Met Museum Faces Lawsuit Over Allegedly Nazi-Looted Van Gogh Painting

29 October 2025

A guest views Vincent van Gogh’s Women Picking Olives (1889, middle), another painting from his olive trees series, at the Met in New York. Photograph: Bjanka Kadic/Alamy

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been sued by the heirs of a Jewish couple who allege that the museum knowingly accepted and later transferred ownership of a Olive Picking (1889) by Vincent van Gogh that they claim was looted by the Nazis in the 1930s.

According to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the painting was originally purchased in 1935 by Hedwig Stern and her husband Frederick in Munich, Germany, shortly before the couple were forced to flee in 1936 owing to Nazi persecution. The complaint states that the Nazi government designated the painting as “German cultural property,” forbidding the Sterns from removing it from the country and later appointing a trustee to sell it without the family’s consent.

The painting later surfaced in New York: in 1956 the Met acquired it from the Knoedler Gallery for $125,000. Then in 1972 the museum sold it to Greek shipping magnate Basil Goulandris; it is now held by the foundation he and his wife Elise established, the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, and displayed in Athens.

The suit accuses both the Met and the Goulandris Foundation of “concealing how and when” the painting changed hands, failing to investigate warning signs about its provenance and ignoring red flags that it may have been trafficked in the decades following the Second World War. According to the complaint the institution should have known that the painting had a problematic history given the curator who approved the purchase, Theodore Rousseau Jr., was an expert on Nazi-era art looting and had served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services during the war.

In response the Met issued a statement saying that it “takes seriously its longstanding commitment to address Nazi-era claims” but noted that when it held the painting there was no record of Stern family ownership and that the painting’s provenance only became known decades later. The museum maintained that its sale of the painting in 1972 followed proper deaccession protocols.

The heirs previously filed a similar claim in California in 2022, which was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. They have now brought the matter to New York in pursuit of recovery of the painting or its value and damages for the alleged illegal taking and retention.

Beyond the parties directly involved the case has broader implications for the art-world and museums: it raises questions about how major institutions conduct due-diligence on acquisitions, how they respond to claims of Nazi-looted artworks and how historic injustices continue to play out via legal and moral channels decades later. The case underscores the tension between legal ownership and ethical ownership in circumstances involving forced sales, fleeing persecution and large-scale human rights abuses.

The Met’s prominence and the high profile nature of the painting, a Van Gogh, no less, mean that this lawsuit could become a landmark in restitution litigation for Nazi-era plunder. Whatever the outcome may be, it reinforces that the legacies of the Holocaust and of art-looting remain very much alive in the twenty-first century museum landscape.