The central question in a new lawsuit against Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum is whether Marei von Saher can revive her claim to two Renaissance panels after earlier federal litigation failed. The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles filed the case on September 14 in L.A. Superior Court, seeking recovery of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Adam and Eve, a roughly 500-year-old diptych that Nazi forces seized from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker's Amsterdam gallery in 1940.
The federation acted with von Saher's authorization and says it will use most of the net proceeds to support impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the Los Angeles area, according to LAist. Goudstikker died in an accident while fleeing the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, and Nazi air force commander Hermann Göring personally seized more than 800 works from his gallery, including the Cranach panels, which Göring later displayed at his Carinhall estate near Berlin, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The Norton Simon Museum has not disputed that the artwork was originally looted by the Nazis, the LAist report notes. Instead, the museum's foundation maintains it holds proper title to the diptych, pointing to the painting's chain of ownership after the war.
A Twisting Chain of Title After the War
The Dutch government sold the Adam and Eve panels in 1966 for 60,000 guilders to Prince George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, an exiled Russian aristocrat who claimed the Bolshevik government had illegally confiscated the works from his family during the 1917 Russian Revolution, according to The Art Newspaper. Industrialist Norton Simon then bought the 6-foot-tall panels from Stroganoff-Scherbatoff in 1971 for $800,000, placing them on public display at the Pasadena museum that now carries his name, per the same account.
Von Saher first sued the Norton Simon Museum in federal court back in 2007. That case ended in 2016 when U.S. District Judge John F. Walter ruled the museum held proper title because Goudstikker's estate had missed post-war Dutch filing deadlines, a decision the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in 2018, according to Courthouse News. The Ninth Circuit went further that same year, ruling that a court could not declare the sale illegal simply because a foreign government had carried it out, and the U.S. Supreme Court later declined to hear the case, leaving that ruling standing, per LAist.
The broader Goudstikker collection has already seen a measure of justice. In 2006, the Dutch government returned 202 other artworks from the collection to von Saher under a national restitution policy reform, which led to a landmark Christie's New York auction where the recovered Old Master works sold for more than $100 million, the Art Newspaper reported.
A New California Law Reopens the Door
The new filing relies on a 2024 California law that allows petitions to recover cultural property taken or otherwise lost through political persecution, per LAist. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2867 in September 2024, directing that California substantive law apply in state claims involving property stolen through political persecution and creating a route for certain previously dismissed Nazi-looted-art cases to be brought again, according to the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom.
What AB 2867 Changes — and What It Does Not
AB 2867 does not reopen every previously dismissed property case. According to the bill text, a cause of action dismissed on specified grounds may be brought again within two years of the law's effective date or the entry of final judgment and termination of all appeals, whichever is later. The timing rule supplies a procedural opportunity to refile; the new case still presents the underlying title dispute for adjudication.
The Cranach case also differs from other restitution disputes in both the artwork and the legal history. The Los Angeles Times reported that von Saher secured the return of more than 200 other Goudstikker paintings from the Netherlands in 2006, distinguishing that restitution from the still-contested diptych. Separately, Claude Cassirer sued the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and Spain in 2005 over Camille Pissarro's painting held in Madrid, a claim involving a different family, work and foreign collection, according to the same newspaper.
Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel introduced the bill specifically in response to a January 2024 Ninth Circuit ruling that allowed a Spanish museum to keep Camille Pissarro's Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain, a painting the Jewish Cassirer family had surrendered under Nazi duress in 1939, according to the Los Angeles Times. Under California substantive law, a thief cannot convey valid legal title to stolen property no matter how much time has passed, a standard that stands in contrast to European legal doctrines allowing possessory title transfers or administrative cutoffs, according to Courthouse News.
The lawsuit names the Norton Simon Museum and two related foundations as defendants, per LAist. Rabbi Noah Farkas said the suit seeks to reverse an injustice caused by the Nazi theft of a Jewish family's property, while Joel Greenberg said the museum does not have good title and that retaining the art is immoral and unethical, LAist reported.
Part of a Wider Wave of Claims
The Pasadena case was filed the same week as another major California lawsuit, brought by the daughters of Auschwitz survivor Dina Gottliebova Babbitt against the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum over watercolors she was forced to paint for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, according to the Los Angeles Times. Both filings arrive as California's statutory window for reviving dismissed claims edges closer to closing.
Court filings and art-market valuations place Cranach's diptych at roughly $24 million, with the artist's work having sold for millions of dollars at auction, according to the Jewish Journal. The case echoes another well-known restitution fight, in which Maria Altmann recovered a Gustav Klimt work the Nazis had looted from her family in Austria, per LAist.
The dispute also lands amid other ongoing restitution battles Hoodline has followed, including a 16th-century painting tied to Göring loot sitting unresolved at a Boston museum. For now, the Norton Simon Art Foundation says it has proper title to Adam and Eve, setting up another lengthy legal test of whether California's new statute can succeed where a decade of federal litigation could not.
