The Zeckondorf family has accused the co-owners of a Pennsylvania supermarket chain of selling stolen art.
The Zeckondorfs, a legacy New York office developer, filed a lawsuit against the heirs of Robert and Patricia Weis, who own a nearly two-thirds stake in Weis Markets, accusing them of auctioning a painting stolen a half century ago from a Zeckondorf patriarch, Crain’s New York reported.
The painting, a mostly black abstract work by Pierre Soulages dubbed “Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958,” sold last fall at Christie’s New York art auction for $4.95 million.
The Zeckondorfs seek the proceeds from the sale — but not the artwork.
The family claims the Soulages painting once hung in the Beekman Place living room of Marion Zeckendorf, second of William Zeckendorf Sr.’s four wives, according to the complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court.
The Zeckendorf patriarch was among New York’s leading builders who had pieced together the land under the United Nations. His 1970 autobiography is dedicated to his beloved Marion, killed in a 1968 plane crash.
The Zeckendorf heirs allege the Soulages painting was stolen in or around 1977, a year after William Sr. died after declaring bankruptcy. They said the family reported the theft to an art loss registry and remained on that list through last year.
According to the lawsuit, the Weiss family had acquired the painting from a prominent New York gallery, with documents containing a muddied provenance.
The Zeckendorfs said the Weis family provided an invoice showing their parents acquired the painting from Niveau Gallery in 1984 — only the document allegedly has “multiple inconsistencies” with contemporaneous Niveau invoices on file with the Smithsonian Institution.
The Niveau gallery on Madison Avenue was across the street from the Carlyle Hotel.
“The purported Niveau invoice is the wrong color. The color stationery for Niveau was changed by 1961 to blue from gray. The header on defendants’ purported invoice is the older gray color used between approximately 1954 and 1961. Since Marion owned the artwork at the time of her death in 1968, the gray Niveau invoice is a fabrication,” reads the complaint.
“If there was a consignment to Niveau Gallery, it was by a thief or the successor in interest to a thief,” the suit claims.
The plaintiffs in the Soulages lawsuit include William Sr.’s grandsons, William Lie Zeckendorf and Arthur William Zeckendorf, plus their cousins James Nicholson and Leslie Nicholson.
The Zeckendorf family’s recent developments include luxury towers 15 Central Park West and 520 Park Avenue. They’re close to completing two West Village apartment towers at 80 Clarkson St., where a duplex penthouse sold for $80 million.
The defendants are Robert and Patricia Weis’s children, including Jonathan Weis, CEO of Weis Markets, and Jennifer Weis and Colleen Ross Weis. The family controls 61 percent of Weis Markets, with 200 stores and a $2 billion stock market value, according to Crain’s.
– Dana Bartholomew
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