MoMA, Guggenheim May Continue with Picasso Suit

NEW YORK—U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff has ruled that the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation may proceed with a lawsuit aiming to prove their ownership of two famous Picasso paintings, reports Bloomberg. The museums had filed a pre-emptive complaint against Julius Schoeps, a professor at the University of Potsdam who claimed in letters to the museums that his relative, a German Jewish banker named Paul Robert Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, had been forced to sell Boy Leading a Horse (1905–06) and Le Moulin de la Galette (1900) during the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s.

Schoeps, whose grandmother was a sister of von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, threatened in his letters to sue on the grounds that he and other heirs were the rightful owners of the paintings. In response to the museums' pre-emptive complaint, however, Schoeps said he had not yet been appointed by the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy heirs as a representative of the estate and therefore was not the correct person to be sued. Judge Rakoff dismissed Schoeps's request for dismissal, leaving the parties to decide whether or not to add the other heirs to the case.