About this Site

The Actor, a masterwork by Pablo Picasso currently held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, once belonged to Paul and Alice Leffmann, German Jews who fled from Germany to Italy in 1937 to escape the Nazis. Paul was forced to sell the painting in 1938 for a price far below its actual value to finance his and Alice’s safe passage out of Nazi-allied Italy, which had adopted and implemented the Nazi pattern of rampant anti-Semitic policies and outright physical persecution of Jews.

This site chronicles the story of the family’s efforts to seek the return of the painting through the courts—all the way to the United States Supreme Court.