Picasso's 'Absinthe Drinker' to stay with British foundation
AFP
WASHINGTON - The heirs of a late German-Jewish banker have relinquished all rights to a painting by Pablo Picasso, allowing a foundation set up by British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber to keep the work, a US lawyer said Friday.
The descendants of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy reached an out-of-court settlement allowing the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, based in Berkshire, England to retain ownership of the Picasso painting "The Absinthe Drinker", John Byrne, a lawyer for the heirs of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family said.
A woman looking at drawings by Pablo Picasso at the Museo Picasso, Barcelona
Last year, von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's heirs reached settlements with the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, allowing them to keep two other Picassos that had belonged to their wealthy predecessor.
The family had argued in those lawsuits that von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had sold the Spanish artist's paintings "Boy Leading a Horse" and "Le Moulin de la Galette" under duress as Adolf Hitler's Nazi party came to power in Germany.
According to reports, von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy sent his three Picassos to Switzerland for safekeeping shortly after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.
Not long afterwards, he ordered that they be sold.
Von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy died in 1935.
His prized paintings eventually ended up in the Guggenhim, MoMA and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, but one of his heirs, Julius Schoeps, a grandson of one of von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s sisters, sued in a bid to reclaim them.
Schoeps claimed the paintings had been sold under duress and were rightfully his.
The settlement over "The Absinthe Drinker", which Picasso painted in 1903, was the third out-of-court deal by the family and the third time the family had relinquished its rights to the painting at the heart of the lawsuit.
Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a nephew of Felix Mendelssohn, the composer.
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