Viewing page 10 of 45

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

JACQUES SELIGMANN & CO.,INC.
5 East 57th Street
New York 22, N.Y.

March 25, 1946

Dear Mr. Bernheim:

This morning I received simultaneously your letter of March 18th and a cable from my brother François Gerard, repeating the request made in your letter. You seem to be "surprised"....and I can assure you that I am a great deal more surprised than you are, as it is the second time in the space of a year that you suspect me the first time of having run away with your paintings and your money, and you seem to infer the same thing in your letter of March 18th.

I thought I made it perfectly clear to you that I did not care for your style and prose, and that is one of the reasons that I am so surprised at your starting all over such incredible blunders, particularly as you are asking me to do you a favor.  Had I received the letter you referred to, of two months ago, I would have tried in spite of the difficulties involved to turn over your paintings to Jacques Helft who is a childhood friend of mine, and I would have been only too pleased to oblige him. Further, in view of the telephone conversation I had with him a little while ago I doubt very much that he ever told you that "I did not want", as you write, to turn over the two paintings to him. Neither he nor I could make out what the message he had received actually meant, and not having been authorized by you it would have been hardly ethical to turn over to him paintings which belonged to a third party and which were in my safe keeping.

As long as we are on this particular topic, I should also like to point out to you that you constantly refer to these paintings [[strikethrough]] to be [[/strikethrough]] as "yours" and you also talk about "your" money. All the papers were drawn up in the name of Mr. Georges Bernheim, your father, so that to be legalistic I would not have to accept your instructions and the American Treasury most probably will not.

However, to go back to the legal angle of your request, my attention has just been called by my lawyer to the fact that you want me to sell to Jacques Helft two paintings for the sum of $5,500 which were consigned to me for $8,100. You seem to forget that all these transactions were, and are, to be authorized by the Treasury Department and that when the paintings were transferred from Durand-Ruel to my firm, your consignment values were given to me as counter-values. In other words, I was authorized by the Treasury to part with these paintings provided I would deposit in a blocked account in your father's name the sum at which these paintings were consigned. I could not thus today, even if I wanted to show you any good will, part with these paintings under those conditions without another license amending the one granted me previously. The tone of your epistles does not encourage me to go through these new formalities.

After your first cables and letters of about a year ago which were full of innuendos and threats, I told you that your paintings were being de-

deposited in a warehouse.....