Oakland woman claims New York’s Metropolitan Museum secretly sold her grandma’s Nazi-stolen van Gogh

A Bay Area woman and her family are suing The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, claiming the storied museum bought — and then secretly sold — a Vincent van Gogh painting stolen from her grandmother by the Nazis.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Oakland’s Judith Silver, her sister Deborah Silver, and seven other surviving heirs of the painting’s purported owner Hedwig Stern, who landed in Berkeley and then Southern California after fleeing Germany in 1936 to escape persecution of Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.

Silver, who is in her late 50s, and her co-plaintiffs describe a shadowed path of the 1889 Van Gogh painting “Olive Picking” — from its theft by the Third Reich to its sale and subsequent disappearance, and finally, its reappearance in a Greek gallery as recently as this month. They allege an expert in Nazi art looting, working for the Metropolitan Museum, knew the painting by the Dutch post-Impressionist had been stolen, yet approved its purchase by the museum and later, its secret sale to a Greek shipping tycoon who hid it for decades.

The Metropolitan Museum did not respond to a request for comment on the claims made in Silver’s suit.

In September, the museum said it had identified 53 works in its collections seized or sold under duress during the Third Reich, but that it had obtained all of them after the art had been returned to their rightful owners, the Associated Press reported. History professor Jonathan Petropoulos of Claremont McKenna College has estimated that the Nazis stole 600,000 artworks from Jews in Europe and the former Soviet Union between 1933 and 1945.

According to the suit filed Thursday in U.S District Court in San Francisco, before Stern fled Munich, the Gestapo secret police stopped her from exporting the van Gogh, which depicts a bucolic orchard scene rendered with the artist’s typical strokes in thick paint on a 29″x36″ canvas.

Stern, the daughter of a textile and fashion company owner born in 1898, first tried to escape Germany in November 1936 with her husband Fritz, but the night before their planned departure from Munich, two policemen confiscated Fritz’s passport, according to a history compiled by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Sterns finally escaped Germany in December, arriving in New York in early January 1937 and then going on to Berkeley and later Pasadena.

The Nazis looted at least five paintings owned by Stern, including the Van Gogh and a work by Renoir, but she was able to recover only two. She was compensated for the loss of an additional painting through a 1958 ruling by the German government, according to a report Petropoulos submitted as an exhibit in the lawsuit.

Stern had searched for “Olive Picking” for years, but never found it, despite “serious and diligent efforts,” Petropoulos wrote. She died in 1983.

The Stern heirs believe the painting was transported to Paris in early 1948, then transported to New York by a German art dealer on behalf of the collector, and sold to Vincent Astor, the son of American business magnate John Jacob Astor who died on the Titanic. Astor allegedly sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum in 1956 for an unknown amount, the suit claims.

Stern’s efforts to find her van Gogh included traveling in 1951 to Germany seeking to get it back or obtain compensation, but the German government declined to compensate her, saying the painting had never become the property of the Third Reich, according to the report by Petropoulos, a frequent expert witness for Holocaust victims taking legal action to recover Nazi-stolen art.

Petropoulos said in his report he believed the Metropolitan Museum could have tracked true ownership of the painting back to Stern. The suit claimed that the museum’s chief curator at the time, Theodore Rousseau, “knew or consciously disregarded that the painting had been looted from Hedwig Stern by the Nazis” but still approved its purchase and secretive sale.

Rousseau had deep-rooted expertise in Nazi art theft, according to Petropoulos’s report. During the Second World War, Rousseau was an officer in the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, working in the Art Looting Investigation Unit — a sister agency to the Allies’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program central to the 2014 film “The Monuments Men“, starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray.

Rousseau was also a wartime colleague of Lane Faison, one of the U.S. Army’s “monuments men” from the Allied program, and the two remained friends until Rousseau’s death in 1973, according to Petropoulos’s report. Stern in 1951 had met with Faison, who had stayed with the monuments program after the war, and reported the loss of her van Gogh. Faison could have told Rousseau who owned “Olive Picking,” Petropoulos claimed in his report.

Still, the Metropolitan Museum in 1956 sold the van Gogh to the late Greek shipping magnate Basil Goulandris in a transaction that Petropoulos described as “shrouded in mystery.” Petropoulos alleged in his report that it is “reasonable to conclude” that the Metropolitan Museum sold the painting secretly to avoid having to return it to Stern.

Goulandris and his wife Elise, the suit claimed, hid “Olive Picking” “for decades.” The Stern heirs had no concrete information about the painting’s location until 2003, when a report from a Berlin law firm specializing in unsettled property issues indicated it was probably in the Goulandris collection, according to Petropoulos’ report.

The painting, completed in a mental asylum less than eight months before van Gogh took his own life, was put on display earlier this year at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and as recently as Dec. 10 in the Athens museum of a foundation the Goulandrises set up, the suit alleged. The museum reportedly houses billions of dollars in art, Petropoulos’s report said.

In the lawsuit, Silver and the other Stern heirs are seeking the return of the painting from the foundation, restitution from the Metropolitan Museum equivalent to the amount it allegedly received by selling the van Gogh, and unspecified damages. Paintings by van Gogh typically sell for millions to tens of millions of dollars.

The museum has said it has provided restitution or reached settlements in the cases of eight Nazi-looted works, including a painting by Claude Monet.