Van Gogh, the Met, and a Legacy Unresolved: Heirs of a Jewish Family Sue Over Nazi-Looted Painting 

By: Fern Sidman

A storm is once again gathering over the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this time not over curatorial choices or exhibition politics, but over a matter far deeper — the question of moral responsibility in the stewardship of history. As The New York Times reported on Tuesday, the heirs of a Jewish couple who fled Nazi Germany have filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan seeking the return of Vincent van Gogh’s “Olive Picking” — or, at the very least, restitution for what they claim is a long and deliberate chain of neglect that allowed a looted masterpiece to pass through one of the world’s most esteemed institutions.

The painting, created in 1889 while van Gogh was in the Saint-Rémy asylum near Arles, has lived many lives: first as a cherished possession of a German-Jewish family, then as an asset seized under duress, and later as a museum trophy and a commodity traded among elites. The new lawsuit, however, casts the story not as a simple historical misfortune but as a profound institutional failure — implicating the Met itself in the larger moral question of how much cultural giants are willing to know about the shadows that underlie their collections.

As The New York Times report recounted, Hedwig and Frederick Stern purchased van Gogh’s “Olive Picking” in 1935, during the final twilight of a civilized Germany that was rapidly descending into barbarism. Two years later, the Sterns — like thousands of other Jewish families — were forced to flee Munich with their six children, leaving their possessions behind in a desperate attempt to escape Nazi persecution. The painting, considered part of Germany’s “cultural property,” could not leave the country.

By 1938, “Olive Picking” had been sold in Germany “on the family’s behalf,” as the lawsuit states — though in reality, the proceeds were confiscated by the Nazi regime. What was left behind was not simply a painting, but the embodiment of cultural erasure: an heirloom stripped from its rightful owners, its value siphoned into the machinery of the Reich.

The family eventually settled in California, where, after the war, they began a decades-long effort to locate and reclaim their lost art. According to court papers reviewed by The New York Times, the Sterns filed multiple claims with restitution specialists in both Germany and the United States, including with the U.S. State Department.

The journey of “Olive Picking” after 1938 reflects a troublingly familiar pattern for looted art. As The New York Times report noted, the painting resurfaced in postwar Europe before making its way to the United States. It was eventually purchased by one of America’s wealthiest men — Vincent Astor — through a Jewish art dealer who, the suit alleges, failed to disclose the Sterns’ ownership.

Astor’s widow, Brooke Astor, the celebrated philanthropist, sold the painting through the Knoedler Gallery in 1955, which in turn passed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $125,000 in 1956. That purchase, the heirs now argue, should never have taken place — at least not without deeper scrutiny.

The lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan federal court claims that the Met’s acquisition represented “a failure of due diligence,” especially given that the transaction was overseen by Theodore Rousseau Jr., then the museum’s curator of European paintings. Rousseau was not just any curator — he was a former “Monuments Man,” a member of the elite World War II unit tasked with recovering art looted by the Nazis.

“Rousseau and the Met knew or should have known that the painting had probably been looted by Nazis,” the complaint states. “He took no action to assure himself or the Met of anything about the painting’s transfers from or within Germany during the war.”

In the eyes of the Stern heirs, this was not mere oversight — it was willful blindness.

The Met has long defended its role in the saga. Its position, first articulated in a 2022 statement following an earlier lawsuit in California (dismissed on jurisdictional grounds), remains unchanged. “During the Met’s ownership of the painting,” the statement reads, “there had been no record that it belonged to the Stern family. That information did not become available until several decades after the painting left the museum’s collection.”

The Met insists that its purchase, ownership, and eventual sale of the painting were all conducted “legally and well within all guidelines and policies.” It maintains that the 1972 sale — which transferred “Olive Picking” to the Greek shipping magnate Basil Goulandris and his wife, Elise — was driven purely by curatorial considerations. “The van Gogh was deemed to be of lesser quality than other works of the same type in the collection,” the Met explained at the time.

Yet, as The New York Times report observed, even the rationale of “quality” seems coldly transactional in hindsight. It implies that the museum’s curatorial calculus took precedence over its moral obligation to interrogate the painting’s past — a past already scarred by the looting of Europe’s Jewish patrimony.

The Goulandris family, who now display the painting in their foundation’s museum in Athens, have also remained largely silent. Their museum’s provenance listing, The New York Times found, does not mention the Stern family at all. The heirs argue that this omission perpetuates a legacy of erasure — a form of cultural amnesia in which the narrative of displacement and loss is smoothed away by polite gallery labels and museum walls.

