California has rejoined the 20-year legal battle over a Camille Pissarro painting that was sold under duress during the Nazi regime.
This week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta vowed once more to return the work, which has continually been the subject of legal actions in the US, where a struggle between David Cassirer, the heir of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid has played out in court.
The painting in question, titled Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain (1897), is estimated to be valued in the “tens of millions” today.
In 1939, Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was forced to sell the oil painting under duress to a Nazi art appraiser for 900 Reichsmarks (roughly $360 today) in exchange for a visa to flee Germany ahead of the impending war. According to court documents, she never received payment.
In 1993, the painting was acquired by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.
The Cassirer Neubauer family long believed the painting was lost, but when they learned it was acquired by the museum, they requested its return. When the museum refused, Neubauer’s son Claude Cassirer filed a lawsuit in 2000. Since his passing in 2010, the claim was taken up by his son David, his daughter Ava’s estate, and the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County.
Earlier this year in September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that allows exceptions when personal property in question was taken “as a result of political persecution.” With the passing of that new law, Bonta is now defending the state’s legal authority to require stolen art and artifacts to be returned to victims in and connected to the state.
In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Bonta said, “There is nothing that can undo the horrors and loss experienced by individuals during the Holocaust. But there is something we can do—that California has done—to return what was stolen back to survivors and their families and bring them some measure of justice and healing.”
Bonta added that his office “has supported the Cassirers’ quest for justice for two decades,” and “will continue to fight with them for the rightful return of this invaluable family heirloom.”
The provision has allowed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum to keep the painting. A prior Supreme Court ruling that the California law should apply to the case was overturned by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit last year.
