In 1888, Vincent van Gogh spent three nights painting an image of the café downstairs from his lodgings in Arles, France. In a letter to his brother Theo, he called the painting “one of the ugliest I have done … I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.”

On Monday, Yale University filed a federal lawsuit to establish its title to the painting, “The Night Café,” which was donated to the university in 1960 as part of the estate of Stephen C. Clark, a Yale alumnus who was one of the most ambitious art collectors of his era.

The lawsuit is intended to fend off the claims of Pierre Konowaloff, a French citizen who recently said that the painting was stolen from his Russian ancestors by the Soviet government in 1918.

The university says that it is much too late for Mr. Konowaloff’s family to put forward such claims. The lawsuit also asserts that the Soviet government’s sales of nationalized paintings have generally been viewed as legitimate.

This is the third active federal lawsuit involving Yale and objects that were allegedly stolen during the 1910s. In December the government of Peru sued Yale for the return of thousands of artifacts from Machu Picchu, a 15th-century Inca settlement. And last month Yale was named in a lawsuit filed by the descendants of the Apache leader Geronimo, requesting the return of his remains. —David Glenn