The descendants of Lilly Cassirer want justice – and their family’s painting back. Cassirer was forced to give up an original Camille Pissarro painting, now valued at $40 million, when she escaped Germany during the Nazi regime. Fast forward to 2019 and a decade of litigation, and her great-grandson David Cassirer could find out within a few months whether his family can get the painting, a impressionist scene of a rainy French city, back from its current home in Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.  The Cassirer family settled in Cleveland after leaving Europe and have been fighting since 2000 to get the painting back. The Madrid museum maintains the painting was acquired in good faith in 1993 and, since Lilly Cassirer received restitution for the painting from the German government, the museum does not have to relinquish it.

The fight began when Claude Cassirer, Lilly’s grandson, originally sued the museum when a friend saw the painting there in 1999. When Claude died, his daughter Ava and son David took up the case. Ava died in March 2018. The Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza bought the painting through the Stephen Hahn Gallery in New York for $275,000 in 1956. He loaned his private collection to Spain in 1998 as part of the creation of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. He eventually sold his collection, including the painting, to Spain in 1993.

The U.S. State Department estimates that 600,000 paintings were stolen during World War II and that 100,000 are still missing. 

 

Photo: Theartnewspaper.com