​“In the nineteenth century,” Brancusi declared, “the situation in sculpture was desperate. Rodin arrived and transformed everything.” In a way, Rodin was fortunate that initially he wasn’t part of the system. Rejected several times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Rodin was not trained according to the rigid academic standards of the time. Nonetheless, he never gave up and showed great confidence in his talent. In 1865, for example, his sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose (1865 and 1875) was initially rejected by the jury of the Salon, partly because the clay fissured and the sculpture cracked in the back of the head.
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​After a trip to Italy, the works of Michelangelo served as his main inspiration. Like the Renaissance masters, he studied human anatomy. In fact, his sculptures were so life-like in his sculptures that his first major work, The Age of Bronze (1876), caused a great controversy. Rodin was accused of cheating by making it from a live cast of his model. Rodin protested and put together an impressive dossier defending himself, but to no avail. In Rodin’s defense, his model, Auguste Neyt, recalled “I had to train myself to strike the pose. It was hardly an easy thing to do. Rodin did not want straining muscles; in fact, he loathed the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted ‘natural action taken from real life.” (http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin)
Eventually, however, thanks to recommendations made by influential friends, the French government bought the sculpture in 1880 for the hefty sum of 2000 francs. Henceforth Rodin’s fame would continue to rise.
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The charge of the Salon could have been further from the truth. Rodin never worked from live casts. He asked his models, both male and female, to walk around freely in his studio. Often he would follow them around, making rapid sketches of their movements. When he spotted them in a particularly interesting pose or expression, he would try to capture it quickly, modeling in clay. For Rodin, as for Michelangelo, the body itself was expressive of emotion. He stated: “I have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.” It is said that Rodin’s wife, Rose Beuret, once stormed into his studio in a fit of rage and began screaming at him. She would have had plenty of reasons to be upset with Rodin since he notoriously cheated on her with his young models, most of whom were can-can dancers. Instead of responding in kind, however, Rodin quickly modeled her angry expression in clay, saying “Thank you, my dear. That was excellent.” Nothing was as inspirational for him as visible emotion, read in facial expressions and gestures.
Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, his chef d’oeuvre, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, The Kiss, as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:
“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”
Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone.

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"This donation, exceptional both in its size and its consistency, is the biggest received by a French museum from a French museum since 1945," the French culture ministry said on Friday.
The 89-year-old couple have bequeathed their huge collection to Paris's Seineside museum of 19th-century art when they die but 187 works, worth 173 million euros, were to be donated on Saturday.


Degas, Corot and les Nabis

The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.


The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.

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The art dealer Guy Wildenstein should be sentenced to four years in prison—with two years suspended—and pay a penalty of €250 million ($275 million) for acts of alleged tax evasion and money laundering, prosecutors urged France’s high court for financial crimes on Thursday.

Two other members of the Wildenstein clan, Alec Jr. and Liouba Stoupakova (the widow of Guy’s brother), were recommended suspended prison sentences of 6 months and one year, respectively, in what prosecutor Monica D’Onofrio called “the most sophisticated fraud of the 5th Republic.”
The Wildensteins are accused—along with two offshore banks, two lawyers, and a notary—of using a complex system of trusts and shell companies to hide the vast majority of their family’s wealth from French tax authorities.

French tax authorities say they were shortchanged by the Wildensteins by an estimated half billion euro in estate taxes following the 2001 death of Daniel Wildenstein. The ultimate amount of underpaid taxes and interest owed by the family will be determined in a separate civil procedure.
Prosecutors say that the Wildensteins and their associates have continued to create fictional loans and secret agreements to transfer money to foreign accounts in order to keep revenues from the trusts from appearing on the books of French tax authorities.
This is the first time offshore financial institutions have been tried in France for helping clients to hide their wealth in tax havens.
Prosecutors say that the family never ceased to exercise control over thousands of paintings, a stable of racehorses, and immense real estate holdings that were formally owned by offshore trusts.

Prosecutor Mireille Venet recommended fines of €187,500 for both Guernsey’s Northern Trust and The Royal Bank of Canada Trust Company (Bahamas) for actively assisting the Wildensteins by “furnishing the structures that allowed the family to no longer own their belongings” on paper.
Prosecutors recommended a 3-year sentence—with one year of hard prison time—and a penalty of €1 million for the Swiss lawyer Peter Altorfer for helping manage the family’s system of offshore trusts and for advising them in the use of fictional loans to keep revenues off the books.
Altorfer had attempted during the trail to exculpate himself from potentially incriminating remarks in his correspondence with the Wildensteins and their advisors by citing an incomplete grasp of the French language.

