Lost Art by Anja Shortland

Author:Anja Shortland [Shortland, Anja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914414039
Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The ALR had to find Charlotte Landsberg fast, but it could not search the German archives for her documents unless it represented her (unknown) heirs. More genealogical research was urgently required. Sarah Jackson found that Robert Landsberg had died in 1932. There were rumours his widow had emigrated to Palestine, Paris or perhaps to Argentina in the late 1930s. The ALR contacted every organisation in the world tracking Jewish refugees to help it trace Charlotte Landsberg. Silva-Casa could not find any post-war correspondence between her and Thannhauser in its archive. However, archivists in the Wiedergutmachungsämter107 in Berlin unearthed a copy of a letter from Thannhauser to Landsberg about the stolen Picasso. Writing to her at an exclusive residential hotel in New York in 1958, Thannhauser confirmed Landsberg’s ownership of the painting to enable her to make a compensation claim. Jackson gave the hotel a call, but no one in the office knew of a Mrs Landsberg. When she sent someone to make enquiries in person, however, one of the doormen remembered the old lady, saying she had passed away in the early 1990s. He also recalled she had been visited frequently by her grandson. The search therefore moved on to the death registers of New York. Indeed, a Carlotta Landsberg had passed away in Manhattan in 1994 and her death was reported by her grandson, a Mr Thomas Bennigson from Ohio.

The ALR traced Bennigson across the USA to California, where he was studying for a law degree at Berkeley. The ALR’s initial approach was met with scepticism.108 Here was a foreign company proposing to negotiate a seven-figure compensation claim for a painting Bennigson knew nothing about. He had been very close to his grandmother, but she had never mentioned Femme en Blanc to him. Was this a scam? As the ALR asked for a percentage recovery fee rather than a down payment, he decided to give it a try. Bennigson provided the ALR with documents proving he was Carlotta Landsberg’s only living descendant and heir. He appointed the ALR as his proxy, so it could once more search the German archives for the correspondence detailing Landsberg’s efforts to recover her artwork(s) after the war. This time it struck gold: Landsberg had never given up the search for her missing Picasso. Even though she had accepted some money from the German government in compensation in 1969, it was on the understanding that both sides would keep looking for the painting. The transaction would be reversed as soon as the picture was restored to her. Even in advanced old age Landsberg had kept up a regular correspondence with the German authorities to confirm her search was ongoing, but unfortunately it had remained fruitless.

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