"Femme en blanc."
One
Picasso, Two Owners:
By W.A. Demers
LOS ANGELES - It has been nearly 60 years since the Nazis were
soundly defeated, but battles over ownership of the artwork they
looted during their rampage across the European continent
continue to rage on.
In the most recent skirmish, a University of California law
student, claiming to be the sole heir of his grandmother, a
Jewish woman who fled Germany during World War II, is seeking to
regain a Pablo Picasso painting allegedly looted by the Nazis or
be paid $10 million by the art collector who owns it. As in real
wars, both sides claim victims. "It's Solomonic," said E. Randol
Schoenberg, the California attorney representing Thomas
Bennigson, the law student. "Only one person gets to keep it."
For the antiques and fine art market, such legal battles may
ultimately have a chilling effect as they illustrate that with
war- or government-sanctioned looting, there are in fact two
victims. One is the original victim from whom such artwork was
originally stolen; the other, the current owner, who in an
all-or-nothing settlement receives no compensation from his or
her investment made prior to the widespread knowledge of and use
of looted-art data bases.
In this case, the 1922 Picasso painting, known as "Femme en
blanc," was purchased in 1975 from a New York City gallery by the
husband of Chicago art collector Marilyn Alsdorf for $357,000.
Alsdorf, through her attorneys, said she was unaware that the
painting had been looted by the Nazis. Bennigson's lawyers
contend that the painting was confiscated by the Nazis in 1940
from a Paris art dealer who had been entrusted with the piece by
the grandmother who had fled Germany.
For Nazi-looted artwork, one of the first major considerations is
determining who exactly the actual original owner might have
been, a task complicated by the passage of time and the "fog of
war." The problem, according to scholar Lynn H. Nichols, author
of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the
Third Reich and the Second World War (Knopf, 1994), is that
while the Allies' "monuments officer" spent six years locating
and sorting the pillaged treasures in an attempt to restore them
to museums and surviving owners, there remained much that had
either been destroyed or has never been found. Another factor is
how far out in time claims may be made.
In the Picasso case, Bennigson in a court declaration said that
he was first notified of the painting's existence in 2002 by the
Art Loss Register in London, a private international database of
lost and stolen art, antiques and collectibles. In his
declaration, Bennigson stated, "I located a letter in German
dated 1958, from Mr Thannhauser [the Paris art dealer] to my
grandmother which states: 'Dear Mrs Landsberg, As I remember very
clearly, and as I can confirm to you in writing, in 1938 or 1939,
you sent your painting by Picasso, of a woman, from the so-called
classical period of the artist, to me in my house in Paris. At
this time, as we were forced to leave our home in Paris in 1939,
your painting hung in the middle of a small wall. Upon the
occupation of Paris in 1940, when we were no longer in Paris and
the house was closed, the entire contents of the four-story
building - and with it your painting - were stolen.'"
Although contacted for comment, Alsdorf's attorney did not return
a call.
Stephen Hahn, a retired New York City gallery owner living in
California said he does recall selling the Alsdorfs the Picasso
painting in 1975. As for how Hahn came by the work, "I bought the
painting from a reliable gallery in Paris, which had obtained it
from a private collection. I was not told the name," he said.
At the time Hahn made the sale, exhaustive databases on
Nazi-looted art were not widely available. In fact, Art Loss
Register was not founded until 1991.
The predecessor organization, the International Foundation for
Art Research (IFAR), began collecting records on stolen art in
the mid-1970s, and entered into an agreement with ALR's founders
at the end of the 1980s to license the information that would
form the basis of the registry's current computerized database,
according to Anna J. Kisluk. Nevertheless, Kisluk pointed out, "A
photo and description of the painting was included in a
multivolume French publication that was distributed by the French
authorities after the war."
While admitting that this publication is not widely available and
quite out of date, Kisluk said that it clearly proved the trail
from Carlotta Landsberg to the Paris art dealer J.K. Thannhauser.
From there, ALR began to search for Landsberg and subsequently
her heir, Bennigson.
The other issue affecting artwork, antiques and collectibles is
the window of time in which claims of ownership can be made. A
new state law in California, which took effect on January 1,
retroactively extends the statute of limitations for all claims
against museums and galleries over Nazi-looted artworks to
December 31, 2010. According to Schoenberg, the previous
California statute was set at three years after discovery. In New
York, it is three years from the date a claim is made.
On January 10, Judge David P. Yaffe of the California Superior
Court will rule on whether the painting, currently in Chicago
under a temporary restraining order, will be returned to
California to Bennigson.
However the case is decided, publicity may spur both buyers and
sellers of fine art to exercise more "due diligence" in vetting
the provenance of artworks. "It's not just a legal issue," said
ALR's Kisluk, "there's a moral component as well." Sixty years
removed from the horrific events of World War II and the
Holocaust as these issues about Europe's looted treasures
continue to arise, sources of information such as the ALR
database will become critical to ensuring that past victims are
made whole and that unwary private collectors, dealers or museums
do not become victims themselves.
