Telluride, Colorado “I am the last of the Mohicans,” Naperacht David Cassirer from the dining room of his modest house in the mountains in the mountains. David is the last remaining heir of the Nazi-Looted Camille Pissarro Painting “Rue Saint-Honoré, après Midi, Effet de Pluie” (1897), the subject of a Serpentine Legal cause that has completed the American legal system for the past 25 years. In the decades since his family, the painting discovered in possession of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, his Spain, David’s father, mother and sister all died. David has no children.
At the end of March I rode four hours through the raw, untouched landscape of New Mexico and Colorado to meet David in his house near Telluride.
“It is my style to get away completely,” he said, visibly from a window. While most of the house has the feeling of every standard American residence, objects of the heritage from the past of his family every room. “Having these things in the neighborhood connects me spiritually, a bit, with Lily,” says David, referring to his grandmother, Lily Cassirer.
Lily’s leather steamship trunk, a reminder of its escape from the Nazi-property Europe to the United States, is located under a bedroom window. An impressive hand -cut wooden porcelain cabinet is in the living room, a piece of furniture in which David and his sister used to get into trouble to hide inside. There is also a 16th-century breast, a twisted wooden lamp and a Phillip Harth Bronze sculpture of a running leopard.
David is a former jazz pianist, arranger and conductor. He was something of a musical prodigy while he grew up in Cleveland and left the house as a teenager to study music in Boston. He was a member of a popular jazz trio, regularly performed on television and entertained the American elite. His father Claude Cassirer, a survivor of the Holocaust and the heir of the illustrious publishing house and art gallery Art and Künstler In Berlin, never approved.
“My father went to his grave at the age of almost 90, in the conviction that the whole idea to chase [piano] was to avoid work. I was a big disappointment, “he said.
Towards the end of his father’s life, however, the two men tied their mutual fight for the Pissarro painting.
David knows exactly what he will do with the proceeds from the sale of the painting, estimated at $ 60 million, if it ever flourishes. Although a considerable part of the funds would be to repay the legal costs for the case, he wants to draw up a non -profit to help others reclaim their Holocaust plundered artworks – a foundation that David describes as ‘my father’s mission’. Claude wanted the funds “available for other people who are located in the same way, so they don’t have to go on for 25 years what we did,” David explained.
On several occasions in the last quarter of century, the case seemed dead to the water. But just like Lazarus it has risen again. Advocacy have led to new laws at the constitutional and federal level.
“One of the ways we helped,” said David, “is to do things like people convince … My father would be proud of the various precedents who set this case that others can quote it in their own cases.”
In March, the Supreme Court of the United States sent the case back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California – the second time that the highest court in America has done this – asked to reconsider the case within the framework of California Assembly Bill (AB) 2867. Specifically formulated in response to the shocking turns of the multi-decennium search of the cassirers to restore the Pissarro, AB 2867 broadened the scope and time frame of recovery claims on artworks and personal property lost as a result of persecution, either in the Holocaust or otherwise. It was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2024.
Now, in an important victory for David and his team, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has returned the case to the American district judge John Walter on 30 April for a new statement.
Although David and his family once believed that they had two smoking weapons-an insurance photo with “Rue Saint-Honoré” who proudly hung about the velvet bank in the salon of their Berlin apartment and the remains of a label on the back of the painting that was not enough to paint the partial name and address.
Restitution cases are often less about the painting and merits of the case, than about legal articles of association, the lack thereof, or in this case, something that is known as ‘choice of law’, or a foreign sovereign nation can be charged in American courts. During a hearing of the Supreme Court from 2022, which led to the unanimous 9-0 decision to bring the business back to the 9th circuit for the first time, Justice Stephen Breyer collected a joke about an hour: “Can everyone agree that this is a beautiful painting?”
