I'm sure we'll hear answers, remember Taylor brought the suit making it public. The Mauthner sale is the issue though, not Wolf nor the galleries it passed through. Another article.
Liz Taylor scorns SA family's Nazi claim
Sunday Times, South Africa
Actress goes to court to stop Orkins demanding her Van Gogh on the grounds it was taken from their great-grandmother by Hitler
NASHIRA DAVIDS
THE Academy Award-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor has accused the South African family trying to claim her multimillion-dollar Van Gogh painting of trying to "bluff" her out of a "treasured possession".
In papers filed at the Los Angeles District Court on Monday, Taylor said the Orkin family's demand for the 115-year-old View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Rémy oil painting is "factually baseless" and an "attempt to bluff [her] into parting with a treasured possession she acquired in good faith".
The Orkins, who are Jewish, claim the painting belonged to their great-grandmother and that she lost it to the Nazis during World War Two.
Taylor's father, Francis Taylor, bought the painting for her at a Sotheby's auction in 1963 for £92 000.
Taylor claims the Orkins' great-grandmother, Margarete Mauthner, sold the painting for "financial reasons" before the Nazis came to power in 1933.
The actress wants the judge to rule that she is the legal, bona fide owner of the painting and to prevent the Orkins from launching a legal action of their own, as they have threatened to do.
But Mauthner's great-grandchildren, Andrew Orkin, a lawyer in Canada, Mark Orkin, head of the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, and Sarah-Rose Josepha Adler said Mauthner had no choice but to sell at a time when Jews were being persecuted.
"We have never claimed that Nazis took the painting off Mrs Mauthner's wall at gunpoint. But we do not need to make any such showing in order to recover the painting under the 1998 federal Holocaust Victims Redress Act.
"European Jews sold property during the Holocaust era under acute political pressure and economic duress and it must be returned to them regardless of whether the buyers were Jews or not," said their Washington lawyer, Thomas Hamilton.
But Taylor, star of National Velvet and Butterfield 8, said the family sent her letters claiming the artwork was "wrongfully expropriated" as a result of confiscatory Nazi policies.
She also claims that the Orkins waited 40 years before "attempting to dispossess an innocent, good-faith purchaser".
But the painting, which is now valued at more than $8-million, was not the only Van Gogh owned by Mauthner.
Court papers allege that her last Van Gogh, View of the Sea at St Maries, was sold in 1933.
In a letter dated October 21 1933, one of the employees of the gallery to which Mauthner sold the painting wrote: "[Mauthner] would certainly not have decided upon this course of action were it not for her nephew's moving away to seek a new life in another country [South Africa], and this provides a use of the money for a purpose that is dearer to her heart than owning the painting."
Taylor said Mauthner bought the disputed painting in 1907 from Paul Cassirer and later sold the painting back to him.
It was then acquired by a Berlin art dealer, Marcel Goldschmidt, and later by Alfred Wolf.
In 1963, Wolf's heirs decided to sell his collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings through Sotheby's, where Taylor became the painting's owner.
In 2002 the Orkins first indicated that they were investigating Taylor's painting because they "had reason to believe they were entitled to the painting".
In December last year, Taylor said the Orkins demanded the immediate return of the painting or "a share of the proceeds of its sale".
This is not the first time the Orkin family has applied for restitution for their loss during Hitler's reign.
In June 1954, the German government compensated them for the forced sale of their home in Berlin in August 1938 and for the loss of pension funds seized by the Nazis.
Hamilton, the Orkins' attorney, who described Taylor's court application "entirely non-meritorious" said the family would be filing papers in the next 20 days to oppose the action.
Taylor, meanwhile, says she has "sympathy" with the Orkins but "even the most sympathetic claimants have an obligation to document their claims and pursue them honestly and diligently".
The painting at the centre of the battle was painted in 1889 by Vincent van Gogh while he was in an asylum in France.
Van Gogh had admitted himself to the psychiatric hospital after cutting off part of his left ear.
During this period, critics believe, he produced some of his greatest work including the disputed View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Rémy.
Mauthner fled Germany for South Africa in 1939.