Jewish family battles Spain museum over art looted by Nazis

LOS ANGELES—In the epic, 16-year battle over a priceless painting looted by the Nazis, there is one point on which all sides agree: When Lilly Cassirer and her husband fled Germany ahead of the Holocaust, they surrendered their Camille Pissarro masterpiece in exchange for their lives.

The Jewish couple traded the work for the exit visas that allowed them to flee to the safety of England in 1939. When they did so, they set Pissarro’s stunning 1897 oil-on-canvas Paris street scene on an incredible journey of its own.

It was an odyssey that would take “Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie” from Germany to the United States, through the hands of several wealthy collectors and prominent art dealers and, finally, to Spain’s ThyssenBornemisza Museum, where it has resided since 1993.

Since 2000, Lilly Cassirer’s heirs have been trying to get it back.

They may get one of their last best chances Monday when their lawyer, David Boies, argues before a federal appeals court that under state law and international treaties, the painting appraised at more than $30 million belongs to Cassirer’s great-grandchildren.

“This is an issue that is critically important not only in terms of trying to right terrible wrongs that had their origin in the Nazi persecution of the Jews but also to establish principles that are very important to what’s happening now in the world,” Boies said earlier this week.

“Month after month, you see reports of ISIS looting art in Muslim countries and selling it to raise money,” he continued. Allowing Spain to keep the painting, he said, would tell the world that buying looted art has no consequences.

The museum’s attorney, Thaddeus J. Stauber, argues the issue is no longer about looted art but simply well-documented ownership rights to a painting purchased in good faith.

What’s more, Stauber says, Cassirer forfeited her ownership rights when she accepted $13,000 from the German government in 1958 for the painting’s loss.

“There’s no dispute about the painting’s complete history. The court examined all the evidence and determined that the museum is the rightful owner of the painting,” Stauber said, referencing a federal judge’s ruling in Los Angeles last year.

U.S. District Judge John F. Walter determined that under Spanish law the artwork belongs to the museum, but he concluded that when Cassirer accepted payment for the painting in 1958 she had no idea it still existed.

That shows, Boies says, that Cassirer never signed away her rights.

Her great-grandson, David Cassirer, said his family didn’t learn of the work’s existence until a friend of his late father, Claude, saw it in a museum catalog in 1999.

“She immediately called my dad because he had told her about the missing painting and had showed her a photo of the missing painting,” said Cassirer, who lives in San Diego. “And he was completely stunned because we thought the painting was gone.”

Sleuthing by both sides revealed that soon after Lilly Cassirer and her husband left Germany, the work—originally acquired by Lilly’s father-in-law from Pissarro’s art dealer—was sold to an anonymous German buyer.

It eventually arrived in the United States and was subsequently bought and sold more than once before Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, scion of Germany’s Thyssen steel empire and one of the 20th century’s most prominent art collectors, acquired it from New York gallery owner Stephen Hahn in 1976.

Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died in 2002, gave the painting and the rest of his collection to the Spanish government in 1993, creating the museum that bears his name.

After the museum refused to hand over the work, the Cassirer family sued.