California is once again fighting in federal court for a Jewish family’s right to have a precious Impressionist painting returned to them by a Spanish museum nearly 90 years after it was looted by the Nazis.
The state is also defending its own authority to legally require art and other stolen treasures to be returned to other victims with ties to the state, even in disputes that stretch far beyond its borders.
The state has repeatedly weighed in on the case since the Cassirer family first filed it while living in San Diego in 2005. Last year, California passed a new law designed to bolster the legal rights of the Cassirers and other families in the state to recover valuable property stolen from them in acts of genocide or political persecution.
On Monday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office filed a motion to intervene in the Cassirer case directly in order to defend that law. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation — which is owned by Spain and holds the Camille Pissarro masterpiece — has claimed that the law is unconstitutional and should therefore be ignored.
Bonta, in a statement to The Times, said the law is “about fairness, moral — and legal — responsibility, and doing what’s right,” and the state will defend it in court.
“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 said. “As attorney general, my job is to defend the laws of California, and I intend to do so here.”
Bonta said 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.”
Thaddeus J. Stauber, an attorney for the museum, did not answer questions from The Times. Bonta’s office said Stauber did not oppose its intervening in the case.
Sam Dubbin, the Cassirers’ longtime attorney, thanked Bonta’s office for “intervening in this case again to defend California’s interests in protecting the integrity of the art market and the rights of stolen-property victims.”
“California law has always provided strong protections for the victims of stolen property and stolen art in particular, which the Legislature has consistently reinforced,” Dubbin said.
The state bucked the powerful U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by passing the law last year. The appellate court found in a ruling in January 2024 that the painting was lawfully owned by the Spanish museum.
Bonta’s latest move ratchets up the intrigue surrounding the 20-year-old case, which is being watched around the globe for its potential implications in the high-stakes world of looted art litigation.
The painting in question — Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain” — is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Both sides acknowledge it was stolen from Lilly Cassirer Neubauer by the Nazis in 1939, after she agreed in desperation to surrender it to a Nazi appraiser in exchange for a visa to flee Germany at the dawn of World War II.
The attention surrounding the case, and its potential to set new precedent in international law, likely makes the painting even more valuable.
After World War II, Lilly received compensation for the painting from the German government, but the family never relinquished its right to the masterpiece — which at the time was considered lost. What she was paid was a fraction of the current estimated worth.
In the decades that followed, Lilly’s grandson Claude Cassirer — who had also survived the Holocaust — moved with his family to San Diego.
In 2000, Claude made the shocking discovery that the painting was not lost to time after all, but part of a vast art collection that Spain had acquired from the late Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, the scion of a German industrialist family with ties to Adolf Hitler’s regime. Spain restored an early 19th century palace near the Prado Museum in Madrid in order to house the collection as the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Claude asked the museum to return the painting to his family. It refused. He sued in U.S. federal court in 2005. The case has been moving through the courts ever since.
California passed its new law in response to the 9th Circuit ruling last year that held state law at the time required it to apply an archaic Spanish law. That measure dictates that the title to stolen goods passes legitimately to a new owner over time, if that owner wasn’t aware the goods were stolen when they acquired them — which the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection has argued makes its ownership of the painting legally sound.
In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the new law during a small gathering with the families of Holocaust survivors at the Holocaust Museum LA. Lilly’s great-grandson and Claude’s son David Cassirer, who now lives in Colorado, was there, praising the state’s lawmakers for “taking a definitive stand in favor of the true owners of stolen art.”
In March, the Supreme Court in a brief order ruled that the 9th Circuit must reconsider its ruling in light of California’s new law.
In September, the Thyssen-Bournemisza Collection filed a motion asking the appellate court to rule in its favor once more. It put forward multiple arguments, but among them was that California’s new law was “constitutionally indefensible” and deprived the museum of its due process rights.
“Under binding Supreme Court precedent, a State may not, by legislative fiat, reopen time-barred claims and transfer property whose ownership is already vested,” the museum argued.
It said the U.S., under federal law, “does not seek to impose its property laws or the property laws of its own states on other foreign sovereigns, but rather expressly acknowledges that different legal traditions and systems must be taken into account to facilitate just and fair solutions with regard to Nazi-looted art cases.”
It said California’s law takes an “aggressive approach” that “disrupts the federal government’s efforts to maintain uniformity and amicable relations with foreign nations,” and “stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of federal policy.”
David Cassirer, the lead plaintiff in the case since Claude’s death in 2010, argued the opposite in his own filing to the court.
Cassirer argued that California’s new law requires an outcome in his favor — which he said would also happen to be in line with “moral commitments made by the United States and governments worldwide, including Spain, to Nazi victims and their families.”
“It is undisputed that California substantive law mandates the award of title here to the Cassirer family, as Lilly’s heirs, of which Plaintiff David Cassirer is the last surviving member,” Cassirer’s attorneys wrote.
They wrote that California law holds that “a thief cannot convey good title to stolen works of art,” and therefore requires the return of the painting to Cassirer.
Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), who sponsored the bill in the Legislature, praised Bonta for stepping in to defend the law — which he called “part of a decades-long quest for justice and is rooted in the belief that California must stand on the right side of history.”
Kevin Rector
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