Collector heirs take legal action against Guggenheim over Pablo Picasso painting
The heirs of a World War Two-persecuted Jewish German art collector are taking legal action against the Guggenheim Museum in New York in order to take back ownership of a Pablo Picasso painting that now hangs in the museum. They estimate that the painting is worth nearly $200 million.
The lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan court by the descendants of the original owners of the painting, Karl Adler and Rosi Jacobi. They are being supported by a number of Jewish non-profits in seeking the return of Picasso’s 1904 painting Woman Ironing. The painting is from Picasso’s famous early Blue Period and depicts a frail old woman bent over ironing, as the title suggests.
According to the legal documents, Karl Adler’s descendant Thomas Bennigson claims that Adler and Jacobi sold their art collection when they were preparing to flee Nazi Germany upon their persecution in 1938. Benigson claims that Adler and Jacobi had to sell the Picasso painting well under its real value and would not have dispensed with the work had it not been for the Nazi regime.
Adler had purchased the painting from Heinrich Thannhauser in 1916 but sold it back to Thannhauser’s son in 1938, under the idea that the sale price would be used to buy short-term visas to escape Germany. Thannhauser reportedly loaned the painting to a number of museums from 1939 onwards.
So the lawsuit claims that the Guggenheim should not be in possession of the Picasso work. Responding to the news, a museum representative said: “The Guggenheim takes provenance matters and restitution claims extremely seriously,” adding that “expansive research and a detailed inquiry in response to this claim, engaged in dialogue with claimants’ counsel over the course of several years, and believes the claim to be without merit.”
