Jewish Heirs Sue the Met, Saying a van Gogh It Sold Was Nazi Loot

The heirs of a Jewish couple are suing the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Greek foundation over a van Gogh oil painting that the couple said they were forced to leave behind in Germany when they fled the Nazis on the eve of World War II.

The suit accuses the Met, which bought the painting in 1956 for $125,000, of, at the very least, slack scholarship in not discovering the work’s tainted provenance before purchasing it. In 1972, the museum sold the painting to a Greek shipping magnate, and the suit by the heirs is now seeking its return.

The oil painting, “Olive Picking,” was painted by van Gogh in 1889, a year before his death, and was bought by the couple, Hedwig and Frederick Stern, in 1935.

After the war, the work entered the United States, where it was purchased by one of America’s wealthiest men, Vincent Astor, from a Jewish art dealer who, according to the court papers, had not disclosed the former ownership by the Sterns. Astor’s wife, the noted philanthropist Brooke Astor, later sold it through a gallery to the Met, which ultimately sold it to Basil Goulandris, the Greek shipping magnate, and his wife, Elise, according to the suit.

It is now on display at an Athens museum operated by a foundation the Greek couple created. The provenance on the museum’s website does not list the Sterns as prior owners.

The Stern heirs had pursued a similar claim regarding the van Gogh in federal court in California in 2022 but the case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. The current lawsuit describes New York as the proper place to adjudicate the matter.

“In the decades since the end of World War II, this Nazi-looted Painting has been repeatedly and secretly trafficked, purchased and sold in and through New York,” lawyers for the heirs said in the filing.

In arguing that the Met should have done more to track the painting’s history before its purchase, the lawsuit says the transaction was overseen by Theodore Rousseau Jr., the museum’s curator of European paintings and an expert on art looting by the Nazis. Rousseau had been a member of the elite World War II unit known as the “Monuments Men,” which had tracked and recovered Nazi-looted art.

“Rousseau and the Met knew or should have known that the Painting had probably been looted by Nazis,” the suit contends. “Rousseau took no action to assure himself or the Met of anything about the Painting’s transfers from or within Germany during the war.”

The court papers list places in Germany and the United States where the Sterns had made claims or inquiries regarding the painting after the war, including with a restitution specialist at the U.S. State Department.

The Met’s position is that it did not know of any Nazi involvement in the work’s history before it was acquired or later when it was sold.

The museum said that a statement it released in 2022, when the Stern heirs first sued, still reflects its position. In the statement, the museum said that “during the Met’s ownership of the painting,” there had been no record that it belonged to the Stern family, and added, “that information did not become available until several decades after the painting left the museum’s collection.”

In the statement, the Met described the rationale for the sale, saying the van Gogh was sold to raise acquisition funds because it “was deemed to be of lesser quality than other works of the same type in the collection.”

“While the Met respectfully stands by its position that this work entered the collection and was deaccessioned legally and well within all guidelines and policies,” the statement continued, “the museum welcomes and will consider any new information that comes to light.”

The Goulandris foundation did not respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit also names another family member and a company controlled by the family. In the prior case, lawyers for the Goulandris family had argued that the time that had passed made it unfairly difficult to defend against the claim since “critical evidence and witnesses” including Hedwig Stern herself were no longer available.

In their court papers, the Stern heirs cite New York Times articles about the 1972 sale, including one piece that ran on the front page, that suggested the museum’s sale of the van Gogh had not been widely publicized and only came to light months later when it and another painting the Met had sold appeared on the market. The suit argues that the museum avoided a more public sale that might have risked drawing attention to the fact that the painting was looted.

The suit seeks to have the Met compensate the heirs “for the value it derived from its possession and use of the looted Painting from 1956 to 1972 and the proceeds it received when it sold the Painting in 1972.”

The Sterns were prevented from taking the work with them abroad because the Nazis had declared it to be “German cultural property.” But the Nazis had no use for van Gogh, whose more modern approach to painting was characterized as “degenerate.” They only confiscated the money when the van Gogh was sold, and the work itself was transferred from buyer to buyer until Brooke Astor consigned the painting in 1955 to be sold by the Knoedler Gallery.

The suit contends that the Met should have been more cautious about buying the work from Knoedler because the now-defunct gallery had already been identified as having dealt in looted works from Europe.

The oil was one of three similar paintings of women picking olives that van Gogh made during his treatment at the Saint-Rémy mental asylum near Arles.

After making an original painting, his practice was often to make alternative versions. In 2002, the Met took in a later version, “Women Picking Olives.” A third painting of the olive pickers is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.