Christie’s to sell Blue Period Picasso portrait whose ownership was subject of legal dispute

Picasso portrait, once center of dispute, for sale

LONDON — Christie’s auction house said Wednesday that it will sell a celebrated Pablo Picasso portrait that was the subject of a dispute about its Nazi-era ownership.

“Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (The Absinthe Drinker)” is expected to fetch between 30 million pounds and 40 million pounds ($45 million and $60 million) at an auction in London on June 23.

The 1903 portrait, from Picasso’s Blue Period, is being sold by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s charitable foundation. Proceeds will go to its work promoting the arts.

The painting — of a fellow artist with whom the young Picasso shared a studio — was withdrawn from sale in New York in 2006 after the heir of a Berlin banker who owned it in the 1930s claimed his ancestor was forced to sell it under Nazi intimidation.

U.S. courts threw out the lawsuit, and Christie’s said the issue had now been resolved “by agreement.”

Jussi Pylkkanen, head of Christie’s Europe, Russia and Middle East division, said the painting was “one of the most important works of art to be offered at auction in decades” and could sell for a very high price.

He sad recent sales had showed “there is a huge appetite for 20th-century modernism.”

Despite the global financial meltdown, artworks at the highest end of the price scale have been selling for record sums.

Last month Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture “Walking Man I” sold at Sotheby’s in London for just over $104.3 million, the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction.

The record for a Picasso is only slightly less — $104.17 million, paid in New York in 2004 for “Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice).”