LETTER FROM MADRID
Spain can keep Camille Pissarro's painting Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi. Effet de pluie ("Rue Saint-Honoré, afternoon. Rain Effect"), which has been on display at Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum since 1992. This is despite the fact that it was obtained from the looting of a Jewish family by the Nazis in 1939. After almost 20 years of legal battles, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation won its case against the Cassirer family in a California appeals court on January 9.
While California law would have allowed restitution to the family, Spanish law must be applied to determine ownership of the painting, the US court concluded. By virtue of Article 1955 of the Spanish Civil Code, the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection acquired ownership of the painting, the court reiterated. The article in question refers to usucapion or acquisitive prescription, i.e. the acquisition of property acquired in good faith through public possession and extended over time. This should bring the judicial chapter to a close. But the controversy, and the moral and ethical questions it raises, will probably not disappear.
La vue de la Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi. Effet de pluie is one of a series of 15 views of Paris created by the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro in 1897. It was exhibited in an art gallery and acquired in 1900 by Julius Cassirer, a German Jewish industrialist and art collector. On the eve of the Second World War, the painting still hung in the Berlin living room of his daughter-in-law, Lilly Cassirer. Fearing for her life, she was forced to sell off the painting to a Nazi officer to obtain a visa for the United Kingdom, for $360 paid into an already frozen account.
After the war, Lilly, who had since moved to the United States, decided to find her painting and initiated legal proceedings in Germany to obtain its restitution. In 1958, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany recognized her as the legal owner of the Pissarro and paid her 120,000 Deutschmarks in compensation, without this amount being deemed to imply that she had given up her claim to the painting. The painting itself had disappeared.
More than 40 years passed before her grandson, Claude, rediscovered it in the early 2000s, thanks to a friend who saw it hanging on the wall of the Thyssen. In 1976, Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemizsa bought it from the Stephen Hahn Gallery in New York for $360,000. Ironically, the Swiss art collector was the heir to a 19th-century industrial steel empire created in Germany by the Thyssen family, known for having helped finance the rise of Adolf Hitler through his uncle Fritz, who was affiliated with the Nazi party.
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