A decades-long court battle over a famous painting that the Nazis stole from a Jewish family at the dawn of World War II took a devastating turn for the family on Tuesday, when a federal appeals court in the United States rejected their request that the work of art will be preserved. return.
The court’s decision refers to the painting: “Rue Saint-Honoré in the afternoon. The Rain Effect,” by Camille Pissarro, will remain in the possession of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, a museum owned by the Spanish government, rather than being returned to the descendants of Lilly Cassirer, a Jewish woman who was forced to hand over the paint. to the Nazis in exchange for his freedom from Germany in 1939.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit came as a shock to the family and their attorneys, who had anticipated the painting’s long-awaited return after a unanimous, if legally narrow, decision to their favor from the United States. Supreme Court in 2022.
“Rue Saint-Honoré in the afternoon. Effect of the Rain”, by Camille Pissarro, is exhibited at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid on April 22, 2022.
(Manu Fernández / Associated Press)
Instead, the appeals court ruled in favor of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, which found it had obtained a “prescriptive title” for the painting when it purchased it and a trove of other precious works of art in 1993 from Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen. -Bornemisza, a Swiss art collector and heir to a vast German steel empire.
David Cassirer, 69, the lead plaintiff in the case and Lilly Cassirer’s great-grandson, referred his comments to his family’s attorney, Sam Dubbin, who told the Times they were “surprised and disappointed by the decision.” Dubbin said he will ask for reconsideration by a larger panel of 11 full judges.
In a statement, Dubbin and the family’s other lawyers said Tuesday’s decision “does not explain how Spain has any interest in applying its laws to launder ownership of war loot, a practice prohibited in the 1907 Hague Convention.” , and a series of other international conventions to which Spain has adhered for more than a century.”
The lawyers said the ruling does not address “how a national museum owned by the Spanish government justifies keeping a painting that it knows was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish family in the Holocaust.”
The museum’s lawyers, in their own statement, praised the court’s decision, calling it “a welcome conclusion to this case.”
The painting, of a Paris street scene in 1897 and 1898 and estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars today, had been hanging in Lilly Cassirer’s Berlin apartment when the Nazis took power. After being stolen, it was brought illegally to the United States and sold by a Beverly Hills gallery in 1951 before the baron bought it from a New York gallery in 1976. The museum said it legally acquired the painting in the 1993 purchase. .
A photograph provided by the Cassirer family shows Pissarro’s painting hanging in the family home in Berlin in the 1920s.
(Cassirer Family Trust)
The Cassirer family had considered the painting lost until Claude Cassirer, Lilly’s grandson and David’s since-deceased father, discovered in 2000 that it was part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The family filed a lawsuit seeking the return of the painting in federal court in Los Angeles in 2005.
The case has been closely followed for decades because it raises important legal and deeply moral questions about what is fair when it comes to Nazi-looted artwork and other Jewish wealth.
Circuit Judge Consuelo M. Callahan wrote in a concurring opinion that while she agreed with the ruling in favor of the museum as a matter of law, it went against her “moral compass.”
Callahan wrote that the Spanish government should have “voluntarily handed over” the painting to the family under an international agreement on the return of Nazi-looted art that Spain and dozens of other countries signed in 2009.
Although the law required sentencing against the family, “I wish it were otherwise,” Callahan wrote.
The emotional weight of the case is due in part to the clarity of its origins. All parties agree that Lilly Cassirer, a member of a prominent Jewish art-collecting family in Berlin, was forced to part with the painting due to a cruel and well-organized Nazi program to strip Jewish families of their wealth before were systematically murdered. during the Holocaust.
A family photo shows Claude Cassirer as a child with his grandmother, Lilly Cassirer, who was forced by the Nazis to hand over the painting in exchange for a visa to flee Germany.
(Cassirer Family Trust)
The museum’s lawyers have not argued that the Nazis did not steal the Pissarro from the Cassirers. Instead, they have argued that neither the baron nor the museum knew it had been looted and that Spanish law protects their modern ownership of the piece.
Lawyers for the Cassirer family strongly disputed this, arguing that the baron was a sophisticated art collector and that he and the museum had a responsibility to investigate the origins of the artwork. They would have known the Pissarro piece was stolen if they had done the due diligence required of them as legitimate collectors, the family argued.
The family also argued that California law required the return of the artwork. California officials have argued the same in their own case filings.
After filing their lawsuit nearly two decades ago, the family suffered a series of setbacks when U.S. courts, including the Ninth Circuit, ruled against them. Then, however, the US Supreme Court took up the case, raising its profile and making it one of the world’s most important cases involving works of art looted by the Nazis.
In 2022, the Supreme Court threw out the lower appellate ruling against him and ordered the Ninth Circuit to reconsider the case under California law, rather than Spanish law.
As part of its new review, the Ninth Circuit asked the California Supreme Court to weigh in on how the state’s laws applied to the dueling claims of Spain and the Cassirers, but the state’s high court denied the request, leaving the matter in the hands of the circuit court. hands.
In its unanimous order Tuesday, the court’s three-judge panel determined that, even under California law, the painting should remain in the museum.
The court felt that it had to consider the interests of Spain and California in enforcing their respective (and contradictory) laws governing disputes over ownership rights to stolen paintings and, ultimately, apply the law of the government whose interests would be affected. “most harmed” if their law is ignored.
The court found that Spain has a strong interest in enforcing its laws within its borders, and that enforcing them made sense in the Cassirer case in part because many of the events in question occurred there, including the purchase and exhibition of the painting by from the museum. At the same time, the court concluded that the application of Spanish law “would only partially undermine California’s interests in deterring theft and returning stolen art to victims of theft.”
So, he decided, Spanish law won.
Callahan and the other two judges on the panel, Carlos T. Bea and Sandra S. Ikuta, were appointed by President George W. Bush.
Lawyers for the Cassirer family said the court’s analysis was completely flawed and too dismissive of California’s interests in the matter.
“California law, as Attorney General Rob Bonta clearly explained to the Court, strongly supports the rights of its residents to recover stolen works of art held by museums,” they said in a statement.
David Cassirer, great-grandson of Lilly Cassirer, poses in front of the Supreme Court in January 2022.
(Susan Walsh/Associated Press)
Both David Cassirer and his father, Claude, “fought honestly and vigorously since they learned that Spain possessed Cassirer’s Pissarro painting, for the principle that works of art looted by the Nazis, or in similar atrocities, should be returned to their legitimate owners.” they said, and “they won’t stop now.”
“The Cassirers believe that, especially in light of the explosion of anti-Semitism in this country and around the world today, they must challenge Spain’s continued insistence on hosting art looted by the Nazis,” the family’s lawyers said in a statement. .
Tuesday’s court decision, they said, “gives the green light to looters around the world.”
