31 October 2007
The US Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit against the actress Elizabeth Taylor for owning a Van Gogh painting that a Jewish woman lost before fleeing Nazi Germany to South Africa in 1939. In May, a San Francisco court of appeals had already dismissed the lawsuit filed by the Canadian and South African descendants of Margarete Mauthner, who then appealed to the Supreme Court for the return of Vincent Van Gogh's 1889 painting ‘View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy.’ The appeals court had upheld a lower court's February 2005 ruling dismissing the lawsuit. Taylor, 75, purchased the painting at auction in London in 1963 for US$ 257,600. The painting is currently estimated to be worth US$ 10–15 million.
Mauthner's descendents alleged in their lawsuit that Taylor must have known when she bought the Van Gogh that it had been stolen by the Nazis, accusing her of negligence. Taylor said the painting had been listed in Sotheby's 1963 auction catalogue as originally belonging to Margarete Mauthner and then being sold twice to reputable art galleries before it was acquired by Alfred Wolf, a German Jew who had also fled the Nazis in 1933.
