In May, the actress Elizabeth Taylor requested a declaration from the federal trial court in Los Angeles that she owns a painting by Van Gogh, after heirs of a Jew who fled Nazi Berlin claimed the work. Now she is seeking to dismiss a separate lawsuit by the heirs which is pending in the same court.In a complaint seeking restitution of "View of the asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" (1889), filed against Ms Taylor on 13 October, the heirs of Margarethe Mauthner say that Ms Mauthner lost the work "as a proximate consequence of Nazi persecution and the official policies of the Nazi government to exclude Jews from the economic life of Germany", Ms Mauthner fled to South Africa in 1939. The heirs say that when Ms Taylor acquired the painting in 1963 she "ignored" information including a reference in the Sothebys sales brochure to a 1939 catalogue raisonn by Van Gogh expert J.-B. de la Faille, identifying Ms Mauthner as the paintings owner in Berlin in the 1930s and listing two subsequent Jewish owners in Berlin.
Since Berlin was the epicentre of the Holocaust after 1932, any reasonably conscientious prospective buyer would have appreciated that the title changes may have occurred during the Nazi era under coercive circumstances, the heirs complaint says. The heirs are making the new legal argument that they can recover the painting under the US Holocaust Victims Redress Act of 1998 because the painting was lost as a consequence of Nazi economic and political persecution of Jews. Under the Redress Act, they say, a claimant need not demonstrate that a work of art was taken into possession by the Nazis. Rather, they say, the Redress Act treats the holocaust as a war to which international law applies, and therefore creates new rights for victims to recover art, including their suit for the Mauthner painting which was lost as a direct result of Nazi policies to persecute, disenfranchise and economically despoil its Jewish citizens. Ms Taylor contests this view of the Redress Act.
The section of the Act that relates to looted art is a non-binding sense of Congress that has no legal force and gives private citizens no rights to sue, she says. She further cites the law of England, where her father bought the painting for her in 1963. Under English law, she says, she acquired good title six years after the purchase at the latest, regardless of any allegations that she or her father should have known the painting was lost through Nazi persecution. Ms Taylor says that her ownership of the work became public knowledge after she acquired it in 1963, due to publicity stemming from her own celebrity and the importance of van Gogh. But the heirs waited nearly 40 years to assert a claim which makes their lawsuit invalid, she says. The heirs inability to specify how or when Ms Mauthner lost the painting some two generations ago is precisely the sort of evidentiary void which deadlines for lawsuits are designed to protect against, she says. She says Ms Mauthner voluntarily sold the painting before 1933, and that the heirs have provided no evidence that the painting ever fell into Nazi hands or that its transfer was coerced during the Nazi era. The painting passed from Ms Mauthner to two galleries, neither of which is known to have collaborated with the Nazis, then to a Jewish collector, Alfred Wolf, who fled to Buenos Aires with the painting before 1949, she says. The heirs have asked the court to dismiss Ms Taylors request for a declaration that she owns the painting. Ms Taylor similarly has asked that the claimants separate lawsuit be dismissed, or that the two lawsuits be consolidated. She says the heirs suit was orchestrated around an aggressive public-relations campaign. The court will consider these requests. January 21, 2005