In their filing, the heirs accuse both the Met and the Goulandris Foundation of continuing to profit from a looted legacy. They seek restitution not only in the form of the painting’s return but also financial compensation for “the value [the Met] derived from its possession and use of the looted painting from 1956 to 1972 and the proceeds it received when it sold the painting in 1972.”

The complaint further cites The New York Times’ own front-page coverage from 1972, which revealed that the Met’s sale of the painting had been conducted quietly, without public announcement, and only came to light months later when “Olive Picking” appeared on the market alongside another deaccessioned work. The heirs’ lawyers suggest that this secrecy was intentional — an effort to avoid the kind of publicity that might have invited questions about provenance.

This lawsuit is not an isolated case but part of a broader reckoning now confronting the world’s leading museums. In recent years, institutions from the Louvre to the British Museum and the Getty have faced growing pressure to return artworks with Nazi-era or colonial-era provenance gaps.

For the Met — already weathering criticism over its opaque deaccessioning practices and questions surrounding the origins of certain antiquities — this latest lawsuit cuts particularly deep. As The New York Times report observed, the museum’s history is not without blemish: from questionable acquisitions in the 20th century to its reliance on galleries later exposed for trafficking in looted art.

The inclusion of the Knoedler Gallery in this case underscores that tension. Once among the most prestigious art dealers in New York, Knoedler has since become infamous for its association with forged and ethically tainted works. “The Met should have been more cautious about buying the work from Knoedler,” the lawsuit contends, “because the gallery had already been identified as having dealt in looted works from Europe.”

At the heart of the controversy is not merely whether the Met acted illegally, but whether it acted responsibly. As The New York Times editorialized in earlier cases involving looted art, museums occupy a unique position as custodians of cultural memory — a role that demands transparency and moral courage equal to their scholarly prestige.

The Met’s defense — that it could not have known — rings increasingly hollow in an age when provenance research has become an established academic discipline and digital archives make the past more accessible than ever. If Rousseau, a man trained to recover Nazi-looted art, could overlook the signs, what does that say about the institution he represented?

One art historian quoted in The New York Times report offered a pointed observation: “The problem is not that museums didn’t know — it’s that they didn’t want to know.” The reluctance to ask hard questions about acquisitions, particularly those emerging from Europe between 1933 and 1945, reflects a systemic discomfort with acknowledging complicity in history’s darker chapters.

Van Gogh’s “Olive Picking” — one of three versions he painted during his stay at Saint-Rémy — depicts women gathering olives in the Provençal countryside. The brushwork is vigorous, the light meditative. It is, as The New York Times report described, “an act of labor and transcendence rendered in color and motion.”

The irony is painful: a painting born of a tormented artist’s search for peace became, half a century later, an object of displacement and moral confusion. Today, another version of the Olive Pickers hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, while the Met itself now owns the later version, “Women Picking Olives.”

The presence of these sister works only sharpens the symbolic weight of the contested one. For the Stern heirs, “Olive Picking” is not just a painting but an heirloom of humanity — one whose loss represents both personal and historical injustice.

The lawsuit now unfolding in the Southern District of New York will test not only the reach of restitution law but the conscience of American cultural institutions. As The New York Times report emphasized, the issue is not one of art alone but of accountability: What obligation does a museum have to revisit its own history when new information emerges?

The Met insists it welcomes “any new information that comes to light.” But the heirs argue that the museum had every opportunity to uncover that information long before — and that its failure to do so constitutes a betrayal of both moral and scholarly trust.

For decades, the Met has styled itself as a temple of civilization — a place where the achievements of human creativity transcend the conflicts of nations. Yet, as this case illustrates, even the most exalted institutions can become entangled in the same moral evasions that defined the very century they curate.

In the end, the question is not whether the Met will lose a painting but whether it will regain a measure of integrity. As The New York Times report observed, the museum’s leadership has, in recent years, sought to portray the Met as a forward-looking, inclusive institution attuned to ethical collection practices. Yet the legacy of cases such as “Olive Picking” casts a long shadow over such claims.

The painting remains on display in Athens, unacknowledged as a fragment of stolen history. The Met, meanwhile, stands at a crossroads — confronted not by legal peril alone, but by the deeper reckoning of what it means to be a guardian of memory in an age when memory itself demands justice.

Perhaps, as van Gogh might have understood, truth — like light — cannot be permanently hidden beneath varnish.