The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is once again the subject of a lawsuit centering around a Vincent van Gogh painting that the institution sold to a Greek collector in 1972.
That work, titled Olive Picking (1889), was only held by the New York institution for 16 years, with the Met having bought it in 1956 for $125,000, according to the suit, which was first reported by the New York Times.
But the lawsuit claims the painting should have never entered the Met’s holdings in the first place, since the work allegedly once belonged to Hedwig and Frederick Stern, who could not take the work with them when they fled Nazi Germany.
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The Sterns’ heirs are now suing the Met and the Athens-based Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, which is run by the namesake collector who bought the painting from the Met. Olive Picking is now on view there.
If the lawsuit sounds familiar, that’s because its allegations have been fielded previously by the Stern heirs, who sued the Met and the Goulandris Foundation over this very work in 2022 in California. That lawsuit was eventually tossed out by a judge who claimed that the venue did not befit the accusations made. Now, the Sterns are trying their luck again in New York. (The Times reported that the suit was filed in “Federal District Court in Manhattan”; however, ARTnews was unable to locate a filing for the suit in any of New York’s four district courts or in New York State court.)
According to the Times, the suit attempts to underscore that New York is the correct location for the action this time. Olive Picking, the suit says, was “repeatedly and secretly trafficked, purchased and sold in and through New York.”
As in the 2022 suit, the heirs claimed that the Met should have made a greater effort to determine the painting’s provenance. Back then, the Met said it could not have known about the Sterns’ ownership of the painting because “that information did not become available until several decades after the painting left the museum’s collection.”
The painting’s sale in 1972 received scrutiny for different reasons. That year, the Times reported that Marlborough Gallery purchased the van Gogh painting, as well as another by Henri Rousseau, leading the Art Dealers Association of America to issue a statement in which it denounced the institution’s sale of these works. The ADAA said the Met should have “publicly announced” such a sale. (Thomas Hoving, then the museum’s director, claimed he had worked on the advice of a curator at the institution and said he felt the Met could do “whatever we felt was wise.”)
A Met spokesperson did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment. ARTnews has reached out to the Goulandris Foundation.
