California is again in federal court fighting for a Jewish family’s right to a Spanish museum to return a rare Impressionist painting nearly 90 years after it was looted by the Nazis.
The state is also defending its right to legally demand the return of art and other stolen treasure to other victims with ties to the state, even in disputes that extend far beyond its borders.
The state has intervened in the case several times since the Cassirer family first filed suit in 2005 when they lived in San Diego. Last year, the state passed a new law aimed at strengthening the legal rights of the Cassirers and other California families to recover valuable property stolen in acts of genocide or political persecution.
Monday, California attorney. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office filed a motion to intervene directly in Cassil’s case to defend the law. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, the Spanish-owned property that owns the Camille Pissarro masterpiece, claims the law is unconstitutional and should therefore be ignored.
Bonta said in a statement to The Times that the law is “about fairness, ethics and legal responsibility, and doing the right thing” and that the state will defend it in court.
“Nothing can undo the horror and loss that individuals experienced during the Holocaust. But there are things we can do — and California has done — to return what was stolen to survivors and their families and bring them a level of justice and healing,” Bonta said. “As Attorney General, my job is to defend California’s laws, and I intend to do that here.”
Bonta said his office “has supported the Cassirer family in their pursuit of justice for two decades” and “will continue to work with them to fight for the legal return of this priceless family heirloom.”
The museum’s attorney, Thaddeus J. Stauber, did not respond to questions from The Times. Bonta’s office said Stauber had no objection to its involvement in the case.
Sam Durbin, the Cassirers’ longtime attorney, thanked Bonta’s office for “reengaging in this case again to defend California’s interests in protecting the integrity of the art market and the rights of victims of stolen property.”
“California law has always provided strong protections for victims of stolen property, particularly stolen art, and the Legislature has been strengthening this,” Durbin said.
The state passed the law last year in defiance of the powerful 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeal found in a January 2024 ruling that the painting was legally owned by the Spanish museum.
Bonta’s latest move adds to the intrigue surrounding the 20-year-old case, which has received global attention for its potential impact on the high-stakes field of looted art litigation.
This painting – “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon” by Pissarro. The Effect of Rain”—estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Both parties acknowledged that the jewelry was stolen from Lilly Cassirer Neubauer in 1939, when she agreed in desperation to turn it over to a Nazi appraiser in exchange for a visa to escape Germany at the beginning of World War II.
The attention surrounding the case and its potential to set a new precedent in international law may make the picture even more valuable.
After World War II, Lily received compensation for the painting from the German government, but the family never gave up its rights to the masterpiece – rights that were thought to have been lost at the time. She was paid a fraction of her current estimated net worth.
In the following decades, Lily’s grandson Claude Cassirer also survived the Holocaust and moved with his family to Santiago.
In 2000, Claude made the shocking discovery that the painting had not been lost to time after all, but had been preserved in Spain from the late Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza. Thyssen-Bornemisza, Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza was a descendant of a family of German industrialists with ties to Hitler’s regime. Spain has restored an early 19th-century palace near the Prado Museum in Madrid to house its collection as the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum.
Claude asked the museum to return the painting to his family. It refused. In 2005, he filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court. The case has since been making its way through the courts.
California passed the new law in response to a Ninth Circuit ruling last year that found state law at the time required it to apply ancient Spanish law. The measure provides that ownership of stolen items will legally transfer over time to new owners if the new owner did not know the items were stolen when they acquired them – something the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection argued makes its ownership of the painting legally sound.
In September 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the new law at a small gathering with family members of Holocaust survivors at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. David Cassirer, Lily’s great-grandson and Claude’s son who now lives in Colorado, was also on hand and praised the state’s lawmakers for “taking a clear stance in favor of the true owners of the stolen art.”
In March, the Supreme Court ruled in a brief order that the Ninth Circuit must reconsider its ruling in light of California’s new law.
In September, the Thyssen-Bornmissa Collection filed a motion asking the appeals court to rule in its favor again. It makes a variety of arguments, but one is that California’s new law is “constitutionally untenable” and deprives the museum of its due process rights.
“Under binding Supreme Court precedent, the state may not by legislative order reopen a statute of limitations claim and transfer property in which title has vested,” the museum argued.
Under federal law, the report said, the United States “does not seek to impose its property laws or its own property laws on other foreign sovereign states, but explicitly recognizes that different legal traditions and systems must be considered to promote the just and equitable resolution of cases of Nazi-plundered art.”
The report said California’s law takes an “aggressive approach” that “undermines the federal government’s efforts to maintain unified and friendly relations with foreign countries” and “becomes an obstacle to the implementation and enforcement of federal policy.”
David Cassirer, the lead plaintiff in the case, has argued the opposite in court filings since Crowder’s death in 2010.
Cassirer argued that California’s new law required an outcome in his favor, which he said was also consistent with “the moral commitment made by the United States and governments around the world, including Spain’s, to the victims of the Nazis and their families.”
“It is undisputed that California substantive law vests title in the Cassirer family, as Lilly’s heirs, of which plaintiff David Cassirer is the last surviving member,” Cassirer’s attorneys wrote.
They wrote that California law provides that “a thief cannot convey good title to a stolen artwork” and therefore requested that the painting be returned to Cassirer.
The bill’s sponsor in the Legislature, Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), praised Bonta for stepping in to defend the law, which he called “part of a decades-long pursuit of justice rooted in the belief that California must be on the right side of history.”
