Court lets US family try to get back Nazi-looted masterpiece

Thaddeus Stauber, an attorney for the museum’s manager, said he was confident its ownership of the painting would be confirmed by the lower court.

The museum has argued that it has well-documented ownership rights to the painting, which was purchased in good faith.

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

David Cassirer has said his family didn’t learn of the work’s existence until a friend of his late father saw it in a museum catalogue in 1999. Lilly Cassirer’s heirs filed a petition in Spain in 2001 and then a lawsuit in the U.S. in 2005 after that petition was denied.

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.

Sudhin Thanawala, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Court lets US family try to get back Nazi-looted masterpiece

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