Giving me the opportunity to post about Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in the same week, this is from yesterday's New York Times:
"An American court ruled on Friday that Elizabeth Taylor can keep her van Gogh, Reuters reported. Ms. Taylor, 75, bought the 1889 painting 'View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Rémy' at a London auction in 1963 for [about $257,000]. South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman who fled Germany in 1939, sued her in 2004, saying the work had been confiscated by the Nazis and should be returned to them under the Holocaust Victims Redress Act. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals backed a lower court, ruling that the family had waited too long in claiming the painting ..."
More from the San Francisco Chronicle here. The Ninth Circuit ruling is here. Shaun Martin at the University of San Diego School of Law says the decision "seems pretty right."
