Yale University has gone to court in a preemptive attempt to protect its claim to an 1888 Van Gogh painting in its collection, Business Week reports. “The Night Café,” which entered the university collection in 1961 through a bequest from alumnus Stephen Carlton Clark, once belonged to the great Russian collector Ivan Morozov. Russia nationalized his holdings during the revolution and later sold the work.

According to Yale’s suit, Pierre Konowaloff, a Paris-based man purporting to be Morozov’s grandson, last year asserted through a lawyer that he owned the painting and sent a draft complaint of a federal suit. Konowaloff argues that the Soviet nationalization of property was illegal and that the painting is the rightful property of his great-grandfather and his estate.

“The implication of his argument is that American courts should try to undo the entire program of property reform undertaken by the Russian government in the early part of the 20th century, invalidating the transfers of title of Russian citizens’ property that Russia effectuated within its own borders,” Yale contends in its suit. “It was accepted at the time, as it is now, that the sales by the Soviet government were valid, as were later acquisitions of the paintings.”

When the painting was given to Yale in 1961, Konowaloff’s parents made no claim on it, nor did Morozov’s widow, Yale argues. The university also argues that the family is barred from recovering the painting, or equivalent compensation, because it failed to act within three years of what it claims to be Yale’s unlawful possession.

Here’s van Gogh's own take on the piece, in a letter to his brother Theo:

"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green."