A Pierre Soulages painting that sold at Christie’s last fall is at the center of a new lawsuit, which alleges that the work was stolen from the plaintiffs’ family decades ago.
Filed in New York State Supreme Court on Monday, the suit concerns Soulages’s 1958 abstraction Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958, which sold for just under $5 million at Christie’s last November during an evening sale of the collection of Patricia G. Ross Weis and Robert F. Weis, who founded the Weis Markets grocery chain.
The suit comes from the Zeckendorf family, real estate developers in New York, who allege that the work was stolen between 1977 and 1980 and was listed from 2008 to 2025 on the London-based Art Loss Register. The family is seeking the proceeds from the sale of the artwork. The suit was first reported on by Crain’s New York and the Real Deal.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are William Lie Zeckendorf and Arthur W. Zeckendorf, two co-chairmen of the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens, as well as James Nicholson and Leslie Nicholson, all of whom are the remaining beneficiaries of the dissolved trust. The defendants in the suit are Jennifer Weis, Collen Ross Weis, and Jonathan Weis, who are each listed as a “personal representative of the Estate of Patricia R. Weis.”
A spokesperson from Weis Markets declined to comment on the suit. An attorney for the Zeckendorf family declined to comment further.
According to both the suit and the provenance provided by Christie’s for the sale, the artwork was sold the year after its creation by the legendary Kootz Gallery, which was known for its early support of the Abstract Expressionists, to Marion Zeckendorf (listed as “Mme William Zeckendorf, New York” by Christie’s). Marion died in 1968 and, according to the suit, the work was included in the inventory of Marion’s estate.
In 1977, the year after the death of her widower, William Zeckendorf Sr., it was distributed to a trust established by Marion’s will. The suit claims that the Soulages was likely stolen in 1977 and found to be missing by 1980, the year that trust was dissolved. The suit adds that the plaintiffs “exercised reasonable due diligence in searching for the Artwork.”
Christie’s provenance records, however, state that the painting passed through the Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer Gallery in New York, and that the gallery sold it to the Weises in 1984. The provenance does not state the year in which Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer received the painting in their inventory or the consignment to sell it.
The complaint adds that “provenance is impossible for multiple reasons” because Marion Zeckendorf did not sell the work prior to her death as it was listed in her estate inventory, adding that neither she nor William Zeckendorf Sr. could not have consigned or sold the work to Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer because they died prior to 1984. It also states that William Zeckendorf Sr. would not have been authorized to sell the work prior to his death “because it was not distributed to him by the trustees of the Marion Zeckendorf Trust.”
The lawsuit also states that the plaintiffs “asserted their claim to the Artwork and demanded its return” ahead of the work’s sale at Christie’s, which the defendants “refused.” Instead of producing an invoice from Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, the defendants allegedly provided an invoice from Niveau Gallery, dated to 1984, “which has multiple inconsistencies with contemporaneous Niveau Gallery invoices on file at the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art and does not evidence any link with a person authorized to transfer title to the Artwork,” according to the suit.
The complaint further alleges that the Niveau invoice provided by the defendants is the wrong color, as Niveau Gallery used gray-colored invoices from approximately 1954 to 1961 before switching to blue-colored invoices after 1961. The defendants’ invoice was gray, instead of blue, per the suit, which claims that invoice is “a fabrication.”
In a statement sent to ARTnews, a Christie’s spokesperson said, “Christie’s was aware of and resolved this issue ahead of the sale. Title of this artwork passed to the buyer, and any remaining financial dispute does not concern Christie’s or its sale.”
When an artwork’s provenance is disputed ahead of an auction, the artwork is often withdrawn from the sale. Instead, the suit states that both parties “agreed that the auction could proceed while preserving Plaintiffs’ claims, and that sale proceeds would be held in escrow pending resolution of the parties’ dispute.” The plaintiffs state that they learned about the auction of the Soulages work on November 10, seven days before its planned sale at Christie’s.
The work hammered at Christie’s for $4 million, with a final sales total of $4,955,000 (including buyer’s premium); it carried a pre-sale estimate of $5 million to $7 million. The 18 lots that sold on November 17 from the Weis collection brought in a total of $218.1 million, well above the $180 million estimated for the 80 lots that family consigned to the auction house.
The Art Loss Register confirmed in an email to ARTnews that it did have a registration of a Soulages work with the title Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 in its database that was active from 2008 to 2025. However, the registration did not include images of the artwork, so “it is difficult to be absolutely certain that the works are one and the same although we worked on that basis,” ALR director James Ratcliffe wrote.
Ratcliffe added that the ALR was in touch with the party that registered the stolen work ahead of its sale at Christie’s, and that the organization “requested that he provide us with further information to substantiate his claim against the work as in the absence of this we would not be in a position to maintain the registration. He did not provide any further information, and instead confirmed to us in writing that he did not wish us to stand in the way of the sale and understood we would be removing the registration from our database.”
The ALR did remove that Soulages listing from its database and notified Christie’s. “The registrant was aware of the location of the sale and was free to take any action he deemed appropriate at that stage,” Ratcliffe added.
