After the sale of Picasso’s painting, “The Ironer” by German Jews in 1938, their heirs want to recover the painting, property of the famous museum in New York and valued between 100 and 200 million dollars.
In 1938, German Jews Karl and Rosi Adler fled the Nazi regime and sold a Picasso to finance their trip. Their descendants filed a civil lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He exhibits since 1978 The Ironer, an oil on canvas that the Spanish master Pablo Picasso painted in 1904.
The group of plaintiffs, heirs in the United States and Argentina, consider themselves the legitimate owners of the work and invoke in their complaint of January 20 a sale ” forced“in October 1938 by the Adlers who allegedly acted under duress. In a press release, the Guggenheim Museum disputes a procedure”unfounded“, which suggests a civil trial.
“La Ironer” bought in 1916
The extraordinary story of The Ironer, like those of many European paintings stolen by the Nazis or missing during the Second World War, begins in 1916 when Karl Adler buys it from a Jewish German gallerist in Munich, Heinrich Thannhauser.
Use our interactive feature to view the hidden painting below Picasso’s 1904 “Woman Ironing” pic.twitter.com/WSpUMYki5V
— Guggenheim Museum (@Guggenheim) January 30, 2015
Adler, owner of a leather factory, and his wife Rosi, enjoy a ” prosperous life” in Baden-Baden, in the south-west of Germany, just opposite Strasbourg. The arrival of Hitler and the Nazis in power in Berlin marked the beginning of the terrible persecutions against the Jews in Germany and the freezing or confiscation of their property and assets.
The Adlers decided in June 1938 to flee their country to settle in turn in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland before seeking a visa for Argentina. But to get their sesame the Adlers, who had already left Germany a few weeks before, sold in October 1938 The ironer Thannhauser’s son, Justin, who is also a Jew, has just taken refuge in Paris.
1152 dollars and 1938
The sale is concluded for 1,552 dollars at the time, or about 32,000 dollars today, nine times less than the 14,000 dollars that Adler hoped to make in the early 1930s. of the complaint which argues that the work, valued today on the art market between 100 and 200 million dollars, was sold under duress.
“Thannhauser was acutely aware of the plight of the Adler family. If they hadn’t been persecuted by the Nazis, the Adlers would never have sold the painting for such a price.“, according to the plaintiffs, American Jewish individuals and organizations who rely on a 2016 law that regulates the return of works of art to Holocaust victims.
Decades passed and in 1976, on the death of Justin Thannhauser, his collection was donated to the Guggenheim, a museum with avant-garde architecture that has been enthroned since 1939 in the upscale Upper East Side near Central Park. .
For the establishment, the complaint “surprisingly avoids recognizing“that the museum had contacted a son Adler before taking possession of The ironer in the 1970s: he “never expressed any reservations about the work and its sale to Justin Thannhauser” in 1938. The heirs of the Adlers have been trying to get their hands on the Picasso for ten years. In 2014, Thomas Bennigson, grandson of another child of the Adler couple, learns that his grandmother was in a moment in possession of the work.
The complaint thus recalls that Bennigson’s lawyers corresponded with the Guggenheim for a long time, before demanding in June 2021 the return of the painting, without success. The museum now counters that even if it takes ” very seriously“complaints for restitution, it is the” legal owner” of The ironer.
