21-05-2007 23:01
Elizabeth Taylor Wins Three-Year Art Battle Over Valuable Van Gogh
Dame Elizabeth Taylor has won her battle to keep a Vincent Van Gogh painting after a court ruled the Jewish family who claimed the original was stolen from them by the Nazis waited too long to file papers for its return.
The Orkin family sued Taylor in 2004, claiming Nazi soldiers illegally seized the painter's 1889 piece View of the Asylum Chapel at Saint-Remy from the home of a great aunt, Margarete Mauthner, during the Holocaust.
The family claimed the valuable artwork, which Taylor bought at a London auction in 1963, should be returned to them under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.
But on Friday (18May07) a U.S. appeals court supported a lower court ruling, stating the Orkins waited too long to claim the artpiece, which Van Gogh painted the year he died.
Judge Sidney Thomas, one of the three judges on the court panel, insisted the high-profile purchase of the painting and a subsequent international auction in 1990 must have alerted the Orkin family to the whereabouts of the Van Gogh - and they should have acted quicker.
He said, "It is apparent that Ms Taylor's acquisition of the painting was certainly discoverable at least by 1990."
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