A lawsuit was filed against the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) on Friday, 30 September, by the estate of Paul Leffmann—a German-Jewish businessman and refugee who fled from Nazi rule in 1938—in an effort to recover Pablo Picasso’s painting The Actor (1904-05).
The lawsuit states that Leffman sold the painting under duress to Hugo Perls, a Parisian art dealer, and Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s dealer, for $13,200 when he and his wife fled to Italy and then Brazil. In 1941, the American automotive socialite Thelma Chrysler Foy bought the painting through the Knoedler Gallery in New York for $22,500, and donated it to the Met in 1952.
Representatives for the estate estimate that the painting is worth more than $100m, and that the museum should have been aware that the work was only sold because of “Nazi and Fascist persecution”.
The museum denies the claim, saying that the work sold for “a higher price than any other early Picasso sold by a collector to a dealer during the 1930s”, and that the Leffmann family did not include the painting among other property they tried to recover after the Second World War. The Met says it only learned about the claim 10 years ago when Leffmann’s great-grandniece approached the museum about the work.