A Pablo Picasso painting stolen while on loan from the Guggenheim Museum more than six decades ago has resurfaced, and the museum has gone to court to get it back.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation filed suit in New York State Supreme Court this week, according to Hyperallergic, against Massachusetts residents Lawrence Jay Handler and Wendy Cohen Handler, who the museum says currently possess Femme dans un fauteuil (Woman in an Armchair), a small 1918 painting that disappeared from the University of Pittsburgh in 1961.
The story begins on February 6 of that year, when a graduate student and dormitory aide discovered that the small canvas was missing from the university’s Students Union building. The Guggenheim had lent the work for an exhibition during the fall semester and was expecting it back later that month.
Pittsburgh police were notified and the FBI joined the investigation. News of the theft was circulated to institutions across North America and a reward was offered, but nothing turned up. Eventually, the trail went cold. Then, in 2023, Christie’s came calling.
According to the complaint, the Handlers bought the picture from the now-closed Beadleston Fine Art in 1999. Nearly a quarter-century later, the picture was up for private sale at Christie’s. A researcher noticed that the Guggenheim appeared in its provenance in Christian Zervos’s Picasso catalogue raisonné and contacted the museum.
According to Hyperallergic, the Guggenheim says it demanded the painting’s return in August 2023. The Handlers refused, according to the complaint, and the Picasso has been at Christie’s ever since. The museum is now accusing the couple of unlawfully withholding the work and unjustly benefiting from possession of stolen property. It is seeking the painting’s return as well as $3.5 million in compensatory damages.
How the Picasso got from Pittsburgh to a Fifth Avenue gallery remains a mystery. The lawsuit does not say whether the Handlers or Beadleston knew that the work had been stolen when it was sold in 1999.
Picasso painted Femme dans un fauteuil during his honeymoon with his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, near Biarritz. The Guggenheim acquired it from London’s Gallery Zwemmer in 1936. Court filings put its value at between $10,000 and $60,000 at the time of the theft; today it could be worth millions.
Then there is also the logistic wrinkle involving insurance. After the theft, Chubb paid the Guggenheim $7,000. Once the painting resurfaced, the museum repaid the insurer in late 2023, and Chubb subsequently confirmed that title to the work had been restored to the Guggenheim.
The case also has a curious precedent involving the Guggenheim itself. In the late 1980s, the museum sued to recover Marc Chagall’s The Cattle Trader, which it said had been stolen by a mailroom employee decades earlier and eventually sold to an unsuspecting couple through a Madison Avenue gallery. The buyers argued that they had acquired the work in good faith and that the Guggenheim had waited too long to pursue it.
New York’s highest court allowed the museum’s case to proceed in a 1991 decision that helped establish the state as particularly friendly territory for rightful owners trying to recover stolen art, even when it has subsequently been bought in good faith. The dispute was ultimately settled in 1993.
A Guggenheim spokesperson told Hyperallergic, that the museum had tried to resolve the current dispute outside court and was firm that it “is and always has been the painting’s rightful owner.” Representatives for the Handlers did not respond to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment. ARTnews has also reached out.
