$5m Soulages Painting Sold at Christie's Was Stolen, New York Real Estate Moguls Claim

News Christie’s New York to Auction Rarely Seen $180 Million Weis Collection Rachel Kubrick

A 1958 Pierre Soulages painting that sold at Christie’s last autumn for just shy of $5 million USD is now at the centre of a legal battle between relatives of the late mega-collector Patricia Ross Weis and New York real estate titans the Zeckendorfs.

Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 (1958) went under the hammer during last autumn’s marquee sales as part of the much-anticipated Collection of Robert F and Patricia G Ross Weis auction. The little-known collection made headlines internationally both when it was revealed and when it was sold at Christie’s over several nights, with its dedicated evening sale achieving more than $218 million USD.

In a lawsuit filed on Monday to New York’s Supreme Court, the Zeckendorfs allege that Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 was stolen from the estate of the late Marion Zeckendorf in or around 1977, and as such cannot have been legitimately sold by the Weis family as part of its namesake sale, which took place on 17 November last year.

The plaintiffs, William Lie Zeckendorf, Arthur William Zeckendorf and their cousins, James Nicholson and Leslie Nicholson, are not demanding the return of the painting, but are seeking all proceeds from the sale. The work hammered for £4 million and, with fees, its sale totalled $4,955,000—the funds are currently being held in escrow, according to court documents.

In their legal filing, the heirs of Marion Zeckendorf claim that following Marion’s death in 1968, Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 was placed into trust by executors of her estate. However, they allege that the work was stolen before the trust was terminated and its contents distributed among them in 1980.

Marion was the second wife of the prominent real estate developer William Zeckendorf senior, who at one time owned the Chrysler Building, and worked several times with star architects IM Pei and Le Corbusier. However, in 1965 his development company Webb & Knapp collapsed, with Time magazine writing later that he had “managed to go broke in a big way”.

According to the court documents, the defence—Jennifer, Colleen and Jonathan Weis, representatives of the estate of Patricia R Weis—alleges that the painting was acquired from New York’s now-defunct Niveau Gallery. However, the Zeckendorf family claims that the invoice purporting to confirm this sale contains “multiple inconsistencies” and “does not evidence any link with a person authorised to transfer title to the artwork”.

“If there was a consignment to Niveau Gallery, it was by a thief or the successor in interest to a thief,” the suit says.

Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 was consigned to Christie’s in 2025, at which point the suit claims the Zeckendorfs “promptly asserted their claim to the artwork and demanded its return”, but the Weis family “refused that demand”. The two parties subsequently agreed that the sale could go ahead, with proceeds held in escrow until the dispute is resolved, the document says.

A spokesperson for Christie’s, which is not a party in the suit, confirmed that the auction house was “aware of and resolved this issue ahead of the sale”. They added that the title of the work has now passed to its 2025 buyer, and “any remaining financial dispute does not concern Christie’s or its sale”.

Representatives of both the Weis and Zeckendorf families decline to comment on the case.

The Collection of Robert F and Patricia G Ross Weis sale was announced by Christie’s in September last year. Though it included works by Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst, it was relatively unknown, with the couple behind it having rarely lent or otherwise publicly displayed their paintings.

The couple had housed most of their impressive collection at their home in the small, rural town of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where the Weis Markets supermarket chain, for which Robert served as chairman, was founded in 1912. After their deaths in 2015 and 2024 respectively, their three children chose Christie’s to sell their wide-ranging art collection.

In a statement at the time, Christie’s chief executive Bonnie Brennan described the collection as “both deeply personal and instilled with historical significance, tracing the evolution of modernism through best-in-class examples by 20th-century icons”.

The auction house’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, Max Carter, added: “In few collections of its time or since will you find such thoughtfulness, interconnection and superlative quality.”

Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958 is, according to Christie’s, a “masterful example” of Soulages’s raclage technique, a method that involved scraping away layers of pigment to reveal unexpected colour relationships and depths. Painted towards the end of the 1950s, the work hails from a time when the artist had moved beyond the bold, interlocking black forms of his earlier work and was pioneering a complex process of layering and excavation.