Cranach Adam & Eve to Stay in U.S.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Pasadena, California's Norton Simon Museum of Art won a court battle on October 18, 2007 when a Los Angeles federal judge, John F. Walker, for undisclosed reasons, allowed the venerable institution to keep Adam and Eve (both ca. 1530) by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. The heiress of a Jewish art dealer sought to acquire the two paintings, her lawyers having contended that their original owner, a deceased relative by marriage, lost the works to the Nazis during the Holocaust era.

Norton Simon and His Museum

Norton Winfred Simon (1907-1993) was an extremely successful businessman and millionaire philanthropist. A passionate art lover, Mr. Simon began collecting art in 1964 when one of his two foundations purchased what was left of well-known art gallery Duveen Brothers' Old Master paintings, Italian marble sculptures and Flemish tapestries. He expanded his private holdings, which included Impressionist and Modern works, in the 1970s by acquiring exquisite examples of Indian and Southeast Asian art. Spanning more than 2,000 years of human creativity, the landmark museum named after Simon owns paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs, including superb graphic works by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669), Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). American artists of the 20th Century are also represented. Its lush garden is inspired by that of French Impressionist Claude Monet (1848-1926) at Giverny.

Provenance

While museums research the provenance or ownership history of artworks before they enter their inventories, recent emphasis has been placed on those that could have been seized by Germany's Nazi regime. During the Holocaust era and World War II, many objets d'art from private European collections appeared on the international market for purchase. Museums worldwide are actively engaged in provenance studies, seeking to identify paintings and other works of art acquired after 1932 and produced before 1946, that the Nazis looted and were never restored to their rightful owners, be they countries, families or their heirs. The documentation process has proven to be an ongoing arduous task because histories and surviving records are often incomplete or have simply perished with time.

Cranach Court Case

The provenance of Cranach's Adam and Eve is a complicated and convoluted one. Connecticut's Marei von Saher, the daughter-in-law of Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch Jew, claimed that he bought Lucas Cranach's paintings in 1931 at a Berlin auction intended as a fundraiser for Josef Stalin's money-strapped Russian government. Possibly part of the Stroganoff Family collection, the pair was looted from Goudstikker's Amsterdam art gallery in 1940. After World War II, his widow Desiree never pursued claims to them and other artworks for financial reasons and the Dutch government duly presented George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff with the two monumental Cranach paintings, among others, in 1966. Norton Simon purchased them in 1971 from their owner whose family's paintings were thought to have been confiscated by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and sold in Berlin in 1931.

Von Saher's lawyer contacted the Norton Simon Museum in 2001, one year after she learned of the two Cranach paintings' West Coast whereabouts. Lengthy litigation resulted in Judge Walker dismissing the case for two reasons:

• Dutch law legitimized George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff's title to the works granted to him, making their subsequent purchase by Norton Simon legal; and
• the State of California's three-year statute of limitations regarding claims to artworks acquired illegally had already expired.

Incidentally, The Netherlands restituted 202 works from Dutch museums to Marei von Saher in 2006, based upon a similar claim. She's expected to appeal Judge Walker's recent decision regarding the ownership of Cranach's Adam and Eve.

Source:

• Moser, Peter. Lucas Cranach: His Life, His World and His Art. Bamberg: Babenberg Verlag GmbH, 2005.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1550)

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