Displaying items by tag: district court

California’s District Court has emphatically denied a motion to dismiss a case about the ownership of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s life-size "Adam and Eve," around 1530.

This court ruling is the latest twist in a bitter legal battle that began in Federal Court in 2007 when Marei von Saher, the heir of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, filed for ownership of the paintings.

They were part of a collection of more than 1,200 works owned by Goudstikker, who fled the Netherlands in 1940 after the Nazi invasion. The painting were hung outside the home of Nazi Reichsmarschall Herman Göring at one point during the war, according to von Saher’s court filings, but were returned by Allied Forces to the Netherlands in 1945.

Following a trial that was prominently covered in the German press due to its illustrious protagonists, particularly the heirs of billionaire Berthold Albrecht, one of the founders of the German discount supermarket chain Aldi, German art consultant Helge Achenbach was found guilty of fraud by the District Court in Essen and sentenced to six years in prison on Monday.

The 62- year old used to be one of Germany’s most influential art consultants, entertaining long-term business relationships with some of the country’s wealthiest collectors. Berthold Albrecht, who passed in 2012, was one of his most important clients. Achenbach had repeatedly inflated the net purchase prices for art works and vintage cars he procured for Albrecht and other clients.

A district court in Düsseldorf ruled on Tuesday that German art adviser Helge Achenbach must pay €19.4 million in damages to the heirs of Aldi Supermarket heir Berthold Albrecht, the DPA reports. The ruling culminates a civil court case brought against Achenbach following allegations that he defrauded Albrecht of up to €23 million (see Fraud Claim Against Art Adviser). The art adviser is also part of a criminal trial, taking place in Essen. He has confessed to portions of the allegations (see Achenbach Gives Surprise Partial-Confession in Fraud Case and Achenbach Confesses to Yet More Fraud).

Meanwhile, German auction house Van Ham has won the rights to sell artworks still owned by the adviser's bankrupt company, Achenbach Art Consulting.

A bite of the apple is said to have gotten Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

Now the Norton Simon Museum wants another bite at the apple as it tries to have a legal threat to one of its most prized artworks thrown out of court. At stake are Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1530 paired paintings “Adam” and “Eve,” which have hung in the Pasadena museum since the 1970s.

The museum has asked for a rehearing of a June decision that went against it in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, when two members of a three-judge panel revived Marei Von Saher’s claim to “Adam” and “Eve” after it had been dismissed two years earlier in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

On October 11, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the current owner of Egon Schiele’s Seated Woman with Bent Left Leg (Torso) could keep the drawing he purchased in the early 1960s from a gallery in Manhattan. Featuring the artist’s signature muted color palette, the work has been at the center of a seven-year-long legal battle.

The dispute arose when heirs to Fritz Grunbaum, a Viennese cabaret singer who was murdered by Nazis in 1941, claimed that the work had been unlawfully confiscated from Grunbaum’s estate in 1938. Although David Bakalar currently owns the drawing, Grunbaum’s heirs, Milos Vavra and Leon Fischer, considered themselves to be the rightful proprietors. When Bakalar attempted to sell Seated Woman at Sotheby’s London in 2004, Vavra and Fischer stopped the sale. Bakalar, who had bought the Schiele drawing from Galerie St. Etienne for about $3,300, was attempting to sell the work for about $675,000.

Although Grunbaum was a noted collector of Schiele’s work, there was no direct evidence that he had owned Seated Woman or that Nazis had confiscated the drawing. However, evidence emerged that Grunbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, sold the drawing in Switzerland in 1956. The Swiss dealers who had purchased the drawing from Lukacs testified in the case and provided records of the sale. Based on this evidence, the U.S. District Court ruled that Grunbaum was most likely not the drawing’s owner and that Nazis had not stolen the piece, rather, it had stayed with the family until the sale in 1956.

The Court’s ruling was particularly significant because Bakalar had employed New York’s “laches defense,” a defense that is used by good-faith buyers to protect themselves against frivolous claims. While Schiele’s heirs claimed that if Lukacs had owned the drawing it was because she had stolen it from Grunbaum, Bakalar argued that the fact was irrelevant because no claims had been filed and that crucial evidence had disappeared over the decades.