A Chicago woman will settle a legal dispute over her Pablo Picasso painting by paying US$6.5 million to the grandson of a Jewish woman who lost it to Nazis during World War II, attorneys said on Tuesday.
Marilynn Alsdorf decided she would rather pay Thomas Bennigson of Oakland than continue a costly and complicated legal dispute over the 1922 oil painting, her attorney Richard Chapman said. She will keep the painting, now valued at more than US$12 million, and will sell it after the settlement is approved by a federal judge.
Alsdorf and her late husband bought the painting, known as Femme en blanc (Woman in White), for US$375,000 in 1975. It was sitting in the window of a New York gallery, Chapman said.
PHOTO: AP
"This was a reputable dealer, not a back-alley thing," Chapman said. "She had no knowledge that there had been any impropriety at all."
When Alsdorf tried to sell the painting in 2002, experts notified the Art Loss Register in London, which investigated its history.
Bennigson's Jewish grandmother, Carlota Landsberg, entrusted the painting to a Paris art dealer for safekeeping when she fled Berlin in the late 1930s. When Nazis reached Paris, they took the Picasso.
Its whereabouts were unknown until New York art dealer Stephen Hahn purchased it in France in 1975 and sold it to the Alsdorfs. Hahn recently settled a separate suit by agreeing to pay Bennigson, Landsberg's only living heir, an amount equal to his profit from that sale, said E. Randol Schoenberg, Bennigson's attorney.
The federal government in October claimed jurisdiction over the Alsdorf case and custody of the painting, but allowed it to remain in a safe in her home.
Chapman said Alsdorf's decision was not based on the legal merits of the case.
"It was considering her age and her own personal feelings," he said. "It's tough when you have to foot the bill of very expensive and long-term litigation which has tremendous implications."
Schoenberg said Bennigson, who did not return a message seeking comment, was satisfied.
"It's the right thing," he said. "You like to see in these type of cases things result without litigation and paintings returned to the prior owners, but when there's a dispute -- and this one was hotly disputed -- it's good to get that type of finality of a settlement."
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