The heirs of German Jewish banker and art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy have called on the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on Thursday to revive their lawsuit seeking the return of a Vincent van Gogh Sunflowers painting they claim was sold under Nazi duress, Courthouse News reported Thursday.
In 2022, three heirs of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, respectively based in New York and Germany, filed a lawsuit in an Illinois district court against Sompo Holdings, a Japanese insurance company. The lawsuit claims that Sunflowers (1888) was purchased at a 1987 Christie’s auction by Sompo’s corporate predecessor, Yasuda, which ignored a provenance identifying Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as a victim of Nazi coercion.
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The lawsuit was filed under the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2016, and aims to recover the painting, as well as recoup the profits Sompo Holdings garnered from the Art Institute-sponsored exhibition of Sunflowers in Chicago in 2001.
“Your honors, this case at its core involves a theme as old as human temptation itself, a classic devil’s bargain,” Thomas Hamilton, an attorney with Byrne Goldberg told the panel of judges, as first quoted by Courthouse News. “When a party in exchange for receiving some illicit advantage or power, that promises great wealth and fame, forfeits its authentic identity and mortgages its future.”
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s collection included works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and August Renoir, among others, in the mid-1930s. He sold the contested Sunflowers in 1934.
A lower court dismissed the case in 2024, saying it lacked general “suit related contacts” with Illinois.The heirs appealed, arguing that the fact of the work’s display in Chicago establishes sufficient legal ties to Illinois.
“These policies also enjoin federal courts to exercise their maximal judicial authority and discretion both to entertain these claims as well as resolve them expeditiously, fairly, and on their substantive merits,” wrote the heirs in the appellate brief. “In enacting the HEAR Act Congress expressly invoked its Constitutional war powers and foreign policy authority to further its long-standing and priority goal to return Nazi-confiscated artworks to rightful owners.”
Attorney Thomas Hamilton, who is representing the heirs, has put forth the 2009 HEAR Act as an argument for its return to the heirs. The HEAR Act is law created to enforce the principles of the Terezin Declaration, a legally non-binding international agreement—a diplomatic promise—signed by 46 world governments to facilitate when possible the return of Nazi-looted art.
However, Sompo’s legal representation, Daniel Graham, argued in court Thursday that this was not a case of Nazi-confiscated art, because Mendelssohn-Bartholdy sold Sunflowers at an auction.
The lower court also determined that because the Terezin Declaration was nonbinding, “the heirs’ claims are premised upon merely ‘desirable social policy,’ and eschewed judicial authority to enforce such mere ‘matters of conscience.’”