Andrew Lloyd Webber charity strikes secret deal over £30m Picasso
- January 09, 2010 17:14
A wealthy art charity set up by music impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber has reached a confidential settlement over the ownership of a £30m Picasso portrait with the heirs of a Jewish banker who claimed that he had been forced to sell the painting during the 1930s by the Nazis. The Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation had to withdraw the 1903 "Blue Period" painting "The Absinthe Drinker" from a planned auction in New York three years ago, after descendants of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy lodged a claim that it had been sold under duress to a Berlin art dealer in 1934.