[CPProt.net] $6.5 million settlement reached over Picasso looted by Nazis

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

From: E. Randol Schoenberg [mailto:randols at bslaw.net] 
Sent: 10 August 2005 02:24
To: E. Randol Schoenberg
Subject: FW: $6.5 million settlement reached over Picasso looted by Nazis



Posted on Tue, Aug. 09, 2005

$6.5 million settlement reached over Picasso looted by Nazis

BY HOWARD REICH
Chicago Tribune


CHICAGO - (KRT) - A Chicago art collector has agreed to pay $6.5 million to
settle a claim that a Picasso oil painting she bought in 1975 was looted by
the Nazis.

Marilynn Alsdorf, who acquired Picasso's "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White")
from New York art dealer Stephen Hahn for $357,000, will pay the sum to
Californian Thomas Bennigson, whose grandmother owned the painting before it
was confiscated during the Holocaust.

Though Alsdorf has fought Bennigson's claim since 2002, when he sued for $10
million in California state court, she agreed to settle after attorneys for
both parties met June 13 in Los Angeles before Magistrate Judge Margaret
Nagle of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

"I think she has very personal reasons for doing it," said Alsdorf's
attorney, Richard Chapman, adding that Alsdorf would not comment on the
case.

Alsdorf is "maintaining that the painting had been purchased in good faith
with proper legal title," according to a statement released by the Chicago
law firm representing her, FagelHaber LLC, but she "agreed to the settlement
citing her advanced age and the need to resolve financial claims so her
commitments to family and charitable organizations may be completed."
Alsdorf is 80.

But Bennigson's attorney disputes Alsdorf's contention that she owned the
painting legally.

"I think it's very clear that she didn't get good title, and that's why we
had a lawsuit," said E. Randol Schoenberg of the Los Angeles firm Burris &
Schoenberg LLP.

"It was clear that Mrs. Alsdorf had no (legal) defense, that this painting
had been stolen during the Nazi era."

Added Howard Spiegler, an expert on restitution law who serves as
co-chairman of the international art department at the New York law firm
Herrick, Feinstein LLP, "In general, under American law, one does not get
good title to stolen property, even if you are a good-faith purchaser.

"Mrs. Alsdorf could have been a good-faith purchaser and still might not
have had good title to the property - those are not inconsistent positions."

In October, FBI agents served Alsdorf with a seizure warrant and a federal
restraining order, allowing the Picasso to remain in her possession but
under protection of the court. The action was taken after the U.S.
attorney's office in Los Angeles filed a complaint in U.S. District Court,
charging that Alsdorf had transported the work across state lines "with
knowledge that it was stolen, converted or taken by fraud."

The battle over the painting began in 2001, when Alsdorf, through a
California art dealer, sent the Picasso to a prospective buyer in France.
But the Parisian art dealer checked the provenance of the work with the Art
Loss Register, a London-based clearinghouse for stolen art.

The Art Loss Register determined that the painting had been listed in an
extensive 1947 text detailing Nazi-plundered art. In addition, in 1969 the
German government acknowledged the theft, paying Bennigson's grandmother
100,000 deutsch marks (about $27,300) in restitution, though that payment
had no bearing on the recent litigation.

Alsdorf had begun negotiating with Bennigson's representatives in 2002 but
ended discussions on Dec. 18, 2002, the same date Bennigson filed suit
against her.

Since then the two sides have been arguing in courts in Chicago and Los
Angeles over jurisdiction of the case, not yet its substance.

But court documents detail the path of the painting before, during and after
World War II.

Picasso painted "Femme en blanc," a work from his "classic" period, in 1922.
Robert and Carlota Landsberg, Jews living in Berlin, purchased it in 1926 or
1927.

But shortly after Kristallnacht, when Nazis and their sympathizers burned
synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes in Germany and Austria, in
November 1938, the widowed Carlota Landsberg decided to flee with her
daughter. She sent the Picasso to French art dealer Justin Thannhauser, who
stored it in his Paris home, which was looted by the Nazis.

Thannhauser later wrote to Landsberg, "As I remember very clearly, and as I
therefore can confirm to you in writing, in 1938 or 1939 you sent your
Painting by Picasso, of a woman, from the so-called classical period of the
artist, to me in my house in Paris. At this time, as we were forced to leave
our home in Paris in 1939, your Picasso hung in the middle of a small wall.
Upon the occupation of Paris in 1940, when we were no longer in Paris and
the house was closed, the entire contents of the four-story building - and
with it your Painting - were stolen."

After fleeing across Europe, Landsberg arrived in New York in 1940 or 1941
and married Rudolph Bennigson, also a Holocaust survivor, and they had one
son: Thomas Bennigson.

Until her death in 1994, Landsberg searched for the painting,
unsuccessfully.

Its turbulent past did not resurface until the Art Loss Register began
investigating it.

Alsdorf will make payment after the California court enters a consent
judgment, expected in November.

---

C 2005, Chicago Tribune.

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.


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Tuesday, August 9, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
$6.5M settlement in suit over stolen Picasso painting
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer



A Bay Area man's lawsuit over a Picasso painting that was once owned by
his German Jewish grandmother, and was stolen by the Nazis, has been
settled for $6.5 million, his lawyer said today.

   The money will be paid by a Chicago woman who, with her now-deceased
husband, bought 'Femme en Blanc" from a Manhattan art gallery for $345,000
in 1976, said Randall Schoenberg, lawyer for Tom Bennigson of Oakland. The
woman, Marilynn Alsdorf, and her husband, James, made the purchase
"completely in good faith, with no idea of its history or background,"
Schoenberg said.

   The 1922 painting, a somber portrait of a woman in whites and grays, was
sent by Carlotta Landsberg to an art dealer in Paris for safekeeping
before she fled Berlin in 1938 or 1939. She settled in South America and
next heard from the dealer in a 1958 letter that said his entire
collection had been stolen by the Nazis after they occupied Paris in 1940.

   The painting next surfaced in 2001, when a Los Angeles dealer brought it
to Paris for sale. A prospective buyer contacted the Art Loss Register,
which found "Femme en Blanc" on a list of looted works and identified
Landsberg as its owner.

   The register traced Landsberg to New York, where she had died in 1994,
and
also located Bennigson, her only heir, who was unaware of his
grandmother's painting or her efforts to find it. He was then a law
student at UC Berkeley and has since graduated and passed the bar exam,
said Schoenberg, his lawyer.

   Bennigson filed a $10 million suit against Marilynn Alsdorf, who had
placed the painting with the Los Angeles dealer after her husband's death
but recovered it after learning its history. Alsdorf sued in Illinois to
establish her title to the painting, and the federal government also
entered a claim in federal court.

   Under the settlement, reached with the aid of a federal magistrate,
Alsdorf will keep the painting. The New York dealer who sold it to her --
and who also denied knowledge of its origin -- will add an unspecified sum
to Bennigson's compensation, Schoenberg said. He said the settlement
amount will cover his legal fees and a payment to the Art Loss Register.

   Compared to other U.S. legal disputes over art work looted by the Nazis,
"this is probably the largest and most successful settlement," Schoenberg
said. 'I'm pleased that Mrs. Alsdorf has seen fit to do the right thing."

   E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko at sfchronicle.com.
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