ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER FOUNDATION’S PICASSO SET FOR AUCTION

After the resolution of a four-year-old claim by a German academic that a 1903 Picasso painting had been sold under duress to the Nazis in the mid-1930s, Christie’s announced on Wednesday that it would now auction the work, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (the Absinthe Drinker) in London on June 23, according to the New York Times.

The portrait, which is from the artist’s Blue Period, was painted in Barcelona, Spain. It depicts the artist’s friend Angel Fernandez de Soto seated at a café table, shrouded in tobacco smoke. The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, which the composer founded to benefit theaters and actors, is selling the work, which it had bought at Sotheby’s in 1995 for $21.9 million. It had belonged to the New York collectors Donald and Jean Stralem.

Christie’s was to have sold the painting in New York in November 2006 to benefit the foundation, but it was forced to withdraw it twenty-four hours before the auction after the collector Julius Schoeps filed a lawsuit saying said it had been forcibly sold by his great uncle Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Jewish banker in Berlin. Three years ago Christie’s expected it to bring $40 million to $60 million. Now, after a settlement between the heirs and the foundation, the auction house believes it can fetch around $60.9 million.