Supreme Court: Dispute over painting seized by Nazis can be decided in California

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday for a California family seeking to recover a Pissarro painting looted by a Nazi official in 1939 and eventually put on display in a Spanish museum.

The 9-0 ruling does not resolve the dispute but sends the case back to a courtroom in Los Angeles to decide the matter based on California law, which is more favorable to the family.

The justices overturned a ruling that said the painting had been lawfully obtained under Spanish law. In their appeal, lawyers for the Cassirer family argued that an unlawful transaction would not be upheld as legal under California law.

“The path of our decision has been as short as the hunt for Rue SaintHonoré was long,” said Justice Elena Kagan for the court. “Our ruling is as simple as the conflict over its rightful owner has been vexed. A foreign state or instrumentality... is liable just as a private party would be. That means the standard choice-of-law rule must apply. In a property-law dispute like this one, that standard rule is the forum state’s (here, California’s).”

The case was Cassirer vs. Thyssen-Bornemisza

Collection Foundation.

Last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a federal judge in Los Angeles that the painting of a Paris street scene by Camille Pissarro should remain with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection at a stateowned museum in Madrid. The judges did so by applying Spanish law.

The painting had been brought to the U.S. illegally after the war, and it was sold by a Beverly Hills gallery in 1951.

The Stephen Hahn Gallery in New York arranged for its sale in 1976 to Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, a Swiss art collector and the heir to a German steel empire.

In 1993, he sold his collection of more than 775 paintings for $340 million to Spain, where they would be exhibited at a new museum in Madrid. The artworks were displayed publicly for more than six years, a key issue under Spanish law.

But all the while, Claude Cassirer had been searching for the lost painting that hung on the wall of his grandmother Lilly’s apartment in Berlin. She turned over the painting to a Nazi official in 1939 to obtain a visa out of Germany. Separately, her grandson escaped to Britain and then to Cleveland after the war.