Court rejects claim for art looted by Nazis
The heiress of a Dutch art dealer cannot reclaim two Renaissance paintings that were looted by the Nazis during World War II, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in deference to the Dutch government’s decision that the artworks had been legally acquired by a museum in Southern California.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco also said the heiress, Marei von Saher, and her family could have filed claims for the paintings long ago but declined to do so. The rulings could signal the end of a lengthy legal battle over “Adam” and “Eve,” life-size oil paintings by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder that date from about 1530.
The paintings had been purchased by Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art collector,
who left them behind, along with 1,200 other artworks, when he and his family fled the Netherlands in 1940. Nazi leader Hermann Göring acquired the art dealership in a forced “sale.” The Allies found the paintings at his country estate at the end of the war and delivered them to the Dutch government.
During his flight from Europe, Goudstikker died in an accident on the ship that carried his family to South America. When the Dutch government invited claims for Nazi-looted art, the family, for financial reasons, decided not to seek return of the paintings. The government instead sold the Cranach paintings in 1966 to a Russian man, George Stroganoff-Sherbatoff, who claimed he and his family had actually owned the paintings before the Soviets stole them in 1931.
Stroganoff sold the paintings for $800,000 in 1971 to the Norton Simon Art Museum in Pasadena, where they remain on display. They have been appraised at $24 million.
Von Saher, Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law and heiress who now lives in Greenwich, Conn., sued in the Netherlands in the late 1990s for the paintings, but the Dutch courts ruled that her family had relinquished its claims. The Dutch government then adopted what it described as a “more moral policy approach” that allowed von Saher to recover more than 200 paintings that were still in the government’s possession.
She sued the Norton Simon museum for the Cranach paintings, arguing that the museum had acquired them in an invalid sale because Stroganoff had not been their rightful owner. But the appeals court, upholding a federal judge’s decision in the museum’s favor, said the issues von Saher raised had been resolved against her by the Dutch courts.
The Netherlands’ highest court found in 1999 that von Saher’s family “had consciously foregone their restoration rights” in the paintings, Judge M. Margaret McKeown said in Monday’s ruling.
“Second-guessing the Dutch government would violate our commitment to respect the finality of appropriate actions taken by foreign nations to facilitate the internal restitution of plundered art.”
In a statement, the Norton Simon Art Foundation said the ruling “should finally put this matter to rest, and we look forward to continuing to make these important artworks accessible to the public, as we have since 1971.”
Lawrence Kaye, a lawyer for von Saher, said his client was disappointed by the ruling and was “considering her next steps in her long, frustrating battle to achieve justice in this case.”