LIZ TAYLOR TO KEEP VAN GOGH STOLEN FROM JEWS BY NAZIS

Elizabeth Taylor to keep Van Gogh (SF Chron)
The heirs of a Jewish art collector who lost possession of a Vincent Van Gogh painting before fleeing Nazi Germany were rebuffed by a federal appeals court Friday in their attempt to obtain the painting from actress Elizabeth Taylor, who bought it at an auction in 1963 for $260,000.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower-court ruling that Margarete Mauthner's four descendants, who sued Taylor in Los Angeles federal court in 2004, were more than a decade too late under California's law on the recovery of misappropriated property.

The court also said individuals have no right to sue under the federal Holocaust Victims Redress Act of 1998. That law encouraged governments to make "good-faith efforts'' to return artworks confiscated during Nazi rule, but contained no mandatory provisions and created no individual rights, the court said.

Van Gogh painted "View of the Asylum and Chapel at St. Remy'' in 1889 after entering an asylum in southeastern France, less than a year before he killed himself. Mauthner, who bought the painting in 1907, left her possessions behind when she fled Berlin for South Africa in 1939.

The court said it was unclear when or how Mauthner had relinquished the painting. But her heirs, a Canadian and three South Africans, said she had sold it under duress from the Nazis, whose laws allowed for art owned by Jews to be confiscated. The suit also said Taylor should have known of the painting's history when she bought it from a businessman's estate at a Sotheby's auction.

The painting's value has recently been appraised at between $10 million and $15 million, according to published reports.