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum is also very enthusiastic about maintaining the ownership of the artwork, despite the seismic shifts that have taken place in art recovery practice and the moral implications of retaining Nazi-plunged art. A new exhibition in the museum, Proust and the artistswhich opened in March 2025 has “Rue Saint-Honoré” as the most important marketing image, almost enlarged from floor to ceiling at the front of the show. One of the lawyers of the Cassirers, Sam Dubbin, called it “a deeply misled attempt from the museum to claim ownership of the painting” in a recent e -mail.
“It is also a scandalous representation of arrogance and tone deafness – with the help of not only stolen art, but a masterpiece of French impressionism that was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish family,” Dubbin told me. “Emphasizing the painting in the exhibition shows how important it is and further shows why Spain should return the painting to the Cassirer family instead of showing off with his property derived from Nazi madnesses.”
It is difficult to underestimate the fame of the Cassirer family in Berlin before the Second World War. “My father was raised like the Kennedys or the Rockefellers,” said David, “beyond rich.” The original fortune was made in the production of mining and steel production, so that the next generation could become cultural customers. Art and Künstler Shredded the avant-garde and modern art movement in Germany.
Although the cassirers were well assimilated in German society, they felt the Nazi threat early and made plans to leave the country. “They tried to walk for Hitler,” David explains, “when nobody knew this would be that big.”
The Cassirers fled in 1939, only after they were forced to pay the “escape tax” that was levied on Jewish refugees. For the family it was today the equivalent of $ 4 million and the some of their appreciated assets had to hand over, including Lily Cassirer’s favorite artwork: “Rue Saint-Honoré.”
They were the lucky ones. David’s great aunt, who was left behind to take care of her older mother, would perish with her family in Auschwitz. The Nazis traded “Rue Saint-Honoré” on another Jewish family for old master paintings by Hitler’s taste. That family fled to Holland with the painting, not knowing that Hitler was just behind them. “Then the Nazis took it again,” says David.
At boarding school in England, David’s father Claude was a distance from what unfolded in Germany. While on holiday in the south of France with a British classmate, the Vichy government carefully started inspecting passports on exit and prevented Claude from returning to England. “He had a Nazi passport and they would not let it go, so they sent him to a terrible detention camp in Morocco near Casablanca without running water and no toilets,” says David. He closed typhus and almost died and dropped to just a hundred pounds.
In 1941 the camp was freed by the Allies and Claude was sent on a ship to America, where he was placed in quarantine on arrival in New York City. He was released in a brave new world, a new continent without family and no connections.
“He walks out, without work, and had to start completely,” said David. “But he was exactly the right guy – immigrant and young enough to still be hard.” He faltered a job as an assistant to a photographer and ended up in Cleveland, Ohio, where there was a robust Jewish community.
Claude became a successful photographer and documented people like Paul Newman, Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. His mantra was “It is more important to click with the people than the photos.” During the war he met his future wife, Beverly, a descendant of Russian Jewish immigrants, on the train between Cleveland and New York City. “She was just swept off her feet,” David describes.
In December 1999 the phone rang the Cassirer Residence in San Diego, where the couple had retired. A friend had just seen ‘Rue Saint-Honoré’ in a book that accompanied an exhibition of the extensive art collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, which causes the family Multi-Decennium Legal Battle.
When I asked about what his father would think about how far they got with this painting, David replied: “Like most survivors of the Holocaust, they were very modest. They were humiliated by what happened, where Hitler had such a terrible impact on the world.”
“So they were much more modest than in their heyday, and they would be stunned about the interest in this case, about the amazing amount of public support, not just from Jewish people, but of everyone,” David continued. “But my father would be more satisfied if we finally recover, and we can give this art back.”
For David, this business is more important than the painting itself, the potential sale or the basis that he hopes to create. It is ultimately about the stories of those who have experienced fascism and genocide, and about giving a voice to the voices who were unable to share what happened to them.
“This is another perspective compared to the Holocaust, instead of the heavier perspective of the people, Jews and others, in concentration camps or dead camps,” said David with conviction, standing next to a reproduction of “Rue Saint-Honoré” that hangs in his living room. “That is a bit easier to take, because we stared at this beautiful art and tell the story how it is taken from these people, from the real owners.”