Monica d’Onofrio read one such email aloud to the court, saying: “There are few errors here and I would even say that his French is, in fact, remarkable.”
The prosecution urged the court to serve another of the family’s lawyers, Olivier Riffaud, with one year of hard prison, one year suspended sentence, and a three-year ban from practicing law.
As a specialist in tax law, Riffaud “was conscious of the legal risk” of the Wildenstein’s offshoring scheme, and behaved like “pyromaniac fireman,” according to prosecutor Venet. “At no moment did he say, ‘I think we’re going too far.”
The prosecutors recommended two-years suspended sentence for the retired notary Rober Panhard, whom they accuse of “cooking up” the allegedly fraudulent tax declaration for Daniel Wildenstein’s estate.

“This is shameful,” said Ms. D’Onofrio. “Daniel and Alec [Guy’s father and brother] both ended their days, very sick, in Paris—where the hospitals are paid for by our taxes.”
Lawyers for the Wildensteins and their associates will be given the chance to defend their clients before the court during the three remaining sessions of the trial, which ends next Thursday.
A date has not yet been set for the court’s final ruling.

by Robert Williams

First it was suspected counterfeit chairs, and now, counterfeit tickets—the Palace of Versailles is having a rough year. Five employees of the opulent tourist attraction were indicted for fraud on Monday, after French police confirmed a fake ticket conspiracy suspected by innocent colleagues, Le Parisien reports.

Three men and two women, aged 26 to 34, allegedly sold re-used and counterfeit tickets to tourists paying in cash. Employees at the welcome desk issued the fraudulent tickets, and staff members at the castle’s entrance accepted them, without putting them through the ticket-taking machine.
When a co-worker noticed that some tickets were not being scanned, he notified the authorities, who arrested the five. One of whom allegedly had 150 fake tickets on his person at the time of the arrest.

The scheme is suspected to have been led by a seasonal employee, who worked at the historic site in the busy summer months. The co-conspirators coordinated their schedules via text message, investigators confirmed.
In all, the plot is estimated to have cost the historic estate €250,000 ($275,000) in damages, beginning in August, although authorities are now looking into the whole of 2016.
Tickets to the Versailles Palace and estate cost anywhere from €6 to €25, and the fake tickets were reportedly being sold for €10 a pop, which the suspects likely pocketed.
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​​More details have come to light regarding a suspected Old Mastery forgery scandal that may encompass some €200 million ($255 million) in fake canvases. It would appear that some of the world’s foremost experts on authentication have been taken in, casting doubt on connoisseurship and forensic analysis alike.
The most recent development ha Sotheby’s refunding the buyer from a 2011 sale of a purported Frans Hals portrait. The authenticity of that painting was called into question because it came from the same source as a Lucas Cranach the Elder Venus, after the latter was seized by French authorities earlier this year under suspicion it was fake. Little-known French collector-turned-dealer Giulano Ruffini, who was the original seller of both works, has brought to market a suspiciously high number of previously undocumented works attributed to Old Masters.
Related: String of Suspected Old Master Fakes May Reveal ‘Biggest Art Scandal in a Century’
The Hals refund is all the more concerning given how much press the painting received as a newly discovered treasure in the immediate past. In 2008, the Louvre launched a national campaign to buy the canvas for €5 million from Christie’s Paris, declaring it “un trésor national.” The Parisian museum wasn’t acting lightly: the painting had been authenticated after passing a battery of scientific tests conducted by France’s Centre for Research and Restoration. At the time, Burlington Magazine called the work “a very important addition to Hals’s oeuvre.”

