Displaying items by tag: the night cafe

A federal appeals court has sided with Yale University in a dispute over the ownership of a $200 million Vincent van Gogh painting.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a 2014 ruling by a lower court that dismissed the claims of Pierre Konowaloff. He said the Dutch painter’s “The Night Cafe” was stolen from his family during the Russian Revolution.

A federal judge has dismissed the claims of a Russian man who said that he was the rightful owner of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe.” The painting, which was created in 1888, has been on display at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, for around 50 years.

Pierre Konowaloff, who claimed that the work was stolen from his family during the Russian revolution, asked Yale for the return of the painting or $120 million to $150 million in damages. Yale sued in 2009 to assert its ownership rights and to prevent Konowaloff from claiming the work. Judge Alvin Thompson sided with the University, citing the Act of State doctrine, which says that every sovereign state is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign state, and that courts will not criticize another government’s acts done within its own territory.

Konowaloff claimed that his great-grandfather purchased “The Night Cafe” in 1908 and that his property was nationalized by Russia during the Communist revolution. The painting was later sold by the Soviet government.

Yale received the van Gogh painting through a bequest from alumnus Stephen Carlton Clark, who had purchased the painting from a New York City gallery in 1933 or 1934. 

In December 2010, Pierre Konowaloff, the heir to Russian art collector Ivan Morozov, filed a lawsuit claiming that he was the rightful owner of Paul Cézanne’s (1839-1906) painting Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891), not the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Konowaloff explained that Morozov’s art collection was seized by the Bolshevik regime in 1918 and that when Stephen Clark, the collector and museum trustee who bequeathed the work to the Met in 1960, first bought the painting from Knoedler & Company in 1933, he did not carry out due diligence. Accusing the Met of wrongful acquisition, possession, display and retention, Konowaloff demanded that the work be returned to him and requested restitution for monetary damages.

On December 18, a judge in the 2^nd District Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that the Met could keep the Cézanne masterpiece, as the museum remains the work’s rightful owner. The Met has stood behind their right to the painting since the beginning of the entanglement with Konowaloff. The lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2011 by judge Shira Scheindlin who said that a U.S. court has no basis for questioning a decision made by a foreign government on distant soil. After the rejection of Konowaloff’s appeal, Met officials can finally leave the dispute behind them.

Konowaloff filed a similar suit against Yale University in 2009 over Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) The Night Café (1888). Konowaloff claimed that the van Gogh painting was also stolen during the Russian Revolution and bought by Clark regardless of its questionable history.