[CPProt.net] Californian files suit against Spain, museum over looted painting

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

Californian files suit against Spain, museum over looted painting

BY HOWARD REICH

Chicago Tribune


CHICAGO - (KRT) - For the first time since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last
year that foreign governments can be sued in American courts for art looted
during the Holocaust, a California man on Tuesday sued the kingdom of Spain
and a museum it controls for a painting he values at $20 million.

Claude Cassirer - an 84-year-old retired photographer who lives in San Diego
- says in a suit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles that his family
owned Camille Pissarro's "Rue Saint-Honore, apres-midi, effet de pluie"
since 1898, a year after the celebrated Impressionist painted the famous
street scene.

Cassirer in 2001 petitioned the Spanish government for recovery of the work,
which hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, but he was rebuffed.

"They kept saying `sue us,'" said Cassirer, who spoke via phone from
Cleveland, where he was visiting relatives.

"But I think they wanted us to sue in Spanish courts.

"We decided to sue here."

That action was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June 2004,
allowing Holocaust survivor Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann to sue the Austrian
government for six paintings by the Viennese master Gustav Klimt, which were
looted by the Nazis. The Supreme Court decision stated that victims of theft
can seek remedy in U.S. courts under particular circumstances: The
plaintiffs must show that the property was taken in violation of
international law and that it is "owned or operated" by an agency of a
foreign state.

Both those stipulations, and others, appear to apply in Cassirer's suit
against Spain and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

"The Altmann case is a relatively good precedent for them," said lawyer E.
Randol Schoenberg, who argued Altmann's case before the Supreme Court.

"Though the Altmann case has been cited in other opinions, it just has been
tangentially. This is the first looted-art case to use Altmann as a
precedent."

A spokesman at the Ministry of Culture in Madrid declined to discuss the
litigation.

"At the moment, we cannot say anything about this matter, because the
Spanish government does not have official information about the lawsuit,"
said the culture ministry spokesman, who asked not to be identified while
speaking by phone from Madrid.

Cassirer's grandmother, Lilly Cassirer Neubauer, kept the painting in her
home in Berlin in the 1920s and Munich in the '30s, Claude Cassirer said,
recalling that he spent a large part of his youth in both places. But in
1939 the Jewish family fled Nazi Germany, and she was forced to turn over
the painting to an appraiser appointed by the Nazis, according to the
lawsuit.

Cassirer's grandmother failed to locate the painting after the war, but the
West German government recognized her ownership by compensating her for the
loss. She died in 1962, naming Claude Cassirer her sole heir.

In 1976, the suit alleges, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza purchased the painting
from New York art dealer Stephen Hahn.

The same dealer is cited in another lawsuit regarding Nazi looting. Hahn
sold Picasso's "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White") in 1975 to Chicago art
collector Marilynn Alsdorf, who has been sued by Thomas Bennigson for
ownership of the $10 million oil painting; that litigation is proceeding in
federal court in California and is also pending before the California
Supreme Court.

Hahn, reached by phone in California, declined to comment.

Said Cassirer, "To win this case, would mean to me that there is some matter
of justice."