Price of Nazi-loot Picasso lawsuit: $6.5 mil
ABOVE: detail from Picasso’s Femme en Blanc (1922). A lawsuit over the Nazi lineage of the painting has been settled for $6.5 million.
Talk about your bad investments: Chicago collector Marilynn Alsdorf bought Picasso’s Femme en Blanc from a New York art dealer in 1975 for $357,000. Last month, just to hold on to the damn thing, she had to pay a further $6.5 million. Most Picasso originals, they’ll, you know, appreciate in value, but not this one. Because this is no ordinary Picasso: it is a Picasso with the bloody bootprints of Nazi looters all over it—metaphorically, of course—and that changes everything. The Chicago Tribune has the story.
Ms. Alsdorf, who is 80, says that she didn’t know the painting’s dark history: it started off in the house of the widowed Carlota Landsberg of Berlin, was later sent to Paris, and then was lost when the city was occupied. Mrs. Landsberg had sought the painting until her death in 1994, but now her grandson, Thomas Bennigson of California, is the one who will actually take payment on the settlement. Alsdorf says she wanted to settle because the uncertain outcome of the suit was affecting her bequest plans. It’s hard for us to feel particularly sorry for any of the wealthy parties in this story except the poor Mrs. Landsberg, who never saw her suitably melancholic painting again.