DISPUTE OVER ALLEGEDLY LOOTED VAN GOGH CONTINUES
A California judge has cancelled a hearing originally scheduled for Monday in Los Angeles that was to have considered an ownership dispute between actress Elizabeth Taylor and a Hamilton, Ontario, lawyer and his family over a painting by Vincent van Gogh, James Adams reports in the Globe and Mail. District Court Judge Gary Klausner announced Friday that he was declining to hold the hearing and would instead base any future ruling on court documents previously submitted by lawyers for both disputants. Lawyers for Andrew Orkin of Hamilton want the courts to toss out an application for undisputed title of the van Gogh—an 1889 oil titled Vue de l’asile—that Taylor filed last May. (She purchased the painting at auction in London in 1963.) Orkin’s lawyers claim the painting, now worth as much as $20 million, was illegally removed from his German-Jewish great-grandmother’s possession as a result of Nazi persecution before Word War II.
