Chicago ? A Chicago art collector has agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle a claim that a Picasso oil painting she bought in 1975 was looted by the Nazis.

Marilynn Alsdorf, who acquired Picasso’s “Femme en blanc” (“Woman in White”) from New York art dealer Stephen Hahn for $357,000, will pay the sum to Californian Thomas Bennigson, whose grandmother owned the painting before it was confiscated during the Holocaust.

Though Alsdorf has fought Bennigson’s claim since 2002, when he sued for $10 million in California state court, she agreed to settle after attorneys for both parties met June 13 in Los Angeles before Magistrate Judge Margaret Nagle of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

“I think she has very personal reasons for doing it,” said Alsdorf’s attorney, Richard Chapman, adding that Alsdorf would not comment on the case.

Alsdorf is “maintaining that the painting had been purchased in good faith with proper legal title,” according to a statement released by the Chicago law firm representing her, FagelHaber LLC, but she “agreed to the settlement citing her advanced age and the need to resolve financial claims so her commitments to family and charitable organizations may be completed.” Alsdorf is 80.

But Bennigson’s attorney disputes Alsdorf’s contention that she owned the painting legally.

“I think it’s very clear that she didn’t get good title, and that’s why we had a lawsuit,” said E. Randol Schoenberg of the Los Angeles firm Burris & Schoenberg LLP.

“It was clear that Mrs. Alsdorf had no (legal) defense, that this painting had been stolen during the Nazi era.”

The battle over the painting began in 2001, when Alsdorf, through a California art dealer, sent the Picasso to a prospective buyer in France. But the Parisian art dealer checked the provenance of the work with the Art Loss Register, a London-based clearinghouse for stolen art.

The Art Loss Register determined that the painting had been listed in an extensive 1947 text detailing Nazi-plundered art.