THE MET FACES LAWSUIT OVER PICASSO PAINTING

On Friday, September 30, the estate of Paul Leffmann, a German-Jewish businessman, filed a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art over Pablo Picasso’s The Actor, 1904–5. The lawyers representing the estate claim that Leffmann was forced to sell the work for a low price when he fled from the Nazis during World War II, Graham Bowley of the New York Times reports.

According to the complaint, Leffmann, who sold his home and businesses in Cologne before he left Germany with his family in 1937, was under duress when he sold the work, estimated to be worth more than $100 million, to Paris art dealers Hugo Perls and Paul Rosenberg for $13,200.

The lawyers said that that they have been negotiating with the museum for several years and decided to sue when they failed to reach a settlement. They claim that the Met “did not disclose or should have known that the painting had been owned by a Jewish refugee, Paul Leffmann, who had disposed of the work only because of Nazi and Fascist persecution.” The institution’s provenance information for the canvas indicated that it was owned by an unknown German collector, which the Met updated in 2011.

The museum responded to these allegations in a statement saying that it bought the work in 1938 in good faith. It claims that the sum of money the Leffmanns received for the work was “a higher price than any other early Picasso sold by a collector to a dealer during the 1930s.”

After the war, the Leffmans did not try to reclaim the painting. Alice Leffmann, a great-grandniece of Paul and his wife, Alice, contacted the museum about the work roughly ten years ago.