The US Supreme Court on Monday revived a case on the fate of “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain,” a painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro now worth millions.
The court ordered that the case be reconsidered under a recently-passed California law intended to make it easier for Holocaust survivors and their families to recover stolen art. The painting is currently in a Spanish Museum but could be returned to the plaintiffs, the descendants of the owner from over eight decades ago.
The painting was originally sold in 1939 by Lilly Cassirer Neubauer to Jakob Scheidwimmer, an art dealer and Nazi party member, to obtain a visa to escape Germany and avoid a concentration camp. The painting was later acquired by Julius Sulzbacher, but it was ultimately seized by the Gestapo, the Nazi police group. Although Neubauer brought a case in 1950 to recover the paintings, the painting did not reappear until 1951 at a gallery in the US. Neubauer ultimately entered a compensation agreement in 1958, accepting 120,000 German Marks from the German government. The painting has been sold multiple times since then, landing in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, an instrumentality of the Kingdom of Spain, in 1993.
The Cassirer family made an initial attempt to regain the art piece in 2002 and brought legal action in California in 2005 to claim ownership of the painting. The issue before the court was whether California law or Spanish law governed the disputed claim of title to the painting. Under California law the Cassirer family would recover the art, while under Spanish law they would not. After years of legal battles, the Court of Appeals ruled that Spanish law should apply, and thus the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection is the rightful owner.
The Supreme Court vacated that decision Monday, remanding the casefor further consideration in light of Assembly Bill 2867. The Bill provides that “California substantive law shall apply in actions to recover fine art or an item of historical, interpretive, scientific, or artistic significance, including those covered by the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 (HEAR), brought by a California resident or their heirs.”