Editorial: 85 years after Nazis stole a Jewish family’s Pissarro painting, California may help return it
In the twists and turns that an exquisite Impressionist painting of a rainy Paris streetscape has taken from Lilly Cassirer’s Berlin home in 1939 to the wall of a Spanish museum where it hangs today, no one has ever questioned that the artwork was stolen by the Nazis.
Yet, her descendants, now living in California, haven’t been able to get it back.
Finally, after two decades of fighting in court from California to the U.S. Supreme Court, a bill in the state Legislature may give the Cassirer family the best chance yet of winning back the Camille Pissarro painting, “Rue Saint-Honoré, après midi, effet de pluie,” which the Nazis forced Lilly to give up in exchange for exit papers out of Germany.
Nazis stole a Camille Pissarro painting from a Jewish woman in 1939. It should be returned to her family, no matter what a court says.
Assembly Bill 2867, authored by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino) and sponsored by California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, would mandate that all court cases filed by California residents or their families to recover their stolen art held by museums be adjudicated according to state law. Under California law, a thief has no legal right to stolen property and therefore cannot pass legitimate title to others no matter how many times the property is sold or how much time passes.
Gabriel and Kounalakis know how hard it is to find and retrieve property stolen during the Holocaust. Gabriel, an attorney, has represented Holocaust victims, and Kounalakis was previously ambassador to Hungary, a country that sent more than half a million Jewish people to their deaths.
Thousands of precious antiquities disappeared from Cambodia during decades of war and strife. Now the country is taking on California museums to get them back.
This morally compelling bill solves a glitch that had stymied the Cassirer family’s case. Currently, courts deciding a case in a state where the plaintiff is suing a foreign entity (like the Spanish museum) are required to make a decision whether to apply that state’s law or the law of the defendant’s country. In the Cassirer case, federal courts always decided to apply Spanish law. And in Spain, the holder of stolen property has the right to keep it after a certain period of time passes — even if it was stolen.
Under those rules, the Cassirer family lost in federal district court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and — after the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back to the appellate court in 2022 — again in the appellate court. Earlier this year, a panel of the 9th Circuit applied Spanish law and ruled that the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid had the right to keep the painting. If the bill passes, the Cassirer family can go back to the 9th Circuit based on the new law or they can appeal the 9th Circuit’s recent decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
No matter what law was applied, it’s outrageous that the museum has kept it. Even a concurring judge on the 9th Circuit said the museum should give it back to the Cassirer family.
This bill will send a clear message from the people of California to all courts— as well as the government of Spain — that museums should have no right to hold stolen art. The Legislature should pass this quickly and Gov. Gavin Newsom should sign it into law as soon as it passes. The bill has an urgency clause, meaning it will go into effect immediately after the governor signs it into law.
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