Liz Taylor sued over painting

The heirs of a woman who fled the Nazis have sued actress Elizabeth Taylor over ownership of a Van Gogh painting they say is rightfully theirs.

Taylor bought the 1889 painting “View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy” at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1963 for $257,000. She now keeps it in her Los Angeles-area home, where it is valued at millions of dollars.

The South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman who fled Germany in the 1930s, say the work should be returned to them under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

Taylor’s representatives could not be reached for comment. But in court documents filed in May, Taylor asked a judge to declare her the lawful owner of the painting, arguing that the claimants “have not provided a shred of evidence” that it ever fell into Nazi hands or how and when Mauthner lost possession of it.