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Among surviving family descendants are Anne Sinclair, the French journalist and ex-wife of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss Kahn. Another granddaughter, American lawyer Marianne Rosenberg, said Friday she didn't wish to "antagonize" the museum, but hoped that it would come to realize that it is wrong in every sense of the term. The paintings seized from Paul Rosenberg and other Jewish victims of Nazi aggression were taken "under difficult conditions, in a cruel and unfair situation," she said in a telephone interview from her office in New York. "We honor my grandfather Paul's memory ... by doing what he would have done: we wish to recover that which we consider ours." The lawyer representing the museum, Kyre Eggen, said it was significant that Onstad didn't know where the painting came from. Under Norwegian law, if a person has had an item in good faith for more than 10 years, that person becomes the rightful owner, he said. That argument runs against the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which Norway is a party to. The principles say that owners of looted art should take into account the difficulty that Jewish war survivors faced in reclaiming lost property after the Holocaust, and that owners of looted art should in all cases seek a fast and fair solution. The Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse to the Rosenberg family in 1999, after initially making similar arguments. Eggen also argued that it is possible Rosenberg sold the painting himself between 1946 and 1950. But Marianne Rosenberg rejected that possibility. Art Loss Register documents show Paul Rosenberg notifying French authorities the piece was missing in 1946, and his family again listing it as among missing pieces it was seeking in 1958. "The Rosenberg family has since the end of the war assiduously and continuously sought the recovery of the paintings it lost," she said. "We have never sought to recover paintings not lost."
[Associated
Press;
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