Displaying items by tag: Lawsuit

A Russian billionaire has accused his ex-wife of secretly selling off pieces of their massive $120 million collection of art, antiques and furniture.

Oil tycoon Shalva Chigirinsky, 62, says in a Manhattan lawsuit that Tatiana Panchenkova, who has accused him of physical abuse, had agreed to preserve the collection.

Troubled Manhattan art dealer Helly Nahmad, who was thrown in prison in April for running an illegal gambling ring, is being sued for allegedly hiding a $20 million painting stolen by the Nazis.

Frenchman Phillippe Maestracci, whose grandfather Oscar Stettiner was a Jewish art dealer when he fled Paris before Hitler’s army invaded in 1939, is suing Nahmad and his billionaire art dealer dad David Nahmad in Manhattan Supreme Court.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

Slightly more than a year after the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced its plan to charge tuition, a group of professors, admitted students and alumni filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday against the school's board of trustees.

The plaintiffs' aim: to stop the school from introducing tuition next fall and to prompt a court investigation into how the board has managed school finances.

The plaintiffs—a group called the Committee to Save Cooper Union Inc.—are represented by the law firm Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff, & Abady, which has previously litigated high-profile cases seeking to halt city plans at places including the High Line and the Atlantic Yards.

One of the Getty's most prized ancient artworks is hanging in a legal balance this week in Italy's highest court, leaving the L.A. museum's leaders feeling as if they have landed in a Franz Kafka tale, a judicial and bureaucratic nightmare they can neither understand nor escape.

But unlike a hapless Kafka character, the Getty has an inkling as to why its nearly life-size statue, known as "Victorious Youth" or the "Getty Bronze," is back in a maze of judicial and investigative proceedings. And rather than suffer passively, the Getty — the world's richest art institution, with a $6-billion endowment — may well draw a line.

The City of North Miami has asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed earlier this month by the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The city is calling MOCA's suit to move some of its artwork and spread it out across South Florida "legally deficient."

"We're not going to let anybody take our art collection and move it somewhere else after so many years of establishing the great MOCA," Councilman Scott Galvin said.

Since 2012, the New York Public Library has received considerable criticism stemming from its plan to renovate its landmark building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. On Wednesday, April 16, the backlash continued when a group of scholars filed a lawsuit stating that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration approved the renovation project without fully evaluating its environmental impact.

The lawsuit argues that the project was approved the same day that the library submitted its application, which did not allow for an adequate assessment of the effects of the renovation. The suit asks the court to annul the approval and assign the matter to the City Council or another agency.

Initially, the New York Public Library planned to clear out the book stacks in the century-old back portion of its building, which would require relocating over three million volumes to a storage space under Bryant Park as well as another facility in Princeton, NJ. In July 2013, a group of historians and preservationists filed a lawsuit asking library officials and the project’s architect, Norman Foster, to reconsider their plan. The group also filed an application to have the library’s iconic Rose Main Reading Room landmarked in order to protect the book stacks. When the city approved the library’s proposal in December 2013, it demanded that the library develop a plan to protect the reading room and create an historical record of any book stacks that could be demolished in the renovation. The library has been working with Foster to create a new design that would retain the reading room and the book stacks. The plan has not yet been released.

Two lawsuits aiming to halt the renovation are still pending.

Las Vegas billionaire Frank Fertitta III is suing a respected Swiss curator accused of standing behind the authenticity of a Mark Rothko painting that turned out to be a fake. Feritta acquired “Untitled (Orange, Red and Blue)” from New York’s disgraced Knoedler gallery in 2008. He paid $7.2 million for the canvas.

Oliver Wick, a Swiss Rotko expert and specialist in American paintings, received $300,000 for the sale. According to court documents, Wick “was aware of substantial evidence that the painting was a forgery” and “conducted no independent research into the authenticity of this fake Rotko.” The painting had been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler museum in Basel, Switzerland, where Wick was a curator.

Knoedler, which closed in 2011, has been accused by multiple clients of selling forged paintings. The forgeries, which were presented as authentic works by Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, had been painted by a Queens-based Chinese artist and sold to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer. Rosales pleaded guilty to nine charges, including wire fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, last September. During her 15-year scheme, Rosales swindled unsuspecting customers out of over $80 million.

David Toren, a retired lawyer from New York, has filed a lawsuit against Germany for the return of artwork in the case surrounding Cornelius Gurlitt. Gurlitt, the son of the German art dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt, is accused of hoarding hundreds of masterpieces stolen by the Nazis.

Toren is asking for the return of Max Liebermann’s “Two Riders on the Beach,” as well as any other works belonging to his family in the Gurlitt trove. The Liebermann painting, which was owned by Toren’s great Uncle, David Friedmann, was one of the first paintings made public when Gurlitt’s trove came to light. Toren filed the lawsuit in U.S. district court in Washington against the federal republic of Germany and the free state of Bavaria. The suit claims that the German government is retaining property that it doesn’t own and demands that authorities return the Liebermann canvas to Toren and pay unspecified damages.

Out of the 1,406 paintings in Gurlitt’s trove, about 970 are suspected of being looted from Jewish families or taken from museums during World War II. Gurlitt’s father was put in charge of selling stolen artworks abroad by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, but secretly hoarded many of them and later claimed that they were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. Gurlitt, who is unemployed, sold a number of the paintings over the years and lived off of the profits.

Two sisters of the late, New York City-based modern artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, filed a $1 million lawsuit against Christie’s in Manhattan’s Federal District Court on Tuesday, March 4. Basquiat’s siblings claim that the auction house tried to sell possible fakes and falsely suggested that a number of the works had been authenticated by the estate.

The works in question are being offered by Alexis Adler, Basquiat’s former girlfriend and roommate, and include poems written on scrap paper, painted clothing, a sketchbook, prints, and collages. The suit states that six of the more than three dozen items being offered were authenticated by the estate in 2007, but one was rejected because the committee did not consider it a work of art. The other objects were never submitted for the authentication committee’s approval. The lawsuit states that despite bypassing the committee, Christie’s included a notice in the auction catalog that the works being offered had been copyrighted by the estate. Basquiat’s sisters are seeking a court order barring the auction house from using the estate’s name in the sale.

The Basquiat auction, which is being held online and at the auction house, began on Monday, March 2 and will run through Monday, March 17.

Basquiat, who rose to fame in the 1980s, died of a drug overdose in 1988. His graffiti-inspired Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings remain highly influential in the realm of contemporary art.