Picasso painting OKd for auction

A judge in New York City ruled Tuesday that a Picasso painting can be sold at auction, despite a claim that its former owner was forced by the Nazis to sell it in the 1930s because his family descended from Jews.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued the order four days after Julius H. Schoeps, an heir to Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan to stop the sale.

The judge had temporarily blocked the auction of “Portrait de Angel Fernandez de Soto.” The painting, expected to fetch up to $60 million, was scheduled to be sold at Christie’s today by the Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, a London-based charity.