Detroit gallery keeps Van Gogh in face of Nazi-era claim

The Detroit Institute of Arts, the city's main art gallery,will retainownership of the Vincent van Gogh painting Les Becheurs, a judge has ruled.

Citing Michigan's statute of limitations, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood dismissed a claim by heirs of a German-Jewish woman who once owned the work because 66 years had elapsed between the sale and the family's claim.

The statute of limitations usually requires a claim be made within three years.

The ruling echoes an earlier court decision involving a Gauguin owned by the Toledo Museum of Art. That claim also was dismissed by an Ohio judge citing the statute of limitations.

Les Becheurs or The Diggers was owned by Martha Nathan, a German Jew and member of a banking family who emigrated to France from Germany in 1937 to escape the Nazis.

She sold the Van Gogh to a consortium of three Jewish art dealers in Paris in 1938 for $9,360 US.

One of the dealers sold the picture for $34,000 US in 1941 to Detroit collector Robert Tannahill, who eventually donated it to the DIA.

The DIA had argued that Nathan got a price commensurate with other similar works when she sold it in 1938.

The gallery's lawyers also put forward the argument that the family had waited too long to take legal action.

"It's tremendous relief," DIA director Graham Beal said after the judgment.

"You always fear the worst, and while we felt we had the strongest possible case, and we wouldn't have taken our stand if we hadn't felt so strongly, it's still a great relief to know that this is finished."

Fifteen of Nathan's distant heirs, who live in Australia, Europe and America, filed a claim in 2004, saying she had sold the painting under duress.

Courts have become more sensitive to Holocaust-era claims in the past five years, but many such claims rely on complex and sometimes unreliable paper trails.

Nathan died in 1958, but her brother sought compensation for his family's wartime losses in a U.S. Federal Court in 1973. There is no record ofeither pursuing restitution forThe Diggers, the court said.

The painting is worth an estimated $15 million US and the families may launch an appeal.