The Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, California, has fired back in one of the art world's longest-running restitution battles, filing a countersuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that asserts its ownership of a 16th-century diptych by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The filing, made on Wednesday, directly opposes a September lawsuit from the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman, who are seeking the return of the painting Adam and Eve (1530).

The current claimants are acting for Marei von Saher, heir to the Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who owned the diptych before the Second World War. Von Saher has pursued the paintings through the courts before without success and has now transferred her rights to the federation. The museum notes that the family chose not to seek the Cranach's return in the years immediately after the war, even as it recovered other properties.

The work's wartime history is convoluted. Goudstikker bought the Cranach in 1931 when the Soviet Union auctioned off pieces from the aristocratic Stroganoff collection. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, he fled, leaving behind a gallery of some 1,200 works, and died in a shipboard accident en route to the United States. His widow Desirée inherited the firm, which the Nazis forced to liquidate its holdings; Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring acquired the Cranach among other pieces. Allied forces later recovered the works and returned them to the Dutch government.

In August 2016, the same Los Angeles court ruled, after twelve years of litigation, that the museum was the rightful owner, and the US Supreme Court declined to reopen the case. The heirs' new action leans on recent amendments to the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, which bar American defendants in restitution disputes from deploying certain defenses, including statutes of limitation and the act-of-state doctrine.