Marilynn alsdorf picasso biography

Early life Marilynn Alsdorf, née Bruder, was born in 1925 and grew up in the Rogers Park area on the Far North Side of Chicago.
A Chicago woman will settle a legal dispute over her Picasso painting by paying £3.8m to the grandson of a Jewish woman who lost the art to Nazis during the.
Two of Chicago's most important cultural patrons.

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Dispute over stolen Picasso settled

A Chicago woman will settle a legal dispute over her Pablo Picasso painting by paying US$6.5 million to the grandson of a Jewish woman who lost it to Nazis during World War II, attorneys said 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 Richard Chapman said. She will keep the painting, now valued at more than US$12 million, and will sell it after the settlement is approved by a federal judge.

Alsdorf and her late husband bought the painting, known as Femme en blanc (Woman in White), for US$375,000 in 1975. It was sitting in the window of a New York gallery, Chapman said.

PHOTO: AP

"This was a reputable dealer, not a back-alley thing," Chapman said. "She had no knowledge that there had been any impropriety at all."

When Alsdorf tried to sell the painting in 2002, experts notified the Art Loss Register in London, which investigated its history.

Bennigson's Jewish grandmoth

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News:

Whose Picasso is it?

The Chicago Tribune 19 January 2003
Howard Reich

When Chicago philanthropists James and Marilynn Alsdorf purchased Picasso's "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White") from a New York art dealer in 1975, their receipt carried only three words regarding the painting's previous ownership: "Private Collection, Paris."

At the time, many art collectors and dealers did not bother to inquire whether a painting might have been looted by the Nazis from Holocaust victims, then resold after World War II on the international marketplace.

Today, few legitimate dealers, collectors or curators would touch a painting utterly lacking in documentation on its WWII-era provenance, for fear that a Holocaust survivor or an heir might emerge to prove that the art work had been stolen by the Germans. And a phrase as cryptic as "Private Collection, Paris" would be considered so vague as to raise more questions than it answers.

Art commerce has changed dramatically in the 28 years that Marilynn Alsdorf (whose husband died in 1990) has o

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The Collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf

Superb works spanning Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art are among the highlights of one of the finest cross-category collections ever presented at auction

For renowned Chicago collectors and philanthropists James and Marilynn Alsdorf, collecting art represented a unique opportunity for exploration, adventure, and the pursuit of beauty. ‘We looked for objects,’ Marilynn said, ‘to delight our eyes and our souls.’ Over the course of their four-decade marriage, the couple assembled a remarkable collection of artworks and objects spanning all eras and areas of the world.

‘The Alsdorf Collection is an example of cross-category collecting at its finest,’ says Christie’s Chairman of the Americas Marc Porter. ‘It is crowned by masterpieces in the collecting realms of antiquities, works on paper, European and Latin American art, and Indian and Southeast Asian art.’ In addition, some of the biggest names of modern and contemporary art are represented,