RUSSIAN HEIR FIGHTS YALE OVER VAN GOGH PAINTING

Vincent van Gogh’s The Night Café, 1888, is the subject of a high-stakes ownership battle between Yale University and a heir to a Russian art collector, reports Jane Mills for the Agence France-Presse. Parisian Pierre Konowaloff, great-grandson of Russian industrialist and art collector Ivan Morozov, is challenging in a US federal court widely accepted norms that recognize the results of Soviet-era nationalization, at least when it comes to cultural items. Lenin seized Morozov’s real estate, textile factory, and art collection in 1918. Although Bolshevik rule ended long ago, their confiscation of priceless art—part of far wider repression against private-property owners—still stands. In contrast, successful challenges have been made to ownership of treasures looted by the Nazis during World War II and passed on to other owners since. Allan Gerson, an attorney known for pushing the boundaries of international law, wants to change that, saying that Night Café was acquired illegally and describing Lenin’s “looting” as no different than that of the Nazis. Yale acquired the painting in 1961 as a posthumous gift from the American art collector and Yale graduate Stephen Clark. Clark bought the painting around 1933 with the help of the Knoedler Gallery in New York City and the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin from a sale by Stalin of Soviet-owned art. In court papers filed last week, Gerson said the “confiscation of cultural property was prohibited under prevailing customary and conventional international law.” Yale filed court papers in March asking a judge to declare it the owner of the painting in response to Konowaloff’s challenge. “The university believes it is the rightful owner and that the outcome of its filing will confirm that,” Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said.