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Not actual painting

In our coverage about the second instance of grand theft arto to go down in a French museum this month, I made a passing reference to the Nazis being the most devastating and prolific band of thieves in the European art world. Now a newly-filed lawsuit is here to back up my claim. The descendants of Hedwig and Frederick Stern — a Jewish couple who bought the Vincent van Gogh oil painting Olive Picking in 1935, but were then forced by the Nazis to leave it behind when they fled Germany in 1936 — are suing NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for their purchase of the work in 1956 (for $125,000). While the Met didn’t buy the painting directly from the Nazis, the Stern family alleges that the museum “knew, or should have known” of the work’s ill

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