Thanks to a court ruling, Elizabeth Taylor is still the girl who has everything, including her Van Gogh.
The ownership of said Van Gogh, a 1889 work titled View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy, became the subject of dispute when Taylor was sued last October by several individuals who claimed the Nazis took it from their ascendant, Margarete Mauthner, after she fled Germany for South Africa in 1939.
Taylor filed court documents of her own last May, seeking a declaration that she was the work's rightful owner. She claimed she came into possession of the painting in 1963, after her father bought it for her at a Sotheby's auction in London for the bargain price of $257,600.
According to Taylor's court filing, the catalogue at the 1963 auction did indeed list Mauthner in the painting's pedigree, but stated that it passed to two reputable art galleries before it was sold to Alfred Wolf, a German Jew who fled the Nazis for Buenos Aires in 1933.
When Taylor eventually purchased the painting, it was part of Wolf's collection, her suit stated. She denied seeing any evidence that it had ever fallen into Nazi hands.
The Van Gogh currently hangs in her Bel-Air mansion.
However, in the collective opinion of Mauthner's descendants: Andrew Orkin, F. Mark Orkin, Sarah-Rose Josepha Adler and A. Heinrich Zille, the painting, now valued at around $15 million, should rightfully belong to them.
The heirs based their belief on a federal law that entitles Holocaust victims to reclaim property taken from them by the Nazis and Soviets before and after World War II.
"We are asserting that Ms. Taylor was negligent and careless when she bought the painting," Andrew Orkin, Mauthner's great-grandson, said in a statement in October. Had she or her father read the catalogue carefully, they "could not have missed the painting's Nazi taint."
But a federal judge sided with Taylor, ruling that Mauthner's descendents failed to state a valid claim under federal law. According to U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner, the California state law that applies in the case allows individuals to sue for only three years after their property was taken.
A newer California state law that puts the statute of limitations on hold until plaintiffs can determine the property's whereabouts did not apply in this case, Klausner determined.
According to Taylor, she's had the famous painting in her possession long enough that just about anyone should have been able to determine its location with ease.