Redefining Ownership: Is a Picasso Private Property or a National Treasure?

We may some day realize that the most profound impact technology has had is not in the way we communicate, but in the way we assemble data - from financial statistics to art - and then redefine what it means to own the result. JL

Doreen Carvajal reports in the New York Times:

The legal case being argued in Spain and France highlights a shifting balance between private property and a country’s cultural heritage.At the heart of the matter are questions that many countries are now grappling with: What constitutes a national treasure? And what are the limits of private property rights when it comes to precious art?

After a team of customs agents seized a Picasso portrait of a longhaired woman with dark eyes from a yacht in the Mediterranean in July, the Spanish government flew the precious cargo back here in a special plane fit for a work it considers a national treasure.The painting, “Head of a Young Woman,” from 1906, which is valued at 26 million euros, or $28.3 million, remains locked away in the Spanish capital in government custody. And the man who had owned the Picasso for 40 years, Jaime Botín, a billionaire banker and public figure in Spain, is furiously fighting for its return, asserting that the painting is his private property and has no national significance.

“I am defending the rights of property owners,” Mr. Botín, 79, said in his first interview since the seizure, which he called illegal. “This is my painting. This is not a painting of Spain. This is not a national treasure, and I can do what I want with this painting.”

The legal case, now being argued in two countries, Spain and France, involves more than the indignation of a collector challenging government restrictions. It also highlights a shifting balance between private property and a country’s cultural heritage.

At the heart of the matter are questions that many countries are now grappling with: What constitutes a national treasure? And what are the limits of private property rights when it comes to precious art?

The questions have become more relevant recently as some countries, like Ireland and Germany, seek to amend their laws to try to keep within their borders works that might sell abroad in a booming art market.

“The Picasso case raises the question of whether a state can deny an export at no cost” to the government, said Guiseppe Calabi, a lawyer representing a collector in a similar case involving a Dalí work in Italy. “To declare a work an item of cultural interest destroys the market value.”

Mr. Botín’s case has an added twist: There are critical questions about whether the Picasso has an artistic connection to Spain. Complicating the matter are Mr. Botín’s actions after a Spanish court barred him from exporting his painting in May. He had the painting brought by his yacht to a Corsican harbor — with plans to fly it to a Swiss freeport storage center — when French customs agents seized it.

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In an interview at the headquarters here of the Spanish commercial bank Bankinter, where he is a major shareholder, Mr. Botín said he believes that he will triumph. “There is no possibility that the government is going to succeed, because they do not have the right,” he said. “That is my property. It is like if they came to my house tomorrow in Madrid and said, ‘We like this art of yours.’ ”

A spokesman for Spain’s culture ministry said the government was awaiting the outcome of Mr. Botín’s court appeals before taking any new steps.

The government’s position is that the painting should stay in Spain because it is a “national treasure” — a rare work created around a period when Picasso spent part of the summer of 1906 in the village of Gósol in the Pyrenees. Their experts concluded that “No other similar work existed within Spanish territory,” and that the portrait “is one of the few works executed by the artist during the so-called Gósol period.”

Some Picasso family members and biographers disagree. Authoritative Picasso catalogs and biographies indicate that the portrait was painted in the artist’s studio in Montmartre, the Bateau-Lavoir, where Picasso worked from 1904 to 1909, according to Olivier Picasso, the French grandson of the artist and the author of a biography, and Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier Picasso.

Olivier Picasso said he does not believe the painting has significance for Spain. “The reality,” he said, “is that this painting was more influenced by African sculptures than some roof tiles in a Spanish village.”

John Richardson, Picasso’s longtime biographer, also said that “it could not have been painted at Gósol,” because works from that period were very similar, and this is not of that style. The Culture Ministry acknowledged in an email that the painting was created in Paris but was part of Picasso’s Gósol period.

The work remains guarded in a storage facility at the

Reina Sofía Museum. It is a short drive from Mr. Botín’s office, in an early 20th-century mansion along the Paseo de la Castellana. Now hardly anyone sees it, including Mr. Botín, a trim man with a dry sense of humor, who descends from a Santander banking family.

Mr. Botín bought the Picasso in London in 1977 when he said he still liked collecting, ultimately also amassing works by Corot, Sisley and Turner. “Then came a moment,” he said, “when I realized that I was collecting mechanically. There are many days when I don’t look at my paintings.”

During the Spanish economic crisis in 2012, Mr. Botín said he decided to sell the Picasso portrait and plow the proceeds into his family’s investment company, benefiting his five adult children. Art prices were soaring on the international market.

His feud with the state began that same year when Christie’s in Spain sought an export license to sell the work in London, where it could command higher prices among international buyers. The license request was rejected by Spanish government authorities, and so was Mr. Botín’s appeal in May of this year to a Spanish court.

The case may portend more such clashes. In Italy, art dealers are pressing to liberalize restrictive laws, in the wake of cases in which art was blocked for export abroad for tangential reasons — like the case of a Dalí portrait of his sister that the authorities barred from sale to his home museum in Spain because, they said, the Spanish artist was influenced by the 20th-century “Italian Plastic Values” movement.

Spain has had such a protectionist law for 30 years, with export licenses required for cultural works more than 100 years old.

Mr. Botín is proceeding with a flurry of legal challenges over the export ban and seizure — two in Spanish courts and another one filed in September in Paris. He is also facing a smuggling investigation, although he has not been charged, according to his lawyer, Rafael Mateu de Ros.

Some family members have urged Mr. Botín to leave his home country, and he said he is probably angrier than any of them about the seizure. “But I will stay here in Spain,” he said. “Why? To make sure,” he added, his voice cracking, “that the people who did this to me will pay.”