​Though the Louvre’s efforts to secure the work were stymied by the 2008 financial crisis, the painting eventually passed into the hands of London dealer Mark Weiss for just €3 million. He then arranged for a $10 million private sale through Sotheby’s to an American collector—an almost 150 percent profit, the Art Market Monitor points out.
Nevertheless, it now seems clear the Hals painting’s total lack of provenance should have remained a red flag. This year, concerned by evidence against the Cranach, Sotheby’s turned to Orion Analytical, a Williamstown, Massachusetts-based company which investigates artworks and other cultural property, working with law enforcement to unveil forgeries. New tests found traces of synthetic 20th-century materials during its testing of the painting.
“Orion’s peer-reviewed analyses showed the presence of modern materials used in the painting in a way that meant that it could not have been painted in the 17th century,” said Sotheby’s in a statement.
Related: Plot Thickens In Dispute Over Seized Cranach Painting
According to the Art Newspaper, Weiss has yet to repay his 50 percent share of the sale’s proceeds, and is reportedly calling for additional technical analysis on the painting. To date, there is no evidence that Weiss or other dealers and auction houses now caught up in the fakes controversy had any reason to suspect the painting were not authentic.
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​In another case, the Knoedler forgery trial, some of the most damning testimony came from Orion’s founder, James Martin. Should a new Old Mastery forgery ring be as widespread as is now feared—a list of 25 suspect paintings  that originated with Ruffini is expected to be released—Martin’s forensic expertise will likely continue to factor as additional works are more closely examined.
Related: Conservator Found Rothko Painting in Knoedler Trial to Be a ‘Deliberate Fake’
And yet, the trained “eye” of the expert continues to carry considerable weight. “Technical examination is a good back-up, but the visual confrontation and identification of Old Masters, however difficult and subjective to taste at times, is still of the utmost importance in old-school connoisseurship,” art dealer Bob Haboldt told the Antiques Trade Gazette.
Long a contentious manner, however, the value and supposed infallibility of connoisseurship may now being called into question. Given that so many experts failed to recognize the Hals and Cranach forgeries, it would seem that “the system upon which the art market relies for determining authenticity is not working,”  wrote Bendor Grosvenor on his blog Art History News.
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​Like the Hals, the suspect Cranach has been tested and its materials post-date the artist by some 200 years. Additionally, the surface appears to have been artificially aged. Two other works from the now-dubious source of Ruffini, David with the Head of Goliath by Orazio Gentileschi, and a St. Jerome by Parmigianino, have been publicly identified as suspect. They were displayed, respectively, at London’s National Gallery and New York’sMetropolitan Museum of Art.
Many more are expected to come to light, and the scope of the forger’s activities, and whether they are ongoing, remains unknown. “Any such ability successfully to mimic the styles of Old Masters as varied as Cranach and Hals would be unprecedented in modern times,” Grosvenor opined in theFinancial Times. “Equally skillful is the ability to age these modern creations in such a way as to make them look centuries old.”
With the benefit of hindsight, however, it seems likely the forger’s work will be looked at with a more critical eye. “In the long term this will be treated like the van Meegeren case,” predicted Haboldt. Referring to the notorious 20th-century forger whose works are now held in little esteem, he noted that “afterwards everyone was convinced his imitations and inventions of Vermeer’s ‘early’ style were easily recognizable.”
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By Sarah Cascone

With 45 of his 60 extant works, including a whopper of an altarpiece from the Vatican and every single one of his works in the Louvre’s holdings, you have the evidence before you, and you may, especially if Baroque drama is not your thing, find him a mere follower of an earlier genius. Or, like me, you may be overcome by Valentin, and find in his dark vision truths about our own lives, our pleasures and our shortcomings.
A Valentin show has been a longtime dream of Keith Christiansen, who leads the Met’s European paintings department and who has organized this exhibition with the French art historian Annick Lemoine. Its subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” may be a marketer’s necessity to win attention for a less famous artist, though it sets the exhibition’s stakes. There is nothing by Caravaggio in this exhibition, but his influence and example permeate the Frenchman’s art, and you’ll need to know something about him and his devotees to fully adjudge Valentin’s invention. (Next week, the National Gallery in London is opening its own show, “Beyond Caravaggio,” which places Valentin among a trans-European tradition of Baroque naturalism.)

