SAN JOSE, Calif. — An Oakland woman last week sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, claiming it bought then secretly sold a Vincent van Gogh painting the Nazis stole from her grandmother.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Oakland’s Judith Silver, her sister Deborah Silver, and seven others from Los Angeles, Seattle and Israel named in the suit as surviving heirs of the painting’s purported owner Hedwig Stern, who ended up in Berkeley and then Southern California after fleeing Germany in 1936 to escape persecution of Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.
Silver, who is in her late 50s, and her co-plaintiffs describe a shadowed path taken by van Gogh’s 1889 “Olive Picking,” from its theft by the Third Reich to its sale to a renowned museum to its disappearance for decades and re-appearance in a Greek gallery as recently as this month. They allege the Metropolitan Museum’s former prominent expert in Nazi art looting knew the painting by the Dutch post-Impressionist had been stolen by Adolf Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship, and approved its purchase and later, its secret sale to a Greek shipping tycoon who hid it for years. A history compiled by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from Stern’s family papers fills in details of her escape from the Nazis, her arrival in Berkeley via New York, and the birth of her granddaughter Judith in 1963.
