GROSZ HEIRS SUE MOMA

Carol Vogel reports in the New York Times that the heirs of the German Expressionist painter George Grosz filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York on Friday against the Museum of Modern Art, saying the institution had refused to return two paintings and a watercolor by Grosz that were left behind when he fled Germany in 1933. The artworks—Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse, 1927, Self-Portrait with Model, 1928, and the watercolor Republican Automatons, 1920—were left with his dealer, Alfred Flechtheim, who was persecuted by the Nazis and fled Germany. The artworks were thought to be lost after Flechtheim’s death in 1937.

According to lawyers for the Grosz heirs, Charlotte Weidler, an art dealer and curator for the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, said that she had inherited Portrait of the Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse from Flechtheim and that she gave it to Curt Valentin, a German dealer in Manhattan, to sell to MoMA in 1952. The museum bought Republican Automatons from a Toronto collector in 1946 and was given Self-Portrait with Model in 1954. A spokesman for the museum declined to comment on the case because of pending litigation.