In fight over Picasso piece lost during Holocaust, lawmakers side with Jewish family

In 1938, a Jewish family in desperate need of funds to escape the Holocaust during World War II sold a Pablo Picasso painting for $12,000, lawyers said.

Nearly 82 years later, the Supreme Court is poised to decide the fate of the painting, titled “The Actor.”

Descendants of the family staked a claim on the artwork that lower courts rejected. Now 10 current and former members of Congress — including U.S. Reps. David Price, D-N.C., and Deborah Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. — are urging justices to take the case, saying the appeals court flouted what’s known as the HEAR Act in denying their claim.

“If left undisturbed, the decision (by the lower courts) would eviscerate the protections of the act that Congress sought to provide to Holocaust survivors and their families,” lawmakers said an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on Feb. 21.

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 provides a legal remedy for descendants of Jewish families seeking to recover artwork their family members sold under duress during the 1930s and ‘40s, according to the brief.

Courts had previously dismissed their claims as being “untimely,” or outside the statute of limitations, lawmakers said. But the HEAR Act “created a temporary window” for them to be brought forth and considered by setting aside such time-bar defenses, the amicus brief states.

According to Haynes and Boone LLP, which is representing the family, Paul and Alice Leffmann fled Nazi persecution 1937. They later sold “The Actor” for $12,000, or roughly $218,000 in today’s dollars, to get to Switzerland.

The painting was eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1952 and is now worth more than $100 million, Haynes and Boone said.

Laurel Zuckerman — the Leffmanns’ great grand-niece — tried unsuccessfully to get the Met to return the piece to her family, according to the law firm. She filed suit in 2016.

“Zuckerman asserts that the museum cannot be the rightful owner of the painting because it was sold under duress at a price far below its actual value,” Haynes and Boone said.

A New York federal judge rejected her claim and forced the matter up to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found she waited too long to state the family’s claim.

Zuckerman filed a petition for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court in January.

Lawmakers echoed her bid in an amicus brief, which are legal documents filed in appeals court by parties who aren’t part of the lawsuit but have a significant interest, according to the Public Health Law Center.

The current and former members of Congress who signed the brief either sponsored the HEAR Act, helped enact it or were “instrumental” in creating similar Holocaust restitution policies, according to the Charlotte law firm Poyner Spruill LLP, which is representing them.

In rejecting Zuckerman’s appeal, lawmakers said the Second Circuit cited laches — a defense that disallows untimely claims.

“In other words, the court recognized a timeliness defense to a federal law that sought to eliminate timeliness defenses,” according to the brief.

Circuit judges also nixed the suit at its inception before any fact-finding or substantial case development, which lawmakers said is all but guaranteed by the HEAR Act.

“By recognizing a timeliness defense to HEAR Act claims, and by endorsing dismissal on those timeliness grounds at the earliest possible stage of litigation, the court countermanded the fundamental purpose of the Act,” the brief states.