Lawsuit seeks to block LACMA’s Pushkin show

In a legal challenge that aims to block an upcoming show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the grandson of a Russian aristocrat is arguing that 25 of the artworks -- including paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh -- are stolen goods, looted from his family by Lenin’s Bolshevik government in 1918 and later passed to Moscow’s State Pushkin Museum.

The suit, filed Tuesday on behalf of Andre Marc Delocque-Fourcaud in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, argues that the works should be removed from the LACMA exhibition “Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks From the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow,” which is scheduled to open July 27. The suit also contends that the museum owes compensation for damages.

“If they take out the 25 works, I guess they can do the rest of the show,” said Edward E. Klein, New York-based attorney for Delocque-Fourcaud.

The lawsuit doesn’t specify how much compensation they are seeking.

Klein said the action is part of a larger campaign to recover ownership of the works -- which have been shown in 2002 and 2003 in Houston and Atlanta as part of the traveling Pushkin masterworks show -- and win “recognition of the illegal seizure of the works by the Bolsheviks and Lenin 85 years ago.”

But with this particular court action, Klein said, “we’re not seeking seizure of the works. We’re seeking blockage of the show” or compensation.

Officials at LACMA had no comment Tuesday.

Greg Guroff, president of the Foundation for International Arts and Education, a co-sponsor of the traveling exhibition, said that “everyone connected with this has behaved absolutely correctly” and that the suit is effectively an effort to sort out the consequences of the Russian Revolution in a California courthouse.

Klein said he has had two inconclusive conversations about the works with the Los Angeles museum’s general counsel, Thaddeus J. Stauber, and hopes the filing of the suit will prompt more talks.

The show includes 76 paintings from the Pushkin, most never shown in the U.S., including works from the 17th to 20th centuries. The show is to run through Oct. 13 at LACMA, its only West Coast stop. The show was co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Pushkin Museum; and the Foundation for International Arts and Education. Because of time constraints and other issues, Klein said, LACMA is the only institution named in the suit.

Delocque-Fourcaud, a French citizen who is a grandson and heir of Russian art patron Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, is represented by attorneys Klein of New York and E. Randol Schoenberg of Los Angeles. Klein said Delocque-Fourcaud’s family has been trying to recover the works for five decades and has gone to court in Europe three times without success. (He said the family did receive an unspecified settlement payment in 2000 after taking legal action against a museum in Germany.)

This action is the case’s first appearance in a U.S. court, Klein said, adding that he expected much to depend on the court’s view of an agreement last August between the exhibition’s Houston organizers and the U.S. State Department. Under that agreement, the State Department gave museum officials immunity from seizure of the artworks, but Klein suggested that the immunity may have been improperly granted, because his client’s claim on the works may have been understated.

At bottom, Klein said, the argument is that “it should not be permissible for American institutions to traffic in stolen property.”

In their promotional materials for the exhibition, LACMA officials have said that the Pushkin Museum’s inventory includes “works from two outstanding collections formed before the Russian Revolution by Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin.”

Among the most notable of the 25 works Shchukin collected are several Picassos, including “Harlequin and His Companion (The Saltimbanques)” from 1901; “Spanish Woman From Mallorca” from 1905; and the Cubist work “The Violin” from 1912.

Ownership controversies have flared repeatedly in the art world in recent years, including several cases involving World War II.

Early last year, LACMA officials returned a late medieval Persian or Mughal textile canopy to the Princes Czartoryski Foundation Museum in Krakow, Poland. The piece had been in LACMA’s collection since 1971, but provenance research showed it had been seized by the Nazis in 1941.