The Goulandris Museum in ΝΥ courts over Van Gogh’s “Olive Trees”

A similar filing was made by the same people in 2022 before a California court, but it was rejected for jurisdiction reasons. The new lawsuit was filed Monday in a New York court, which is described as the proper venue for the trial of the case since, as noted, “in the decades following the end of World War II this painting has repeatedly and secretly been transferred, bought and sold in New York and through New York.”

The Stern family heirs insist that the work of the famous Dutch painter, with the three women gathering olives inside a masterfully rendered olive grove, belonged to their ancestors and was stolen by the Nazis when they hurriedly fled Germany, where they lived, for the U.S. in order to escape the brutal Nazi persecutions.

According to the complainants, the painting (oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92.5) was bought by the German Jewish couple Hedwig and Frederick Stern in 1935, when they resided in Munich. When a year later though they were forced, along with their six children, to abandon their home for California, they were forbidden to take with them their valuable art collection. Two years later they instructed their former lawyer to sell the Van Gogh along with other works. The sale indeed happened, but they never received the money because their German bank account had been frozen by the Nazis who seized their funds, as happened with many Jews at that time.

Postwar, the odyssey of the Van Gogh work continued on the other side of the Atlantic, when the very wealthy American businessman Vincent Astor bought it from a Jewish art dealer who, however, did not inform him of the true owners. In 1955 the businessman’s wife Brooke Astor delivered the painting for sale to the well-known New York gallery Knoedler and a year later it was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum for $125,000, which in turn sold it, in 1972, to Basil Goulandris.

“They should have known…”

They point out that the sale process was supervised by the museum’s curator of European Art, who was an expert in Nazi-looted art: “Rousseau and the Met knew or should have known that the painting had likely been stolen by the Nazis. They did nothing to confirm anything about its transports from or within Germany during the war,” they state, adding that “the Met should have been more careful when acquiring the work from the now inactive Knoedler Gallery, which had in the past been linked with sales of stolen works from Europe.”

Also in the documents accompanying the lawsuit there is material showing that the Stern couple, while still alive, had repeatedly filed requests to investigate the fate of the painting, including to a restitution specialist at the U.S. State Department.

The heirs of the family, moreover, in their attempt to prove that the painting’s sale by the Met was done deliberately under extreme secrecy, cite “New York Times” articles which reported that the fact was publicized months later due to concern over the dark past of it.

The museums respond

“Given that judicial proceedings are ongoing, we do not deem it appropriate to make further statements,” replied a representative of the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum, which opened in October 2019.

For its part, the Metropolitan Museum of New York insists it knew nothing about the work’s past and Nazi involvement and refers to the statement it had issued after the first 2022 filing, which stated characteristically: “During the period of the painting’s ownership by the Metropolitan Museum there was no evidence indicating that it belonged to the Stern family and this information did not become known until several decades after the painting left the museum’s collection.”

It notes also that “while it respectfully maintains its position that this work entered its collection and was sold legally and within all guidelines and policies, it welcomes and will examine any new information that may emerge.”

The history of the work

Van Gogh created “The Olive Harvest” just a few months before his death, in December 1889, in an extremely difficult moment of his life, during his voluntary hospitalization at the Saint-Rémy psychiatric center near Arles, with severe depression, schizophrenia symptoms and epileptic seizures.

For the one year he stayed there he had been given a small cell without bars to use as a painting studio. The lush, idyllic environment of Provence, visible from his small window, became a huge source of inspiration for him. When, later on, he was permitted to move in the outdoor areas of the asylum, his inspiration soared and he began to capture all those magical images of nature: the green trees, the lilacs full of colors and aromas, the green cypress trees, the wheat fields that looked like gold under the midday sun…

From May 1889 to May 1890 Van Gogh painted around 150 canvases. Among them was also a series of canvases whose protagonist element was the olive trees, through which he tried to symbolize the divine and the cycle of life, his feelings for Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the relationship between man and nature, showing some of the cycles of life, such as the harvest or death.

He depicted “The Olive Harvest” by women uniquely not in one but in three works, in similar variants. The great Dutch painter anyway used to create copies of his works. The canvas in the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation collection was the first he painted and he described it as a study from nature more colored with more serious tones.

The second version, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he described as a studio rendering in a very discreet color gamut, while the third, at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, was a gift to his mother and sister, which he accompanied with the following message: “I hope the painting of the women in the olives is somewhat to your liking — I sent a sketch of it to Gauguin and he found it good…”.

For him though the paintings with the olive trees were among his most beloved and mature works. Nature rested him and pushed away, even if only temporarily, his demons, it relieved him from his great emotional instability. In addition, the irregular shape of the olive tree and its constantly changing colors, depending on seasons and hours of the day, challenged him to experiment with new techniques and approaches.

“I feel happier here with my work than I could be outside. Staying here for a long time, I will have learned routine habits and in the long run the result will be more order in my life,” he wrote in his letters.

Sadly a few months later, in July 1890, no longer able to escape from the deep sorrow in which his entire existence had sunk, he would shoot himself in the stomach and die two days later, leaving behind the eternal vitality of his “Sunflowers” and the timeless magic of his “Starry Night.”