Heirs fight for return of disputed painting
Jewish family battles Spanish museum over art looted by Nazis
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 exit visas in 1939, which set Pissarro’s 1897 oil-on-canvas Paris street scene on an incredible journey.
It was an odyssey that would take Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie from Germany to the United States and finally, to Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, where it has resided since 1993.
Since 2000, Lilly Cassirer’s heirs have been trying to get it back.
They may have had one of their last best chances Monday, when their lawyer, David Boies, argued before a federal appeals court that under state law and international treaties, the painting appraised at more than US$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.
“Month after month, you see reports of ISIS looting art in Muslim countries and selling it to raise money.” Allowing Spain to keep the painting, he said, would tell the world that buying looted art has no consequences.
The museum’s lawyer, Thaddeus J. Stauber, argues the issue is no longer about looted art but welldocumented ownership rights to a painting purchased in good faith. 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 catalogue 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. “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 arrived in the U.S. and was bought and sold more than once before Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, scion of Germany’s Thyssen steel empire, acquired it in 1976 and subsequently gave it to Spain.
At one point, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the case reheard, leading to Walter’s ruling last year in favour of the museum. The appeals court now takes up the issue again before a three-judge panel in Pasadena, Calif.
Boies argues the judge misinterpreted Spanish law in issuing last year’s ruling and that, in any case, Spain is a signatory to international treaties that seek to return looted art to its rightful owners.