Life Is Short, Art and Real Estate Are Long

The heirs of art dealer Sam Salz are trying to settle some old business. Salz died in 1981 but his widow lived on to be 98 and only passed a few years ago. Now the house he owned on the East End of Long Island has been sold for $14.5m.

Salz’s sons want some compensation for some works of art the widow sold from the estate:

His clients included the Rockefeller family and film stars like Edward G. Robinson. Mr. Salz was 87 when he died in March 1981. By that time he had two sons from a previous marriage and was married to Janet Reisner Traeger-Salz, who continued his art dealership company. She died, also in March, in 2015 at age 98, and the heirs began preparing to put the Southampton manse on the market.

That December, the stepsons, Marc and Andre Salz, sued the widow’s estate, alleging that Ms. Traeger-Salz took at least three paintings—a Claude Monet, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir and an Edgar Degas—from their father’s estate and sold them for millions of dollars, pocketing the profits instead of sharing them with the estate—meaning, of course, Marc and Andre.

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