of the roughly 600,000 paintings thought to have been stolen, about 100,000 remain missing.

Spain, Eizenstat said, was one of a handful of key countries that “have made virtually no effort to comply” with the principles in the agreement, despite signing it and numerous declarations.

Also at stake is Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain, one in a series of oil paintings Pissarro made in 1897 and 1898. Shortly after completing it, Pissarro sold the painting, which is about 2.5 feet tall, to Lilly Cassirer’s father, who eventually passed it on to his daughter.

In 2010, shortly before his death, Claude Cassirer recalled in a Los Angeles Times interview memories of growing up in Berlin in the 1920s and discussed how his grandmother raised him after his mother died.

As Adolf Hitler rose to power, members of the family fled Germany. Claude Cassirer parted ways with his grandmother, going first with his father to Prague, then to Czechoslovakia, and then to a boarding school in Britain, where classmates and teachers relied on him to translate Hitler’s speeches as they were broadcast on the radio. Cassirer later moved to France but had to escape to Morocco after the Nazis occupied the country. He eventually made his way to the US.

Lilly Cassirer was among the last of the family to flee the coming terror of the Holocaust. As she tried to leave Germany, a Nazi official forced her to surrender the painting in exchange for the exit visa she needed. Her sister, who remained, was later killed in the death camp of Theresienstadt.

At the end of the war, Lilly Cassirer joined many other Jews in seeking help from Allied officials, who worked to find looted art. A search for the painting turned up nothing. Years later, the German government paid Cassirer about $13,000 as restitution and, afterwards, she gave up on her search.

“My grandmother never knew what happened to the painting,” Claude Cassirer said in 2010.

When Lilly Cassirer died, she left the rights to the painting to Claude. In a house outside San Diego, where Claude and his wife had retired, the couple kept a copy of the lost Pissarro on the wall.

Then, in 2000, Cassirer received a phone call from an old acquaintance: The painting had been found.

The painting ended up in Spain after changing hands among private owners several times. In 1976, an art dealer in New York City negotiated a sale of the painting to Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a Swiss art collector and scion of a German steel empire. Years later, the Spanish government decided to buy the baron’s entire art collection of hundreds of paintings for nearly $340 million, where the painting was moved to the museum.

Cassirer contacted Spanish authorities and asked for the Pissarro to be returned. When the requests were rebuffed, he sued.

Lawyers for the museum tried to get the lawsuit tossed out on the grounds that Spain’s sovereignty gave it immunity from such legal proceedings in a US court. When an appeals court found otherwise, the museum argued that the statute of limitations on the family’s rights to claim the artwork had expired. A judge sided with the museum, but the ruling was overturned by an appeals court.

The case was transferred to Walters, who again ruled in favor of the museum in 2016 when he concluded that Spain legally owned the painting because the museum had possessed it for a legally binding period of time. But an appeals court once again reversed the decision and sent the case back, setting the stage for a trial.

The fight over the painting now hinges on the question of whether the artwork’s ownership should have been clear to Spanish officials.