Getty loses bid to dismiss art-restitution lawsuit
The J. Paul Getty Trust is squaring off against the Armenian Orthodox Church in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and on Thursday the church won the first important procedural round in its bid to reclaim eight prized medieval manuscripts (a detail is pictured above) it contends were stolen goods when the Getty bought them for $950,000 in 1994.
The Getty tried to have the suit dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds, arguing that church officials were aware of the manuscripts’ whereabouts by 1952 and should have sued at that time, when they were owned by an Armenian-American family in Massachusetts — the heirs of a man who had brought them out of the province of Cilicia as the Ottoman Turks were expelling the province’s Armenian population during the World War I-era Armenian genocide.
Superior Court Judge Abraham Khan denied the Getty’s motion, saying that it was “not clear” that church officials knew what the Getty says they knew when it says they knew it. He said the statute-of-limitations law could come into play in a future hearing but that he would want to hear evidence about the complicated path the 755-year-old pages took starting in 1916, when they were separated from a larger bible known as the Zeyt’un Gospels.
The Getty’s pages are lavishly illustrated Canon Tables — citations of parallel verses from the four New Testament gospels, which served as a kind of frontispiece for the bible created in 1256 by T’oros Roslin, considered the greatest Armenian manuscript illuminator.
The church aims to make the Zeyt’un Gospels whole again by winning back the missing pages from the Getty and sending them to the Matenadaran, a major manuscript museum in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, which has housed the rest of the Zeyt’un Gospels since the late 1960s.