Posted on 09/13/2009 9:33:16 AM PDT by Saije
In 1939 Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was desperate to escape Germany. She was a member of a prominent Jewish family of publishers and gallery owners, and as the Nazi oppression escalated, it was clear they would have to leave or die.
Lilly was told there was only one way for her to obtain an exit visa. The family would have to hand over one of their most prized possessions: a Parisian street scene painted by Camille Pissarro.
The work, an atmosphere depiction of a rain-soaked Paris boulevard, had hung on the walls of the family's Berlin and Munich homes since the impressionist painted it four decades earlier.
A Nazi-appointed art appraiser valued the painting at $360, an absurdly low sum, but the deal enabled Lilly and her husband Otto to escape.
The work, entitled Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie, is today estimated to be worth $20m. It hangs in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.
This week, a court in Los Angeles ruled that Lilly's grandson, Claude Cassirer, can continue a lawsuit against the museum and the Spanish state to recover the painting.******
Cassirer, 88, a retired portrait photographer, is the sole heir of Lilly. Four years before her death in 1962, the then West German government acknowledged she was the legal owner, and awarded her 120,000 marks in compensation. But in the chaos of war and its aftermath the painting itself had disappeared.
It was not until nine years ago that Cassirer discovered the painting had been sold during the second world war and since changed hands several times. In 1976 it was bought by Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen, and passed to the Spanish state when it bought much of the baron's collection, installed in Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, for $327m in 1993.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
...a Parisian street scene painted by Camille Pissarro. The work, an atmosphere depiction of a rain-soaked Paris boulevard, had hung on the walls of the family's Berlin and Munich homes since the impressionist painted it four decades earlier... is today estimated to be worth $20m. It hangs in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. This week, a court in Los Angeles ruled that Lilly's grandson, Claude Cassirer, can continue a lawsuit against the museum and the Spanish state to recover the painting.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Ooh, I like the pic.
Thanks Fred Nerks!
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