Rhode Island School of Design denies claim on Picasso by Alphonse Kann heirs (Q86251593)
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news article, The Art Newspaper
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rhode Island School of Design denies claim on Picasso by Alphonse Kann heirs |
news article, The Art Newspaper |
Statements
Rhode Island School of Design denies claim on Picasso by Alphonse Kann heirs (English)
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The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)’s board of trustees have denied a claim on a painting by Pablo Picasso which the heirs of the prominent art Paris collector Alphonse Kann said was looted in occupied France by the Nazis. The Cubist work, Femme assise au livre (Seated woman with a book) (around 1910-12), was purchased by the university in the US from the Carstairs Gallery in 1951 and has regularly been on public display at the RISD Museum since then. (English)
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Kann (1870-1948), a prominent Jewish art collector and dealer, was known for his astute collecting sense and varied tastes. A naturalised British citizen, he fled France for London just before the Nazi occupation, leaving most of his art behind. Nazis pillaged his residence at St Germain-en-Laye near Paris in October 1940, taking the entire collection there. After the war, most of the 1,202 Nazi-inventoried works were returned to him, but Kann himself never kept a precise record of his collection. (English)
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Kann’s heirs started tracking down other works from his collection in the 1990s, and first made a claim to the Picasso painting at RISD in 2010. The university then commissioned the Nazi-era provenance expert Laurie Stein to investigate the work’s history and “follow the facts wherever they led”. Based on Stein’s report, the museum rejected the claim in 2012.The heirs reasserted their case through the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in 2015, after the Paris-based Kann Association requested its involvement. RISD then commissioned Stein and additional experts in the US and France to research any newly available information, the university says. Stein’s final findings were that that the Picasso, while once owned by Kann, was not looted from his collection. “The claim is not supported by the extremely extensive evidence”, says Roseanne Somerson, the president of RISD. Thousands of documents and archives in several countries were examined and RISD has shared the research findings and source documents with the heirs, according to a statement. (English)
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