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Liz Taylor keeps her Van Gogh

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From Bloomberg News

Actress Elizabeth Taylor can keep a Vincent van Gogh painting after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by three people who said their great-grandmother was forced to sell the work before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.

On Monday, the justices, without comment, refused to revive a lawsuit that demanded Taylor turn over the painting, “View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy.” Taylor has owned the painting, now worth an estimated $20 million, since 1963.

The suit was pressed by three great-grandchildren of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman who fled to South Africa with her family to escape the Holocaust. The relatives sought to invoke three 1998 U.S. laws aimed at helping the rightful owners recover hundreds of thousands of works of art taken from Jews by the Nazis.

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