| Resolved
Objects Each object tells a story. Some are still missing,
some are restituted or resolved, and some have cases still pending. The circumstances
of looting and the efforts for recovery are just as fascinating as the famous
works of art themselves. Vincent
Van Gogh, View of Asylum and Chapel at Saint Remy,
1889
 Vincent
Van Gogh’s View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy from 1889, painted
in the last year of the artist’s life, reflects the sadness and vulnerability
of the painter himself. The awkward composition positions the central elements
of the scene, a group of boxy buildings including the asylum and chapel, into
the upper third of the canvas. In contrast to the typical landscape layout which
uses a horizon line to divide the page this choice leaves a large empty field
in the foreground of the composition. The engaging energy of the work transports
the viewer into the moment in which the artist found himself absorbed.
This
painting’s complex history begins with its creation so nearly followed by the
painter’s tragic suicide. The details of the painting’s provenance are somewhat
uncertain, but in recent months these details have become the center of a court
battle between the actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor and three decedents of Margarete
Mauthner when the heirs filed a claim for the painting. Margarete
Mauthner, a German Jew owned the View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy when
she lived Germany. In 1939, she fled to South Africa and it is unclear as to whether
the painting was confiscated by the Nazis or whether Ms. Mauthner sold the painting
legally before leaving Germany. Mrs. Taylor’s
side claimed the piece had passed through the hands of at least two Jewish art
dealers without being suspected as looted before being sold to Sotheby’s in 1963
where she purchased she work. Mauthner’s great grandchildren, Sarah-Rose Joseph
Adier and Mark and Andrew Orking, claimed that the piece fell out of Mauthner’s
possession due to Nazi interference and thus under the 1998 US Holocaust Victims
Redress Act, they had rights to the piece. Although
the provenance of the painting is disputed, both sides agree that the work eventually
landed in the hands of Alfred Wolf, a Jewish art dealer who fled Germany in 1933
for Argentina. Wolf sold the painting to Sotheby’s where it was purchased at a
London auction in 1963 by Elizabeth Taylor’s father on her behalf for £92,000
(today the piece is worth between £5 and £8 million). In
May 2004, Taylor requested that a court decision be made naming her the lawful
owner of the painting. In October of that year Ms. Mauthner’s descendants filed
a claim for the return of the painting to them. A decision in 2004 by a US court
and another decision in 2007 by an appeals court found Taylor to be justified
in keeping the piece on several grounds. First,
the court found that the 1998 US Holocaust Victims Redress Act, does not grant
individuals the right to sue for the return of such pieces. Second, the court
ruled that the descendents had waited too long to file their claim for the piece.
Since the original sale of the piece had been a high profile purchase, that the
family should have been aware of the location of their painting. Thus their delayed
request was not to be honored by the courts.
The family was hoping to overturn rulings of the
US Court of Appeals and the California District Court. Howev er, In
October 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court judges decided not to review the appeals
court ruling on the basis that is was too late to bring further action. This
painting’s story is one of great ambiguity. No one knows for sure how Ms. Mauthner
came to lose possession of her Van Gogh painting, but Elizabeth Taylor is allowed
to keep the painting. | 
