Heirs of Jewish couple sue New York Met, Greek foundation over Van Gogh painting looted by Nazis

The descendants of a Jewish couple are suing New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Greek foundation over their purchase of a Van Gogh oil painting seized by the Nazis before they fled Germany, The New York Times first reported earlier this week.

The suit accuses the Met of knowing, or that it “should have known” the painting was probably looted when it bought it for $125,000 in 1956, before selling it to a Greek shipping mogul in 1972.

According to the family’s lawyers cited by the report, Hedwig and Frederick Stern bought the painting in 1935, a year before they fled to California. The Sterns were barred from taking the artwork with them when they fled Munich, with the government declaring it “German cultural property.”

It was then sold in 1938 on the Sterns’ behalf by a trustee, with the proceeds going to the Nazis, the lawsuit claims. The painting eventually made its way to New York.

After the Met sold it to Basil Goulandris and his wife, Elise, in 1972, the couple established the B&E Goulandris Foundation, which runs a museum in Athens where the artwork is exhibited, the lawsuit says.

The court papers say that the Met’s purchase of the painting was approved by its curator at the time, Theodore Rousseau Jr., who was “one of the world’s foremost experts on Nazi art looting,” and therefore should have known its origins.

“To this day, the Goulandris defendants continue to conceal how and when their foundation came into possession of the painting; the Stern family’s ownership of the painting from 1935 to 1938; and the fact that the Nazis looted the painting from the Stern family, coerced the Sterns into selling it via a Nazi-appointed agent, and confiscated the proceeds of the sale,” court papers read.