Family battles museum over art looted by Nazis

Associated Press

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 Thyssen-Bornemisza 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 today 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 last 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.