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Posted on 08/14/2026 6:21:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A Pablo Picasso painting stolen while on loan from the Guggenheim Museum more than six decades ago has resurfaced, and the museum has gone to court to get it back.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation filed suit in New York State Supreme Court this week, according to Hyperallergic, against Massachusetts residents Lawrence Jay Handler and Wendy Cohen Handler, who the museum says currently possess Femme dans un fauteuil (Woman in an Armchair), a small 1918 painting that disappeared from the University of Pittsburgh in 1961.
The story begins on February 5 of that year, when a graduate student and dormitory aide discovered that the small canvas was missing from the university’s Students Union building. The Guggenheim had lent the work for an exhibition during the fall semester and was expecting it back later that month.
Pittsburgh police were notified and the FBI joined the investigation. News of the theft was circulated to institutions across North America and a reward was offered, but nothing turned up. The theft was even covered in ARTnews, twice. Eventually, the trail went cold. Then, in 2023, Christie’s came calling.
According to the complaint, the Handlers bought the picture from the now-closed Beadleston Fine Art in 1999. Nearly a quarter-century later, the picture was up for private sale at Christie’s. A researcher noticed that the Guggenheim appeared in its provenance in Christian Zervos’s Picasso catalogue raisonné and contacted the museum.
According to Hyperallergic, the Guggenheim says it demanded the painting’s return in August 2023. The Handlers refused, according to the complaint, and the Picasso has been at Christie’s ever since. The dispute did not immediately end up in court. According to the complaint, the two sides spent nearly three years trying to resolve the matter, from August 2023 through July of this year. In February 2024, a Guggenheim representative and a Picasso expert went to Christie’s to examine the painting.
The museum is now accusing the couple of unlawfully withholding the work and unjustly benefiting from possession of stolen property. The Guggenheim is seeking the painting’s return and between $3.5 million and $5 million in compensatory damages, according to a Commercial Division filing dated August 13.
How the Picasso got from Pittsburgh to a Fifth Avenue gallery remains a mystery. The lawsuit does not say whether the Handlers or Beadleston knew that the work had been stolen when it was sold in 1999.
Picasso painted Femme dans un fauteuil during his honeymoon with his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, near Biarritz. The Guggenheim acquired it from London’s Gallery Zwemmer in 1936. Court filings put its value at between $10,000 and $60,000 at the time of the theft; today it could be worth millions.
Then there is also the logistic wrinkle involving insurance. After the theft, Chubb paid the Guggenheim $7,000. Once the painting resurfaced, the museum repaid the insurer in late 2023, and Chubb subsequently confirmed that title to the work had been restored to the Guggenheim.
The case also has a curious precedent involving the Guggenheim itself. In the late 1980s, the museum sued to recover Marc Chagall’s The Cattle Trader, which it said had been stolen by a mailroom employee decades earlier and eventually sold to an unsuspecting couple through a Madison Avenue gallery. The buyers argued that they had acquired the work in good faith and that the Guggenheim had waited too long to pursue it.
New York’s highest court allowed the museum’s case to proceed in a 1991 decision that helped establish the state as particularly friendly territory for rightful owners trying to recover stolen art, even when it has subsequently been bought in good faith. The dispute was ultimately settled in 1993.
A Guggenheim spokesperson told Hyperallergic, that the museum had tried to resolve the current dispute outside court and was firm that it “is and always has been the painting’s rightful owner.” Representatives for the Handlers did not immediately respond to an ARTnews request for comment.
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Banachek ?
So, where is it, at the Handler’s or Christie’s? If Christie’s, why are the Handler’s blamed for being gullible dupes? If that were a crime, a lot of us should be worried.
Look it up. Picasso painted _a lot_ of “Woman in an Armchair” paintings!
…Doesn’t undermine its value or the seriousness of theft. Just hard to know which one they’re talking about!
Why?
As always a Seinfeld reference...
Lois: Have you designed any buildings in New York?
George Costanza: Have you seen the new addition to the Guggenheim?
Lois: You did that?
George Costanza: Yep. And it didn’t take very long either.
Was that wrong?
Should I have not done that?
Why do we never hear of a Hunter Biden painting being stolen?
Security must be really tight around those works of art.
😀
The University of Pittsburgh should pay the Handler’s what they paid for the painting, and the Handler’s should return the painting to The Guggenheim.
Not sure what all the fuss is about. Anyone can go online at ETSY and purchase a perfectly fine giclee reproduction of any artist’s painting in a variety of sizes, priced from fifty to a few thousand bucks for outsized mural-sized versions. And you can’t tell the difference in appearance from the original. Some people just don’t have enough losses in their lives they need to go out and manufacture themselves some.
It is a Picasso. Let them keep it.
Important to know.
Because knowingly receiving stolen property is a crime.
They can even go after you if they can argue that any reasonable person should have known.
Since they are not saying that it is probable that they know that both parties acted in ignorance.
The painting belongs to the Guggenheim Museum..................
Yes. Handlers should be prosecuted.
I would agree. Their claim of ownership is superior to any other party.
OMG.
From hallowed antiquity.
There was a newspaper editor from Maine who built a weather vane, and installed it on his barn. Someone stole it years later, and he later saw that it was for sale in Christies’ catalog. He had photographs (pre-digital age) of it on his barn, and in his workshop. He called Christie’s in New York to make them aware of the situation, and they basically told him to pound salt. He wrote about the situation in the moderate circulation (pre-internet) local newspaper, and wire services picked up the story, but it did not have much effect. He then gathered up his evidence, including a photograph in Christie’s catalog, and drove down to Manhattan, and went to the police percinct wherein Christies was located and reported the situation.
Christies did not tell the burgulary division to pound salt, and eventually he recovered his property. An account was published in Yankee Magazine (Publisher of the Old Farmers Almanac) some years later, where I read about it.
There was also a problem with people driving up to Connecticutt and stealing slate gravestones for use as coffee tables (engraved side up) in trendy Manhattan apartments.
The buyers argued that they had acquired the work in good faith
———
That bit of nonsense was settled about 5000 years ago. It doesn’t belong to them, even if they didn’t know.
LOL It takes great skill to weave a Seinfeld reference into any conversation :0)
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