En
De
Ru
UkCollector Sues Christie’s Over Picasso Painting Once Owned by a Criminal
Collector Sasan Ghandehari recently filed a lawsuit against Christie’s, alleging that the auction house did not inform him that a painting by Pablo Picasso was owned by someone convicted of drug-related charges before he purchased the work.
According to the Financial Times, which first reported news of the lawsuit, Brewer Management Corporation (BMC) guaranteed it would buy Picasso’s Femme dans un rocking-chair (1956) for £14.5 million if the artwork piece failed to sell during a Christie’s evening sale in London in February 2023.
Related Articles
Descendant of Jewish Collector Sues Christie’s For Whereabouts of Nazi-Looted Egon Schiele Works
US Senator Ron Wyden Calls for Investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Work for Collector Leon Black
The authorized representative of BMC, which is based in the British Virgin Islands, is London-based Ghandehari, according to the Financial Times. Ghandehari, a venture capitalist, appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collector alongside his wife Yassmin.
The lawsuit, filed in the High Court of England Wales, Chancery Division on July 21, alleges that the Femme dans un rocking-chair was owned by José Mestre Sr., also known as José Mestre Fernández, who was investigated by police, sentenced to nine years in prison, and fined €14 million after police found 202 kilos of cocaine hidden on a cargo ship in 2010.
According to the lawsuit, Christie’s told Ghandehari that Mestre’s son, José Mestre Jr, was the owner of the painting at the time of the sale, but BMC says it would have never signed the contract for the third-party guarantee if the auction house had disclosed the drug-related conviction of José Mestre Sr. to Ghandehari.
The lawsuit requests that Christie’s cancel the contract for the third-party guarantee and return the partial payment of £4.8 million.
A third-party guarantee allows a guarantor to receive part of the upside if a work sells; that guarantor also agrees to purchase the work if there are no other buyers. These types of guarantees transfer the risk of a failed sale from a house to an outside party, something that has become increasingly common during high-profile auctions.
The Financial Times noted that Ghandehari had previously guaranteed Picassos sold by Christie’s.
The lawsuit claims that Christie’s was “positively misleading” about the ownership and provenance of Femme dans un rocking-chair and did not disclose “the potential that it could represent the proceeds of crime”. The lawsuit also claims that a senior executive at the auction house told Ghandehari that Mestre Sr. had passed away and that “everything was above board” relating to the ownership history of the painting.
A Christie’s spokesperson told ARTnews, “This is a straight-forward debt claim and Christie’s will robustly defend this claim and continue to pursue the sums rightfully owed to it. Christie’s owes duties of confidentiality to its clients, bidders and buyers but is confident that it has complied with all legal and regulatory obligations in relation to due diligence of the work and our consignor.”
ARTnews has reached out to the legal team representing BMC and Ghandehari.
Descendant of Jewish Collector Sues Christie’s For Whereabouts of Nazi-Looted Egon Schiele Works
A Czech man is claiming to be the rightful owner of several blue-chip artworks that once belonged to a Jewish cabaret performer and collector who was murdered by the Nazis, and has sued Christie’s for information regarding their whereabouts.
Seeking restitution, Milos Vavra filed a petition against Christie’s Inc. in New York Supreme Court on August 7 that demands the auction house disclose the ownership and location of the works once counted among the collection of Franz Friedrich “Fritz” Grünbaum. Vavra is a descendant of Grünbaum and had previously received 50 percent of the sales proceeds from auctions of several restituted works by Egon Schiele that were auctioned by Christie’s.
Related Articles
Collector Sues Christie’s Over Picasso Painting Once Owned by a Criminal
Matt Bangser Joins Art Intelligence Global as Senior Director
In the petition, Vavra said that he had “recently learned that Christie’s entered a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with a purported “family in Switzerland” seeking to auction artworks looted from the Grünbaum Collection” and that it was urgent the auction house disclose this information so that Vavra could file claims on the artwork prior to the sunsetting of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 (“HEAR Act”), 22 U.S.C. § 1621. in late 2026.
The petition included an email from attorney Dennis Glazer on July 16, and an email from Eileen Brankovic, Christie’s international business director in its restitution department, sent to Vavra’s attorney on July 21. The email included claimed that experts at Christie’s had seen these three of the contested works and described two as being “among the highest quality (and potentially most valuable)” works by the famed Austrian Expressionist they had ever seen.
The HEAR Act established a six-year statute of limitations for claims seeking the recovery of Nazi loot. Grünbaum was killed at the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1941, the Nazis forced him to sign a document giving his wife the authority to transfer his property, including his art collection.
“While imprisoned, the Grünbaum Collection, including works by Egon Schiele, was wrongfully taken and dispersed without his consent,” Vavra’s attorney Raymond J. Dowd wrote in his affirmation in support.
Queried about the lawsuit, a Christie’s spokesperson told ARTnews via email that the auction house “has established an unparalleled record of bringing objects with painful World-War-Two era histories to public sale by respecting the law, the ethics of restitution, and the protocols put in place to support a successful outcome, as we are doing in this case.”