Posted on 10/31/2007 5:27:21 PM PDT by SJackson
But she knows now. Rightfully it's not hers, legally it is now. I'm ok with that, but I find her actions interesting.
Just a note, till the 1998 treaty which essentially determined that all post 1933 German transactions were under duress, the nature of these pieces wasn't a secret. And it was assumed that the transactions were perfectly legal, that 1933 to 1945 didn't exist. The fact that it might be a NAZI piece wouldn't be a reason to conceal it. Interestingly some of the largest $$ cases in the last few years were initially pursued in the late 1940s, unsuccessfully. The rules did change post 98
Duress can take many different forms.
Here’s a hypothetical, based on a real case. In WWII Greece, a family is willing to pay a princely sum to a man who, at great risk to himself, successfully smuggles the family to safety.
After the war, the family (survivors) sues to get the money back, claiming duress and offering, as evidence, the huge amount of money paid for the service.
The court ruled against the family. The contract was valid, and the court would not deem to judge whether the consideration paid for the service was excessive. Any amount of consideration was enough to create a contract, and the court said “even a peppercorn” was enough to create a bona fide contract.
So how do we know that this type of payment wasn’t made to secure safe passage to South Africa? And perhaps the smuggler risked his life. How much is his life worth — as much as a painting?
BS. Liz is a “holder in due course.” Those who had the painting stolen from them only have recourse to those who stole it.
Liz is rich. She could have given it back.
More recently (to buy voters so he wouldn't get recalled) Gray Davis supported legislation in the California legislature that would RETURN property (real and otherwise) to Mexican citizens or others of Hispanic origin who'd had it seized by California just before they were returned to Mexico for violating immigration laws.
I think someone reminded Gray that this would most properly include Japanese-Americans who had vast tracts of land and water rights improperly seized by California in the 1940s. That would have created some really nasty title problems for tens of billions of dollars of real estate in Downtown Los Angeles.
Apparantly California's Democratic party decided it was more important for rich landlords to continue to prosper than for Gray Davis to continue in office.
Bye bye Gray (you could hear them say as that particular piece of legislation went back to the committee for pigeonholing).
Bad ruling ...
If the owner sold the painting to finance fleeing from Germany, then there is no theft and the courts would simply dismiss the case.
What happened?
Who is the owner going to sue? The Nazis?
That’s BS.
It's really difficult to believe that she was unaware of the general problem of art stolen from Jews by the Nazis ~ she certainly had more opportunity to find out about it that most other people.
I've no particular problem with the courts ruling, we aren't going to undo the harm of that era, I simply found Liz's position interesting.
On the one hand the painting is worth a great deal of money, and clearly she turned out to be in the right legally.
On the other rich, ill, aging, and it's imo on the wrong side of the moral issue.
Make a good TV drama.
THe law considers all sales after some point in 1933 to be coerced and therefore void. A sale in 1939 would necessarily have been coerced.
The idiots in Sacramento and DC are busy giving CA and the rest back to Mexico.
I think that Van Gogh sucked as a painter. His painting here is not worth anything to me.
Now if we were posting about a work of someone such as John Singer Sargent, I might have a different opinion.
The former owner gets to sue NO one. Because the person or persons who actually committed the crime are dead or unknown.
This was never a secret in the postwar perior, common practice assumed prior owners had no recourse. Lawsuits filed in the late 1940s yielded no results. Just as you couldn't collect dad's insurance benefit, because Auschwitz didn't issue death certificates, Goebbels didn't give receipts for confiscations, so how would you prove ownership. A catalog? Witnesses? Didn't work. And face it, most of the owners weren't coming back, didn't have survivors, and if they did they were far removed from ownership issues, and certainly from documentation.
Sotheby's knew, if she didn't know, she did later.
An interesting personal dilema, made more interesting by the fact that she prevailed legally.
I disagree, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
I thought ignorance of the law was no excuse.
I would guess that Elizabeth Taylor doesn't even know she's wearing Depens now...
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