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Heirs of German Jews file lawsuit against New York museum to recover Picasso

2023-01-31T11:41:53.025Z


In 1938, Karl and Rosi Adler fled the Nazi regime and sold a Picasso to finance their trip. At the time, La Repasseuse was sold for $32,000. Today it is estimated between 100 and 200 million dollars.


1938. German Jews Karl and Rosi Adler flee the Nazi regime and sell a Picasso to finance their trip.

85 years later, their heirs want to recover the painting of

The Ironer

, painted in 1904 and exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan since 1978. The oil on canvas has been valued between 100 and 200 million dollars.

The German couple's descendants filed a civil lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court against the museum.

The complainants - heirs in the United States and Argentina - consider themselves the legitimate owners of the work and invoke in their complaint of January 20 a

"forced"

sale in October 1938 by the Adlers who allegedly acted under duress.

In a statement,

"unfounded"

, which suggests a civil trial.

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La Ironer

purchased in 1916

The extraordinary story of

The Ironer

- like those of many European paintings stolen by the Nazis or lost during the Second World War - begins in 1916 when Karl Adler buys it from a Jewish German gallerist in Munich, Heinrich Thannhauser.

Leather factory boss Adler and his wife Rosi enjoy a

'prosperous life'

in Baden-Baden, in the south-west of Germany, just opposite Strasbourg.

But the arrival of Hitler in power in Berlin sounds the beginning of the terrible persecutions against the Jews in Germany and the freezing or the confiscation of their goods and inheritances.

The Adlers decided in June 1938 to flee their country to settle in turn in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, before seeking a visa for Argentina.

But to obtain their sesame, they had to sell, in October 1938,

La Repasseuse,

to the son of Thannhauser, Justin, who, also a Jew, had just taken refuge in Paris.

$1552 in 1938

The sale is concluded for 1,552 dollars at the time - or approximately 32,000 dollars today - nine times less than the 14,000 dollars that Adler hoped to make in the early 1930s. This is the central argument of the complaint that the work - valued today on the art market between 100 and 200 million dollars - was sold under duress.

“Thannhauser was acutely aware of the plight of the Adler family.

If they had not been persecuted by the Nazis, the Adlers would never have sold the canvas at such a price”

, according to the plaintiffs, individuals and American Jewish organizations relying on a 2016 law which regulates the restitution of works of art to victims of the Holocaust.

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Decades passed and in 1976, on the death of Justin Thannhauser, his collection was donated to the Guggenheim, a museum with avant-garde architecture that has been enthroned since 1939 in the upscale Upper East Side near Central Park. .

For the establishment, the complaint

"surprisingly avoids recognizing"

that the museum had contacted a son Adler before taking possession of

La Ironer

in the 1970s: he

"never expressed the slightest reservation about the work and its sale to Justin Thannhauser"

in 1938.

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The Adler heirs have been trying to get their hands on the Picasso for ten years.

In 2014, Thomas Bennigson, grandson of another child of the Adler couple, learned that his grandmother was at one time in possession of the work.

The complaint thus recalls that Bennigson's lawyers corresponded with the Guggenheim for a long time, before demanding in June 2021 the return of the painting.

Unsuccessful: the museum now retorts that although it takes

restitution complaints

'very seriously' , it is the

'legal owner'

of

La Repasseuse

.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-01-31

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