Private Property or Patrimony? The Fight Over a Picasso
By DOREEN CARVAJAL

MADRID — 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.

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.”

私人藏畫「是國寶」 西班牙強扣畢卡索

西班牙富豪柏汀7月將西班牙畫家畢卡索畫作「年輕女子頭像」放在遊艇上運到國外，準備拍賣，西班牙政府卻說這幅畫是國寶，不能隨便運出國，強行送到國家博物館保存，引發政府是否能任意將私人財產列為「國寶」的爭議。

紐約時報報導，「年輕女子頭像」繪於1906年，市值約兩千六百萬歐元（約台幣9.5億元）。79歲的柏汀是身價數十億美元的銀行家，他40年前在倫敦買到這幅畫運回西班牙，2012年西班牙經濟危機時，國際市場上的藝品價格飆漲，他決定把畫賣掉，收益歸五個成年子女所有。西班牙佳士得拍賣行向政府申請畫作的出口許可證，準備把畫運到倫敦拍賣，因為當地有許多國際買家，成交價會比較高，西班牙政府卻駁回申請。今年5月柏汀向西班牙法院申訴，法院也不許畫作出口。

今年7月，柏汀把畫作放到遊艇上，運到地中海上的法國科西嘉島，準備再轉運到瑞士，卻被法國海關人員沒收，後來西班牙政府派專機把畫作運到首都馬德里，鎖進「索菲婭王后國家藝術中心博物館」的庫房。

柏汀不滿畫作被禁止出口與沒收，在西班牙提起兩件訴訟，9月又在巴黎提告。他在畫作被沒收後首次受訪時說：「我是在捍衛私人財產。這幅畫屬於我，不屬於西班牙，不是國寶，我可以隨意處置它。」西班牙文化部說，在法院判決前，政府不會有新動作。

西班牙政府認為，畢卡索1960年夏天有段時間在北部加泰隆尼亞的戈索村度過，創作了一些畫，而這幅畫就創作於「戈索時期」，所以是國寶。畢卡索家族認可的傳記卻記載，畢卡索是在巴黎蒙馬特「洗衣船」工作室創作這幅畫。西班牙文化部承認這幅畫創作於巴黎，但強調是戈索時期作品。

政府宣稱私有畫作為國寶的案例也在義大利發生。義大利政府禁止收藏家把西班牙畫家達利為姊妹繪製的肖像賣給西班牙博物館，因為達利受廿世紀義大利藝術運動的影響。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/arts/design/private-property-or-patrimony-the-fight-over-a-picasso.html

2015-10-13．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯李京倫