Caravaggio was the leading painter in Rome at the turn of the 17th century. His two grand paintings of St. Matthew, done in 1600 for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, shocked an older generation but made younger artists swoon. When he bailed town in 1606 — he went on the run after murdering a pimp — he left behind a generation of young painters who emulated his tight cropping, bold light and taste for flesh. Three paintings by other Caravaggisti, as his followers were called, open this show, and the best is a scene by Bartolomeo Manfredi (circa 1582-1622), in which Christ wields a cat-o’-nine-tails on slack-mouthed merchants.
Continue reading the main storyValentin spent his whole career in Rome. He got there from France no later than 1614, and his early paintings display a Caravaggesque taste for low life in the holy city. Soldiers play dice, cheat at cards. Young men play music while getting drunk and eyeing up Gypsies. A young military man offers his palm to a fortune teller while robbers ply him with wine. The figures’ buttery flesh and midaction positioning make these genre scenes uncannily lifelike, and Valentin’s religious pictures, too, relinquish sacred precision for the realities of the flesh. In “Christ and the Adulteress” (circa 1618-22), Pharisees in contemporary armor look every which way as the accused woman’s bodice droops down, and Jesus kneels in the dirt. A painting of John the Baptist, half-naked beneath a flowing red mantle, is probably a self-portrait of Valentin: young, mustachioed, beautiful and on the make.

Like Caravaggio, Valentin lived fast and died young, succumbing at 41 to fever after a night of binge drinking that ended in a fountain. He belonged to a hell-raising confraternity of artists known as the Bentvueghels — “birds of a feather” in Dutch — whose motto celebrated the pleasures of “Bacco, tabacco e Venere”: drinking, smoking and sex. Like Caravaggio, too, he refused to make preparatory drawings, relying instead on the innovative practice of painting from live models. You’ll see favorites recur as you work through this show. A man cast as a pensive Joseph in a 1624-26 painting re-emerges later in a grand allegory, sporting a longer beard and a rug of chest hair.
The difference from his paragon, especially in the paintings after 1620, is in the darkness. For Caravaggio, chiaroscuro — the contrast of light and dark — was principally a painterly conceit, a means of bringing drama to altarpieces like “The Calling of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) or “Seven Acts of Mercy” (1607). The darkness in Valentin’s mature painting, by moving contrast, is pervaded with a melancholy absent in Caravaggio, a haze of lost love and the certainty of death. At the Met, a single, heart-stopping gallery contains six large paintings with musical motifs, and in all of them the parties ache with a worldly regret. Sitting at tables or castoff blocks of Roman marble, soldiers stare into space as musicians strum lutes or beat tambourines. Two paintings featured depressive violists who look down as they aimlessly bow their instruments. Valentin’s nights out in Rome may have been dissolute, but the nights he painted are suffused with pain.

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Rome in the early 17th century was no honeymoon destination. It was a fetid, debauched, wildly unequal metropolis where starving artists hustled for commissions — Valentin got one of his largest from a diamond thief who used art to launder money — and where painterly disputes were settled with rapiers. In this show’s catalog, the art historian Patrizia Cavazzini provides a bulging register of artists brawling in taverns, and even, after Caravaggio’s example, indulging in a little light murder. Valentin’s own roommate, a sculptor, was stabbed to death in 1626. This was not a place suited to the lofty perfection of the High Renaissance, nor even to the moralizing of contemporary Dutch genre painting. Death was everywhere, and that put life on canvas into a more plangent key.
Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. He painted a barnstorming composition of the martyrdom of the saints Processus and Martinian, whose nude bodies, splayed on the rack, bisect a deluge of torturers, mourners and angels. Its vertical collision of saints and seraphim strongly echoes Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy,” and here, too, the high drama of holy suffering is tinged with the violence of the Roman street. At the time, Valentin’s altarpiece was contrasted unfavorably with one by Poussin, another Frenchman in Rome, whose cleaner finishes and bows to antiquity had come into fashion. The rest is canon formation: Valentin became a mere follower, when he was so much more.
The altarpiece is a wildly accomplished work of art, but to modern eyes the most immediate pictures in this momentous exhibition are those melancholy musical paintings, and one in particular. An allegory of the four ages of man, painted around 1628, depicts in a diamond arrangement a boy with a bird cage, a youth with a lute, a grown man with a book, and an elder with a drink. They’re all downcast, reflective, awash in sad thoughts. The man with the book seems skeptical of learning, the boy fiddling with the cage wonders about the meaning of freedom. The mustachioed lutenist plays despite his sorrows, and he looks a lot like John the Baptist in the earlier painting: a lot, that is, like Valentin himself. This world is vanity, but he plays all the same.

“Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” opens Friday and runs through Jan. 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; metmuseum.org.

