Supreme Court won’t take up fight over ownership of looted art at Norton Simon Museum
Posted January 21, 2015 1:52 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The Norton Simon Museum will return to court in a long-running legal battle with a New York woman who says two of the institution’s most valuable paintings were wrongly taken from her family by the Nazis during World War II.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Tuesday to grant a hearing on the California museum’s efforts to overturn a lower court decision allowing the case to proceed.
Marei Von Saher says the paintings, “Adam and Eve” by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, were seized after her Jewish relatives were forced to flee Holland during the war.
The Norton Simon says it legally acquired the paintings from the descendant of Russian aristocrats who had them wrongly taken by the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
They were painted in the 1500s.
