Will the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid finally have to restore a Camille Pissarro canvas? This is the question that has been agitating the Spanish and American press since Monday after the decision of the United States Supreme Court. The facts are known. In order to flee Nazi Germany, Lilly Cassirer Neubauer had to give in in 1940 a canvas by Camille Pissarro, Rue Saint-Honoré in the afternoon, rain effect (1897), which was exported after the war in the United States. Acquired in 1976 by Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, the canvas was sold in 1993 in the Spanish state and has been exhibited since the Thyssen-Bornemisza de Madrid museum.
In 2005, Claude Cassirer, the heir to Lilly Cassirer Neubauer, decided to ask for the restitution, because the canvas would have been sold under constraint. When he died in 2010, his son David took legal action as a complainant. After 20 years of procedure, the California Court of Appeal confirmed on January 9, 2024 the legitimate property of the Pissarro by the Madrid museum to the extent that US law was to be faded for the benefit of Spanish law which did not have a specific regime concerning the restitution of goods stolen by the 3rd Reich.
The Pissarro table, Rue Saint-Honoré, in the afternoon. Rain effecthung in Lilly Cassirer Neubauer’s apartment in Berlin around 1930.
Courtesy David Cassirer
In order to prevent questions from national skills between several states not complicating the situation, the state of California adopted a new law on September 16, 2024. The admitted goal of this text is to facilitate the restitution to Californian residents of works of art stolen by the Nazis, by a modification of article 338 of the California Civil Procedure Code and by the addition of a new article 338.2 relating to the time to introduce legal actions.
Using these new provisions David Cassirer therefore trained with the United States Supreme Court a request for certiorari (judicial review procedure). Monday March 5, 2025 A brief opinion of the supreme judges granted his request by affirming that the case was to be re -examined in terms of the 2024 law and canceled the previous decisions which had given reason to the Madrilene museum.
Yet nothing is won in advance because this new litigation will be an opportunity to examine whether the new law has been taken legally and if its content is valid. If this is the case the American judges would be likely to apply American law in order to recognize the property of David Cassirer on the canvas of Pissarro.
This new twist recalls that conflicts of laws are of particular importance in the spoliation of works of art in that they can lead to completely different substantive solutions depending on the applicable law. The effect of time is not negligible and the New York Court of Appeal was able to assert on June 26, 2019 the property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a canvas of Pablo Picasso, The actor (1904), due to the past time!
For the moment the Pissarro canvas, estimated at several tens of millions of euros, remains on the ribs of the museum.