By JASON FARAGO
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​LONDON — The art dealer Robert Mnuchin was testing his theory of parallels between the painter Willem de Kooning and the sculptor John Chamberlain by juxtaposing their work in his booth at Frieze Masters, the major art fair that opened here this week.
“You’ll see the yellow here and the yellow there,” Mr. Mnuchin said, grabbing a few minutes to sit down amid the flurry of visitors at Frieze’s preview on Wednesday. “We’re fascinated by their mutual interest in color and shapes and abstraction.”
Mr. Mnuchin is planning to pair the artists at his Upper East Side gallery in an exhibition opening on Nov. 2 that features de Kooning paintings from the 1970s and ’80s and Chamberlain sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s.
“You never see them side by side,” Mr. Mnuchin said, pulling out images of Chamberlain’s 1964 sculpture “Spike” and an untitled de Kooning from 1977, as well as Chamberlain’s “Miss Lacy Pink,” from 1962, and de Kooning’s “Screams of Children Come From Seagulls,” from 1975. “You look at these and say, ‘Of course,’” Mr. Mnuchin said.
An imploding of typical categories and boundaries seems to be the name of the game in the art world these days. It was certainly in evidence under the billowing tents at both Frieze Masters and at Frieze London (which focuses on contemporary artists), which jointly drew 27,629 people — a figure on par with last year’s previews — to Regent’s Park on Wednesday.​

​Jeanne Greenberg of Salon 94 gallery, for example, and the Brussels dealer Bernard de Grunne teamed in their shared Frieze Masters booth to present Judy Chicago’s miniature goddess sculptures (Ms. Greenberg) and miniature African figures from the ninth to 17th century (Mr. de Grunne). Ms. Greenberg said she sold the series of Ms. Chicago’s figures for near the asking price of $390,000.
Arnold Lehman, a senior adviser to Phillips auction house since retiring as president of the Brooklyn Museum — home to Ms. Chicago’s influential installation “The Dinner Party” — passed by to say he was pleased to see Ms. Chicago’s black-and-white cartoons for the woven banners in “Dinner Party” in the booth; the museum has them in black and red.
Hauser & Wirth had a strong first day with an eclectic booth at Frieze Masters, selling a small Alexander Calder stabile for $600,000; a Dieter Roth cheese painting for more than $500,000; a Fausto Melotti sculpture for 300,000 euros, or about $335,000; a Francis Picabia painting for $220,000; and two Marlene Dumas works on paper for $45,000 each.
“The concept of the fair works — to expose 6,000 years of art in one room,” said Iwan Wirth, a president of the gallery. “People are price-conscious, but their appetite for great works is unbroken.” Indeed, while the overall climate felt more muted than it was last spring at Art Basel in Switzerland, important works were still changing hands.
Dealers were also encouraged by the results of an auction of the collection of Leslie Waddington, a pioneering Modern-art dealer who died last November, at Christie’s in London on Tuesday night. Every item sold. Francis Picabia’s “Lampe” (1923) — a work on paper in watercolor, India ink and pencil — went for $4.6 million, well over its presale estimate of $1 million to $2 million. It was an auction record for a work on paper by the artist.
The New York dealer Tanya Bonakdar said of Frieze: “It’s better than I thought it was going to be. Every year, you wonder if art fairs have exhausted themselves. That’s definitely not the case. They still keep giving.”

​Janelle Reiring, a founder of Metro Pictures, whose gallery hadn’t been represented at the London fair since 2008, said that fair visitors had responded to her mural by Louise Lawler ($175,000), who has a show opening at the Museum of Modern Art in April. She also sold a Cindy Sherman untitled 2016 portrait for $325,000, and works by Robert Longo, Nina Beier and Camille Henrot. Often, “people are interested in younger artists,” she said.
Matthew Marks said that on the first day, he sold pieces by Rebecca Warren, Ellsworth Kelly and Nan Goldin. “It’s not a frenzy, but it’s still active,” he said.
During the fair’s opening hours, Pace sold “Cave Girl,” a new marble bust by Kevin Francis Gray — who will have a solo show at the gallery in New York in March — for 80,000 pounds, or about $102,000; a small-scale painting of copper wire and gesso, “fourteen/sixteen” (2016), by Prabhavathi Meppayil, for $20,000; and two life-size works by Kohei Nawa, featuring glass-encrusted taxidermied deer, for $380,000 and $230,000.
The Goodman Gallery of South Africa reported that William Kentridge’s “Observer” (2016), a charcoal and red pencil on paper, sold for $450,000.
“The blue chip end is easier,” said the dealer Marianne Boesky, who exhibited Frank Stella paintings from 1958, including his first black painting, “Delta,” at Frieze Masters.
“We’ve been so focused on showing what he’s been doing now, and he is so contemporary,” she said of Mr. Stella. “We wanted to remind people where he cameBy from.”


