Source:
Los Angeles TimesThe court challenges to recover a painting taken by the Nazis in 1939 have been as tortuous as its provenance.
By Carol J. Williams, April 7, 2010.
Reporting from La Mesa, Calif.
After a lunch of chopped egg and crackers, Claude Cassirer plants his walker on the worn floorboards of his tiny living room, rhythmically inching his way down the hall to his study. It is a short constitutional he takes each day to regard ... a copy of an Impressionist masterpiece, "Rue Saint-Honore, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie,"by Camille Pissarro, which takes him back to his grandmother's lavishly furnished Berlin parlor in the 1920s. It was at the foot of the original painting depicting horse-drawn carriages on a rain-dappled thoroughfare that Cassirer played as a child ...
"My grandmother never knew what happened to the painting," Cassirer says of the 1897 Pissarro his great-grandfather, Julius, had purchased directly from the Caribbean-born Jewish artist. ... His grandmother ... left all she had to Cassirer -- the antique armoires ... , the porcelain dishes ... and the rights to the purloined Pissarro, should it ever surface. ... In 2000, ... an old customer ... said she had found it. ... it had been acquired by Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a Swiss art collector ... The Pissarro had been leased to the Spanish government ... ""Rue Saint-Honore" has been displayed ... near the famed Prado since then ... . With only meager savings at their disposal, the Cassirers turned to the World Jewish Congress for help in approaching the government of Spain, a signatory to agreements to restore Nazi-looted artworks to their rightful owners. "They have been most unfriendly, not cooperative in any way," Cassirer says of the Spaniards.
Cassirer filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in 2005 against the Kingdom of Spain and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation. Although Spain signed accords promising restitution to victims of Nazi art expropriations, the country and foundation have fought Cassirer on jurisdictional grounds, claiming the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act protects them from U.S. court proceedings. ... For nearly five years, lawyers and judges have debated that question, and also if Spain could be made to compensate for the wrongdoing of another country - Nazi Germany. ...Cassirer, who is hard of hearing and tires too easily even to travel to the court hearings in San Francisco, suffers no illusions about the likelihood of recovering the painting in his lifetime. "In a couple of weeks I am 89. This is of great concern to me," he says.
Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pissarro7-2010apr07,0,5838479.story
Some Spaniards and Swiss-Germans are waiting for an old Jew to die, rather than return the stolen painting to him. In doing so, they resurrect the 1933-45 policies of Germany, Switzerland, and Spain.