We want our Woman Ironing Picasso back, Jewish heirs tell Guggenheim

The Guggenheim is being sued by a family who claims Picasso’s Woman Ironing painting, sold by their Jewish ancestor, is now worth at least $US100m.

The painting, Woman Ironing, is housed by the Guggenheim in New York. Picasso’s subject was a low-paid worker. Picture: Alamy/The Times

Heirs of a German-Jewish businessman are suing the Guggenheim in New York claiming that a Picasso now worth at least $US100 million ($142 million) that he sold while fleeing Nazi persecution should be returned to them by the art gallery.

Woman Ironing was painted in 1904 near the end of Picasso’s Blue Period when the young artist, grief stricken after the suicide of a friend, was living in squalor and choosing to paint the beggars and low-paid workers of Paris.

In 1916, Heinrich Thannhauser, a Jewish art dealer in Munich, sold the painting to Karl Adler, one of the owners and managers of a large German leather manufacturing company.

After the Nazis came to power, Adler, who was also Jewish, was forced to relinquish his position on the company’s board and fled Germany with his wife, Rosi, on June 29, 1938, moving across borders while trying to gather enough money to get to Argentina.

The lawsuit filed by his heirs says that because Adler had been subjected to a flight tax by the Nazi government, which also blocked access to his accounts in Germany, he was effectively forced to sell the Picasso and to accept 6887 Swiss francs, a tiny fraction of the sum he had considered accepting six years earlier.

Rosi died in Buenos Aires in 1946 and Adler died in 1957, at the age of 85, leaving three children: Carlota, Eric and Juan Jorge.

The plaintiffs include Carlota’s grandson, Thomas Bennigson, charities that were the beneficiaries of Eric, and the heirs of the widow of Adler’s third child, Juan Jorge.

The claim says these are the rightful owners of a painting that has hung in the Guggenheim since 1978, and demands that the work be returned, or that they be paid $US100 million ($142 million) to $US200 million for it.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation said the claim was “without merit” as it did not concern a painting “stolen or seized by Nazi authorities” but one that was sold by a German Jewish businessman with “extensive international business holdings” to a Jewish art collector.

Woman Ironing was bought by Justin Thannhauser, the son of Heinrich, who had originally sold it to Adler, the gallery said, adding that Thannhauser had a longstanding relationship with the Adler family and had also been subject to Nazi persecution. It said the deal was done when both men were outside Germany.

Thannhauser brought his art collection from Europe to the US and said that he would bequeath Woman Ironing to the Guggenheim in 1963, the gallery said. It says two of Adler’s children, Carlota and Eric, lived near the Guggenheim at the time and raised no complaints about the bequest.

It says the gallery even contacted Eric in the 1970s while researching the provenance of the painting and that he “confirmed the dates of his father’s ownership and did not raise any concerns about the painting or its sale”.

It said it believed that a court would confirm that it was the rightful owner of the painting.

The Times