Judge allows Southern California museum to keep art looted by Nazis

According to the Los Angeles Times A federal judge has dismissed a case brought by a Connecticut woman against the Norton Simon Museum of Art, bringing to an end dueling lawsuits over ownership of a 500-year-old pair of art masterpieces that were once seized by Russian revolutionaries and the Nazis.

Judge John F. Walker granted the museum a motion to dismiss on Thursday four days before a scheduled hearing on the matter and without immediately giving his reasons for doing so, the Los Angeles Times reported in its Friday editions.

The Norton Simon foundation and Marei von Saher of Greenwich, Connecticut, had each filed lawsuits in May claiming they were the rightful owners to a pair of 16th century wood panels depicting Adam and Eve that were painted by famed German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The museum's motion to dismiss argued that a California law extending the statute of limitations for heirs of Holocaust victims is unconstitutional because making amends for war injuries falls to the federal, not state, government.

Norton Simon attorney Luis Li declined to comment on the ruling. Von Saher's attorney Lawrence M. Kaye could not immediately be reached for comment.

The life-sized paintings have hung in the museum in Pasadena since 1976. Museum founder Norton Simon bought them for $800,000 from an heir to the Russian aristocrats the museum claimed were the original owners.

Bolsheviks seized the panels during the Russian Revolution, according to the museum's version of their history. Jewish-Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, Von Saher's father-in-law, bought them from the Soviets in 1931.

Goudstikker fled the German invasion of Holland in 1940 but died on the ship when he fell through a hatch. The art in his gallery went to the Nazis and the Cranach panels wound up in the personal collection of Hitler's second-in-command, Herman Goering.

They were recovered at the end of the war and returned to the Dutch government, which in 1966 turned them over to an heir of the Stroganoff family, who the government believed were the original owners and who later sold them to Simon.

Von Saher, whose late husband Edo was Goudstikker's son, claimed the paintings belong to her family.

Her suit contended the panels came from a Ukrainian church and the Soviets merely lumped them in with the Stroganoff collection when they were auctioned.

Von Saher recovered about 200 other paintings and artifacts from the Dutch government last year that are valued at tens of millions of dollars.