Free Republic

Two agents from U.S. Homeland Security’s ICE unit arrived at my door in September looking for a Polish lady — not a person, but a painting: Melchior Geldorp’s “Portrait of a Lady.” She had, they informed me, been looted by the Nazis from the National Museum in Warsaw. Unsure if these gentlemen were indeed who they claimed to be, I didn’t invite them in. But I knew exactly what they were seeking: My partner, David, and I had purchased this very portrait — ostensibly the work of a different artist — a decade earlier from a major auction house in...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against actress Elizabeth Taylor for owning a Van Gogh painting that a Jewish woman lost before fleeing Nazi Germany to South Africa in 1939. The lawsuit was filed by the Canadian and South African descendants of the original owner, Margarete Mauthner. Taylor, 75, purchased Vincent Van Gogh's 1889 painting "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" at a London auction in 1963 for 257,600 dollars. The painting is currently estimated at between 10 and 15 million dollars. The suit alleged Taylor must have known when she bought...

Alfred Egner drowned. He was just a workhorse, really, a 19-year-old boy from Munich, hired by a couple of former SS officers in 1963 to dive down to the murky bottoms of Austria's Lake Toplitz and resurface with fistfuls of treasures secreted away in this alpine paradise. It wasn't his first dive in Lake Toplitz, but he may have gotten tangled in some of the hundreds of logs that line the bottom, or something may have gone wrong with his equipment. Regardless, he never retrieved what the two men were most likely looking for: secret codes to Swiss bank accounts,...

US screen legend Elizabeth Taylor has sued the family of a victim of Nazi rule in Germany as part of a legal battle to hold on to a precious Van Gogh painting that she claims is rightfully hers. The violet-eyed movie goddess filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against the South African and Canadian descendants of a Jewish woman who fled the Nazis who say the painting was looted from their relative and have demanded its return or a share of its sale proceeds, court documents showed today. Double Oscar-winner Taylor, 72, says she bought Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh's...