In a case resembling that of the “Woman in Gold,” the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on who owns the painting “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain” (1897) by Danish-French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, following oral arguments heard on January 18, 2022.
The painting’s original owners, the German-Jewish Cassirer family, have been fighting the Spanish museum that currently displays it to return the painting for nearly 17 years.
As the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the Cassirer family, Lilly Neubacher Cassirer was forced to flee the country in 1939. A Nazi officer made it clear that the family’s chances of obtaining exit visas depended entirely on whether they surrendered their prized Pissarro painting. The officer “purchased” the painting from the family for $360, which he then deposited into a blocked account. The painting is valued at $30 million today.
After World War II, Lilly Neubacher Cassirer spent years searching for the painting without success. She accepted $13,000 in reparations from the German government after concluding the painting must have been lost or destroyed.
However, she never gave up her right to seek and claim the painting if it were ever found, according to The Guardian. The painting changed hands several times before being acquired by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza of Lugano, Switzerland, in 1976. It was one of 775 works the baron sold to Spain for more than $300 million in the early 1990s.
Lilly’s grandson Claude discovered the painting at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain, in 2000. When he asked the museum to return it to him in California, they refused. After a Spanish court denied his request for the painting’s return, he sued in his home state of California, setting off the legal battle that continues today. Claude’s son David continued the fight after Claude passed away in 2010.
“This has been three generations of the Cassirer family trying to reclaim what is theirs,” said the family’s attorney, Stephen Zack, of the U.S. law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
Although no one disputes that the painting arrived at the museum as stolen property, there has been no definitive ruling on whether the present-day owner of the painting should be determined by Spanish or Californian law. Spanish law recognizes ownership after six years of uninterrupted possession.
Moreover, the Spanish court applied local law, under which the burden falls on victims to prove that the institution should have known the painting had been stolen, according to CNN. Since the painting traveled across the globe and passed from owner to owner, this is a difficult case to prove. However, under California law, a person cannot establish a valid claim to stolen property, according to Zack.
A California court ruled in 2015 that ownership of the painting fell under Spanish law — a ruling upheld by an appeals court in 2020. Unsatisfied with the ruling, the Cassirer family continued to pursue the case, which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The lower courts did, however, criticize Spain for its reluctance to relinquish the stolen painting.
The Jewish Museum’s website for the recently closed “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art” exhibition, which ran from August 2021 until January 2022, notes that an estimated one million stolen artworks were recovered after the war.
Roughly 600,000 of those artworks are paintings, of which 100,000 are still missing, according to Stuart Eizenstat, Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues during the Clinton Administration.
The Guardian reports that the main governing bodies of the Spanish Jewish community have filed briefs with the court in support of the Cassirer family, describing the years-long dispute as compounding the deep wounds left by the Holocaust.
“Further injury and offense are caused to the Jewish population in Spain when a government-funded institution publicly displays and claims rightful ownership over a work of art seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust,” the Jewish Community of Madrid and the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain said in their submission.
After an hour of arguments in court, Justice Stephen Breyer reportedly asked, “Can everybody agree that this is a beautiful painting?” — an apparent attempt to ease some of the tension in the room.
