[MSN] Canadians won't give up Taylor's van Gogh painting

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Canadians won't give up Taylor's van Gogh painting

VAL ROSS

August 21, 2007

Toronto -- The Canadians who claim that Elizabeth Taylor has their great-grandmother's Vincent van Gogh painting are taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. A petition filed on Aug. 16 by Andrew Orkin, Mark Orkin and Sarah-Rose Adler states that View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy, painted in 1889, belonged to their great-grandmother Margarethe Mauthner of Berlin, and was taken in the late 1930s under coercion (the family is Jewish). In May, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the California District Court rejected the Orkins' claim, finding that Taylor had acquired the work in good faith years after Mauthner willingly agreed to its sale.

The Orkins are pressing on, citing a presumption in U.S. law that all property owned by Jews between 1933 and 1945 in Germany was deemed to have been confiscated by the Nazis, and that any art works from Germany in that period could be of dubious provenance.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/