August 10, 2005
Chicago resident Marilynn Alsdorf has announced that she will settle a legal dispute over her Pablo Picasso painting by paying US$ 6.5 million to the grandson of a Jewish woman whom it was stolen by the Nazis during World War II, lawyers in the United States announced on Tuesday. Marilynn Alsdorf decided she would rather pay Thomas Bennigson of Oakland than continue a costly and complicated legal dispute over the 1922 oil painting, her attorney said. She will keep the painting, now valued at more than US$ 12 million, and will be allowed to sell it after the settlement is approved by a judge. Alsdorf and her late husband bought the painting, known as "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White"), for US$ 375,000 (in 1975. When she tried to sell the painting in 2002, experts notified the Art Loss Register in London, which investigated its history. Bennigson's Jewish grandmother Carlota Landsberg entrusted the painting to a Paris art dealer for safekeeping when she fled Berlin in the late 1930s. When Nazis reached Paris, they took the Picasso.
