Liz Taylor fights for art
2004-05-28 06:51
Los Angeles - US screen legend Elizabeth Taylor has sued the family of a victim of Nazi rule in Germany as part of a legal battle to hold on to a precious Van Gogh painting that she claims is rightfully hers.
The violet-eyed movie goddess filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against the South African and Canadian descendants of a Jewish woman who fled the Nazis who say the painting was looted from their relative and have demanded its return or a share of its sale proceeds, court documents showed on Wednesday.
Double Oscar-winner Taylor, 72, says she bought Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh's 1889 work, View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy for £257 600 at a Sotheby's auction in London in 1963, at the height of her fame.
According to the suit that names South African Mark Orkin and Canadian residents Sarah-Rose Josepha Adler and Andrew Orkin as defendants, Taylor now keeps the work in her Los Angeles mansion.
The trio contacted Taylor's business manager claiming to be heirs of Margarete Mauthner, a former owner of the painting who fled Germany after Hitler rose to power before World War 2.
They have alleged the painting was looted by the Nazis, who built up a huge stockpile of valuable art works seized from Jews, a practice that has in recent years sparked waves of litigation over the ownership of art pieces.
But Cleopatra star Taylor claims the family has failed to show that the artwork was ever illegally seized from Mauthner.
"Defendants have provided not a shred of evidence that the painting ever fell into Nazi hands or any specific information concerning how or when Mauthner 'lost possession' of it," the suit states.
Taylor maintains that the catalogue from the 1963 auction at which she bought the piece stated that the painting had once belonged to Mauthner, but that it passed to two reputable galleries before it was sold to a German Jew, Alfred Wolf, who himself fled the Nazis in 1933 for Buenos Aires.