New Lawsuit Reopens Decades-Long Legal Battle Over Nazi-Looted Painting

The Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles has this week filed a lawsuit to recover a large diptych, Adam and Eve (c 1530) by the German renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, from the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, California. 

The filing is the latest in a decades-long legal dispute, prompted by new US legislation around the restitution of Nazi-looted property. In the lawsuit, Marei von Saher—the heir and daughter-in-law of Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish Dutch art dealer whose large art collection was looted by the Nazis after he fled the Netherlands in 1940—has assigned her claim to the Jewish Federation.

“We hope the museum will recognize the imperatives of justice and return the paintings without a protracted legal struggle,” Noah Farkas, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, said in a statement issued to Ocula. He added that “recovering this resource will enable us to provide for the many needs of thousands of impoverished Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles”.

The artwork itself, one of many paintings of Adam and Eve produced by Cranach’s studio, comprises two panels on which the biblical couple is rendered life-sized under an apple tree set against a stark black background, apples in their hands and errant leaves covering their crotches. Its soft-skinned, milky-eyed figures are notably less severe and anguished than those in the Dürer etching from 1504 that likely inspired Cranach.

In 1971, the work was sold by Russian aristocrat George Stroganoff-Sherbatoff to American industrialist Norton Simon. Three years later, the Pasadena Art Museum struck a deal with Simon, taking on his name and dedicating 75 percent of its gallery space—including the Cranach—in return for a donation that served to ease its financial hardships.

Decades of legal back-and-forth

The lawsuit alleges that in 1966, Stroganoff purchased the work from the Dutch government, to which it had been returned by Allied forces after the Second World War, after falsely claiming that it had belonged to his family. Von Saher first initiated a claim against the Dutch government for Adam and Eve’s restitution in the 1990s, but it was rejected on the grounds that her family had relinquished its rights following the war. 

In 2007, the Dutch government returned 202 of her father-in-law’s looted paintings to von Saher. The same year, she went on to sell a number of the returned artworks at Christie’s and to sue the Norton Simon Museum for the Cranach paintings in federal court.

That case was dismissed by the US District Court in California in 2016, close to a decade later. At the time, von Saher’s lawyer Larry Kaye said his client “remains undaunted and is optimistic that she will prevail in the end”. In 2019, the US Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal. 

This fresh complaint follows this April’s enactment of the federal Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act and California’s Recovery of artwork and personal property lost due to persecution Bill (2024). Both laws aim to protect heirs of looted property against dismissal on technical legal grounds or due to the passage of time.

The Norton Simon Museum of Art did not respond to Ocula’s request for comment, but told the LA Times that it was reviewing the new lawsuit. The institution told the paper that, over the decades, various courts have confirmed that the foundation “has proper title” to the diptych paintings, and that it “will continue to make these important artworks accessible to the public”.