More than eight decades after the Second World War, the consequences are still being felt. In 1938, German Jews Karl and Rosi Adler fled the Nazi regime and sold a Picasso to finance their trip. 85 years later their heirs want to recover the painting, property of a museum in New York. The work is valued between 100 and 200 million dollars.
The descendants of this German couple filed a civil lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which has exhibited The Ironer, an oil on canvas since 1978. Spanish master Pablo Picasso painted in 1904. The plaintiffs – heirs in the United States and Argentina – claim to be the rightful owners of the work and allege in their complaint of January 20 a “forced” sale in October 1938 by the Adler who allegedly acted under duress. In a statement, the Guggenheim Museum disputes a “baseless” procedure, which suggests a civil lawsuit.
The extraordinary story of The Ironer – like those of many European paintings stolen by the Nazis or missing during World War II – begins in 1916 when Karl Adler bought it from a Jewish German gallerist in Munich, Heinrich Thannhauser. Adler, then owner of a leather factory, and his wife Rosi enjoyed a “prosperous life” in Baden-Baden, in southwestern 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 heritage. The Adlers resolved in June 1938 to flee their country to settle in turn in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland before seeking a visa for Argentina.
To obtain their sesame, the Adlers, who had already left Germany a few weeks earlier, sold La Ironer in October 1938 to Thannhauser’s son, Justin, who, also a Jew, had just taken refuge in Paris. The sale closed for $1,552 then—about $32,000 today—nine times less than the $14,000 Adler had hoped to make in the early 1930s. center of the complaint which alleges 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. Had they not been persecuted by the Nazis, the Adlers would never have sold the canvas for such a price,” according to the plaintiffs, individuals and American Jewish organizations who rely on a 2016 law that regulates the return of works of art to the victims of the Holocaust. 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 “stunningly avoids acknowledging” that the museum had contacted a son Adler before taking possession of The Ironer in the 1970s: he “never expressed the slightest reservation about the work and its sale to Justin Thannhauser” in 1938. The Adler heirs have been trying to get their hands on the Picasso for a decade.
In 2014, Thomas Bennigson, grandson of another child of the Adler couple, learned that his grandmother was at one time 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 restitution complaints “very seriously”, it is the “legal owner” of La Ironworker.