Yale U. Defends Its Ownership of Famous Painting by Van Gogh
In 1888, Vincent van Gogh spent three nights painting an image of the café downstairs from his lodgings in Arles, France. In a letter to his brother Theo, he called the painting “one of the ugliest I have done … I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.”
On Monday, Yale University filed a federal lawsuit to establish its title to the painting, “The Night Café,” which was donated to the university in 1960 as part of the estate of Stephen C. Clark, a Yale alumnus who was one of the most ambitious art collectors of his era.
The lawsuit is intended to fend off the claims of Pierre Konowaloff, a French citizen who recently said that the painting was stolen from his Russian ancestors by the Soviet government in 1918.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
On Monday, Yale University filed a federal lawsuit to establish its title to the painting, “The Night Café,” which was donated to the university in 1960 as part of the estate of Stephen C. Clark, a Yale alumnus who was one of the most ambitious art collectors of his era.
The lawsuit is intended to fend off the claims of Pierre Konowaloff, a French citizen who recently said that the painting was stolen from his Russian ancestors by the Soviet government in 1918.