[CPProt.net] Judge throws out lawsuit against Elizabeth Taylor over Van Gogh

[MusSecNetworkCulPropProtNet]

 Judge throws out lawsuit against Elizabeth Taylor over Van Gogh
News
LOS ANGELES (AFP)
Tuesday February 08, 2005

A US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the decendants of a Holocaust
victim who claim ownership of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh which actress
Elizabeth Taylor bought 40 years ago.

The lawsuit alleges that the Nazi regime seized the 1889 painting "View of
the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" after its rightful owner Margarete
Mauthner fled from Germany to South Africa in 1939.

In a February 2 ruling made public on Monday, US Dictrict Court Judge Gary
Klausner said the state law that applies in the case allows individuals to
sue for up to three years after their property is taken.

The South African and Canadian descendants of Mauthner maintain in their
lawsuit that Taylor must have known when she purchased the painting at an
auction in 1963 for 257,600 dollars that it had been stolen by government
officials of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

The suit was filed in Los Angeles after the actress in May attempted to get
a local court to declare her the rightful owner of the painting.

Twice Oscar winner Taylor, 72, acquired the painting at a Sotheby's auction
in London at the height of her Hollywood carreer. Since then, the Van Gogh
has been handing in her Los Angeles mansion.

Mauthner's relatives said the painting was confiscated by the Nazis at the
start of World War II and that Taylor and her representatives were aware of
its origins.

Taylor maintains the Sotheby's catalog of the 1963 auction stated that the
painting at one time had belonged to Mauthner and that after it was shown in
two prestigious art galleries it was sold to Aldred Wolf, another Jew who
fled Nazi Germany for Buenos Aires.

The actress said the Van Gogh belonged to Wolf when she purchased it at the
auction.

http://us.news.designerz.com/