Yale Sued over Van Gogh Painting held by Soviets

A successor of the onetime owner of a famed Van Gogh painting has sued Yale University in an effort to reclaim the artwork from the Ivy League school.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., Pierre Konowaloff alleged that the university should have known the painting - "The Night Café" - has been confiscated from his great-grandfather, a Russian industrialist and aristocrat, Ivan Morozov, during the Communist takeover of Russia in the early 1900s.

The 1888 painting was consequently sold by the Soviet government to a European gallery. Stephen Carlton Clark, a Yale alumnus, bought the paintings from a gallery in New York in the early 1930s and bequeathed it to Yale in 1961.