Van Gogh painting seized by Nazis becomes the subject of a lawsuit
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The heirs of a collector who fled Germany are suing the museum over the sale of the painting “Olive Pickers”
A California court is considering an unexpected case centered on a Van Gogh painting. The plaintiffs allege that the Metropolitan Museum of Art secretly sold The Olive Pickers instead of returning it to its rightful owner, Hedwig Stern.
It happened in 1972. Why did the case come to court only now? The history is confusing. The fact is that Hedwig Stern fled from the Nazi regime from Munich in 1936. It was not possible to take her collection with her to the United States, the Nazi regime ordered it to be sold in 1938. The woman did not receive the proceeds. The money first ended up in a blocked account, which was one of the ways the Nazis denied Jews access to their assets. The Van Gogh painting from the Stern collection ended up with the collector Vincent Astor in New York in 1948, from where it was bought by the Met in 1956.
That is, the work turned out to be in the museum legally, then what claims can be made against it?
However, lawyers for the Stern heirs argue that the Met should have traced the origin of the work. In a report filed with the complaint, Nazi art expert and European history professor Jonathan Petropoulos writes that the museum “secretly sold the painting in the 1970s because it realized the illegal circumstances of its original sale.”
“The only reasonable reason the Met decided to sell the painting in 1972 is because he or other Met officials knew it was a work of art confiscated by the Nazis,” writes Petropoulos.
Stern died in 1983. She tried for years to get her paintings back. The heirs hope to see the matter through to the end.
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