California museum sued over Renaissance painting looted by Nazis

The Norton Simon Museum faces a fresh lawsuit over ‘Adam and Eve,’ a Cranach diptych seized by Hermann Göring after Jacques Goudstikker fled the Netherlands in 1940. The Jewish Federation-Council, standing in for Goudstikker's heir, is suing under a 2024 California law that gives residents a two-year window to reopen Nazi-looting claims using state law, which does not recognize title transferred by thieves.

A prior decade-long federal case over the same paintings ended with the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court siding with the museum, which bought the diptych in 1971 for $800,000 from a Russian noble who wrongly claimed family ownership. The museum says the matter was settled long ago and it intends to keep the paintings on view.

A separate suit targets the Auschwitz museum itself, over watercolors a Jewish prisoner was forced to paint of Roma inmates for Josef Mengele. Both cases also invoke the 2025 HEAR Act, aimed at closing the procedural doors museums have used for decades to keep such claims out of court.

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