Museum report·Global
Museums fight back as new US laws reopen Nazi-loot cases they had already won
Two museums are challenging California and federal statutes that revived restitution claims previously decided in their favour, testing whether the new rules can retroactively undo old judgments over a Pissarro and a Cranach diptych.
Two museums are asking American courts to strike down laws that were written to help claimants recover art taken during the Nazi era, in cases where the institutions had already won. The disputes, reported on 28 October, put the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena at the centre of a wider test of how far legislatures can go in reopening closed litigation.
The Madrid foundation is defending its ownership of a Camille Pissarro street scene from 1897. Heirs of Lilly Neubauer, a Jewish collector in Berlin, say she was compelled to sell the painting in 1939 in order to obtain an exit visa, and never received the proceeds. A federal judge in Los Angeles has said he will rule on the competing summary judgment motions without a hearing, and a decision is expected by late February.
California changed its procedural rules in 2024 so that its own substantive law governs claims for stolen art held by museums, regardless of earlier rulings. Congress then amended the federal Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, with effect from April 2026, barring possessors from relying on defences rooted in the passage of time. The foundation argues that both measures would retroactively strip it of property rights that vested under Spanish law no later than 1999, and that the state law improperly reaches conduct in Spain. The United States and California governments have intervened to defend the statutes.
A second case concerns a pair of Cranach panels of Adam and Eve, painted around 1530, that were seized from the Amsterdam dealership of Jacques Goudstikker by Hermann Goering in 1940. The Norton Simon Museum, which won the earlier litigation in 2018, is seeking an injunction against a fresh claim brought by the original heir's assignees under the new California law. A third claim, by the daughters of the Czech artist Dina Gottliebova Babbitt over portraits made in Auschwitz, is also proceeding under the same law. Similar constitutional challenges to the amended federal act are pending in New York.