 By ROBIN POGREBIN 
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​He was born and died in Volpedo, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.

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​Pellizza was a pupil of Pio Sanquirico. He used a divisionist technique in which a painting is created by juxtaposing small dots of paint according to specific color theory.
His most famous work, Il Quarto Stato ("The Fourth Estate") (1901), has become a well-known symbol for progressive and socialist causes in Italy, and throughout Europe. The painting is shown during the opening credits of Bernardo Bertolucci's film 1900 and is currently housed at the Museo del Novecento in Milan. An earlier version is held in the Pinacoteca di Brera.
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Pellizza hanged himself in 1907, after the deaths of his wife and son.
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​The proceeds of the sale allowed its Jewish owners to flee to Switzerland

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One of the most valuable paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is the subject of a new lawsuit which alleges that the piece, Pablo Picasso’s The Actor (1904–5), worth an estimated $100 million, was sold under duress when its owner fled Nazi Germany.
The New York Times reports that Laurel Zuckerman, the great-grandniece of German-Jewish businessman Paul Leffmann and administrator of his estate, filed suit against the museum in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 30. The complaint states that Leffmann was forced to sell his Cologne home and businesses in 1935, leaving the country for Italy two years later.
Related: Report Reveals Germany Returned Nazi-Looted Artworks to Nazi Families Instead of Victims
The couple had stored The Actor with an acquaintance in Switzerland, which saved it from being seized along with most of their possessions. By 1938, however, it became clear that Italy was adopting anti-Semitic policies similar to those of Germany. Residency there became untenable, and the Leffmanns desperately need to raise money to be able to move again.
Leffmann sold The Actor for $13,200 ($12,000 minus the seller’s commission) to two Parisian art dealers, Hugo Perls and Paul Rosenberg, allowing him to flee to with his wife Alice to Switzerland and later Brazil. “The Leffmanns would not have disposed of this seminal work at that time, but for the Nazi and Fascist persecution to which they had been, and without doubt would continue to be, subjected,” states the complaint.
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​The complaint argues that Perls and Rosenberg purchased the artwork for below market value, pointing out that when Rosenberg loaned the artwork to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939, he insured it for $18,000—50 percent more than he had paid just a year earlier.
Thelma Chrysler Foy, who donated the painting to the Met in 1952, purchased The Actor from New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co. in 1941. She paid $22,500, or 70 percent more than what the Leffmanns got for the work.
The complaint also notes that the Met’s listed provenance for the painting inaccurately mentioned an anonymous German collector as having owned it until 1938, even though Leffmann had purchased it in 1912. The museum attributes this omission to incomplete information provided by Perls.
Zuckerman and her attorneys, Herrick, Feinstein LLP, have been seeking the return of the painting from the museum since 2010.
In a statement, the Met insisted it had the “indisputable title” to the painting. “While the Met understands and sympathizes deeply with the losses that Paul and Alice Leffmann endured during the Nazi era, it firmly believes that this painting was not among them.”
The museum alleged that The Actor was sold for “a higher price than any other early Picasso sold by a collector to a dealer during the 1930s.” The Met website describes the painting “simple yet haunting.”

​“We believe the painting is tainted by the history of the Holocaust, and the Leffmanns, given the circumstances under which they sold it, never lost title,” said Lawrence Kaye, who represents Zuckerman, to Reuters.
This isn’t the first time The Actor, which has been on continuous view at the Met since its donation, has made headlines. In January 2010, a visitor to the Met accidentally fell onto the historic canvas, tearing a six inch hole on the work. It was successfully restored in time for the opening of a major Picasso exhibition at the museum in April.
Related: Neue Galerie Returns a Nazi-Looted Painting, Then Buys It Back from Heirs
Last week, the Neue Galerie, also in New York, announced that it had returned and repurchased a work from its collection after learning that it had a disputed provenance with ties to the Nazis. The 1914 nude by German Expressionist artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had been owned by art collector and shoe manufacturer Alfred Hess and his wife, Tekla, but went missing in 1939 when Tekla fled Germany for the UK.

by Sarah Cascone
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