The National Gallery of Art Returned a Picasso to the Heirs of a German-Jewish Banker Last Week. This Week, Gagosian Is Selling It for $10 Million

The National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC, has returned a 1903
drawing by Pablo Picasso to the heirs of a German-Jewish banker who sold
the work to Nazis under duress. Now, one week later, the painting
is hitting the private market with a little help from Larry
Gagosian. 

The descendants of Paul von
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Berlin banker who purchased the pastel
drawing around 1912, approached Gagosian with the idea of a sale
last September, the dealer told the Wall Street
Journal, which first
reported the news. 

Gagosian agreed to privately
sell Picasso’s Blue Period portrait, titled Head of a
Woman, for a price tag of at least $10
million. 

“What makes this particular work
so rare is that it’s so finished, unlike other works on paper from
this period that were more like sketches,” Gagosian told the
Journal. “You can tell Picasso has found his
voice.”

Head of a Woman was one
of at least 16 prized works that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was forced
to sell in the months after the Nazis seized power in Germany and
he was removed from his position at the bank, causing his income to
plummet. He consigned the work to a local dealer, Justin
Thannhauser, before dying from a heart attack just a year
later.

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s heirs,
which number in the dozens, chose to sell the painting as it would
be difficult to share the object among such a large and wide-spread
group. They said they would use part of the profits from the sale
to fund future restitution cases. 

The National Gallery of Art,
which acquired the drawing through a donation in 2001, continues to
deny the validity of the family’s restitution claim, arguing that
there was no evidence that the drawing was ever in the possession
of the Nazis. Nevertheless, the museum transferred ownership of the
work to the family on March 30. 

The decision, the museum said in
a statement at the time, was made in an effort “to avoid the heavy
toll of litigation” and did “not constitute an acknowledgment of
the merit or validity of the asserted claims.”

A representative for the
National Gallery declined to comment on the news of the sale,
saying the institution does not discuss “matters concerning the art
market.”

Gagosian Gallery did not respond
a request for comment.

The post The National Gallery of Art Returned a Picasso to
the Heirs of a German-Jewish Banker Last Week. This Week, Gagosian
Is Selling It for $10 Million appeared first on artnet
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