Jewish federation sues Norton Simon Museum over Nazi-looted Cranach diptych, and the museum countersues

When Marei von Saher found in 2000 that two paintings once owned by Jacques Goudstikker were at the Norton Simon Museum, she asked for them back. The museum refused.

The works are Adam and Eve, two life-size panels painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder around 1530. They had passed through Nazi seizure, a postwar government sale and a private purchase before arriving at the Pasadena museum in 1971.

Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch Jewish art dealer, owned the diptych when he was forced to leave the Netherlands with his wife and child in 1940. Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, seized most of Goudstikker’s collection, including the Cranachs, as the dealer fled.

After the war, the Allies returned the paintings to the Dutch government. It sold them to George Stroganoff, who said they had belonged to his family before Goudstikker acquired them. The Norton Simon Museum later bought the works.

Von Saher sued in federal court in California in 2007. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit held in Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena that the act of state doctrine meant the Dutch government’s transfer to Stroganoff had to be treated as valid, giving the museum good title.

Congress later passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, known as the HEAR Act. It denies the acts of state defence to current owners facing claims for art lost through Nazi persecution, and specifically refers to the Von Saher case.

On 14 September 2026, von Saher assigned her rights in the Cranachs to the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles. The organisation promptly sued the Norton Simon Museum in California state court. The museum has filed a countersuit in Los Angeles.

Von Saher had pursued the paintings’ return for 26 years before assigning the claim under the new legislation. The new case turns on whether the HEAR Act can displace the defence that protected the museum in the earlier litigation, despite the postwar chain of ownership.

The case also arrives as two Nazi-looted art claims landed in California courts on 14 September. The lawsuits were filed two days before a 2024 California statute expired. That state law created a right to sue over art lost because of political persecution and explicitly allows claims previously dismissed on procedural grounds to be filed again.