Displaying items by tag: Lawsuit

Michael Altman Fine Art in New York is suing Pace Gallery in Seattle over a damaged painting by Willem de Kooning worth $6.4 million. Michael Altman Fine Art had purchased Untitled IV from Pace last December. The Abstract Expressionist canvas was later sent to a prospective buyer in Dallas who upon receiving the painting discovered a horizontal mark where packing materials had been adhered directly to the canvas. James Sowell, a Dallas-based real estate developer, turned down the painting after seeing the damage.

In a case filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Michael Altman Fine Art claimed that Pace failed to take proper and adequate precautions while packing and handling the work. The gallery is suing to recover the $1.25 million it will cost to repair the painting.  

AXA Art Insurance Co. has leveled a lawsuit against Christie’s over several paintings that were destroyed last October during Hurricane Sandy. The claim states that the auction house failed to secure a valuable art collection that was being kept in one of its storage facilities in Brooklyn, New York despite the ongoing warnings about the damage Hurricane Sandy was expected to bring.

Paintings worth at least $1.5 million, which once belonged to the late cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and his chess champion wife, Jacqueline, were left on the ground floor of the storage facility where they were damaged by rising flood waters. While the suit didn’t specify which works were destroyed, the Piatigorskys’ collection included paintings by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Chaim Soutine.

A rep for Christie’s told the New York Daily News that they have not yet been served with court papers.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against The New Yorker and one of its writers by Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art expert. Biro was the subject of a 16,000-word article about art authentication and the process of matching fingerprints on paintings to the artists who created them. Biro claimed that the article, which was published in The New Yorker in July 2010, left readers with a negative impression of him and his work.

Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed the case saying that the writer, David Grann, did not act “recklessly” or vilify Biro. The ruling, which was released on Thursday, August 1, 2013, applied to Gawker Media, Business Insider, two additional websites and a biography of Jackson Pollock published by Yale University that mentioned Grann’s New Yorker article.

Biro’s lawyer, Richard Altman, said that they plan to appeal the court’s ruling.

In November 2012, two members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York sued the institution for making the public think that the suggested admission fees are mandatory. The historically free institution suggests entry fees of $25 for adults and less for seniors and students.

Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson filed the suit in state court in Manhattan and said that the museum’s fee policy lacks transparency. They also argued that the museum fails to note that the fee is suggested on several of its websites and that it’s only in fine and barely legible print on signs near cash registers. A statute was put in place in 1893 declaring that the Met must remain free in order to continue receiving government funding. Grunewald and Nicholson commissioned a survey of visitors to the museum and found that 85% of patrons believed they had to pay to gain entry.

According to court papers filed by Gerald Lee Jones, who worked at the Met as a floor manager from 2007 until 2011, cashiers were paid in part based on how much they collected from admission fees. The statement, which was filed in late June 2013, also suggested that cashiers were instructed to never volunteer that patrons may pay less than the “recommended” fee.

Harold Holzer, the Met’s senior vice president for public affairs, said that Jones, “one of the many floor managers” had a “glib spin on his experience [at the museum].” Holzer also asserted that the Met tracks how much the cashiers collect because auditors require admission figures. “It has nothing to do with performance evaluation or salary,” said Holzer, adding “The Met will offer its response in due course.”

During the year ending in June 2012, the Met brought in $37.8 million in admissions, about 16% of the museum’s revenue.

Back in December 2012, officials at the New York Public Library released a number of important details pertaining to their $300 million renovation. Part of the project involved clearing out the back portion of the library, which is housed in a landmark building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The plan has 1.2 million volumes being relocated to a storage space under Bryant Park as well as another facility in Princeton, NJ. Most of the exiled books are now available digitally and library officials purposely chose rarely requested books to be relocated. With the newly freed up space, the architecture firm Foster & Partners, plan to create a four-level atrium with curving balconies filled with bookshelves and reading tables overlooking Bryant Park. It will be the first time since the library was built in 1911 that patrons will be able to see the park.

The library received a fair amount of criticism after announcing their plans to renovate and Advocates for Justice, a nonprofit organization, has just filed a lawsuit on behalf of five preservations and scholars. The plaintiffs are arguing that the library is violating its charter and the state’s constitution by removing the aforementioned books. The suit also claims that the library failed to conduct an environmental impact review for the renovation plans. While the library recently applied for building permits, officials claim that they are for “preliminary work” and that the designs have not been finalized.

The busiest public research library in the United States, the New York Public Library is expected to span 100,000 square feet after renovations are complete. Construction is slated to begin this summer and is expected to last until 2018.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has ended a six-year clash with its insurer Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company, recovering almost $6.6 million in legal fees. The battle between the foundation and its insurer began over authentication issues and snowballed to include the repayment of related legal fees.

The dispute began in 2007 when art collector Joe Simon-Whelan sued the foundation’s authentication branch for alleged fraud and conspiracy relating to the purchase of his 1965 Andy Warhol self-portrait, which he paid approximately $200,000 for in 1989 and was later deemed inauthentic. Another collector, Susan Shaer, filed a similar suit again the foundation in 2010 bringing the legal fees doled out to nearly $7 million.

According to a statement released by the foundation, “both suits alleged an absurd scheme to manipulate the prices for Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) artwork yet [they] were forced to dismiss their claims in late 2010…The Foundation’s insurers nevertheless refused to reimburse the Foundation for its legal costs incurred in defending these bogus suits, alleging that the Foundation’s insurance policies did not cover claims of this nature.” The funds have since been repaid by Philadelphia Indemnity and transferred to the foundation’s endowment.

The Andy Warhol Foundation was established in 1987 following the artist’s sudden death. The organization’s mission is to support the creation, presentation and documentation of contemporary visual art.

In February 2013, the Fred L. Emerson Foundation and the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York announced that they would sell a significant painting by the English-born American artist and founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole (1801-1848). The sale of the work, titled Portage Falls on the Genesee (1839) is intended to benefit the institution, which opened to the public in 1955 and became a registered National Historic Landmark in 1964.

Portage Falls was given to the American politician William H. Seward while he was the governor of New York prior to the Civil War. Seward went on to serve as Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and was a dominant figure in the Republican Party during its formative years. After his death in the 1950s, his home and its contents, which included 15,000 items including books, furniture, and works of art, were donated to the Fred L. Emerson Foundation. The Foundation opened the Seward Museum in 1951 and it became a fully independent, not-for-profit institution in 2009; the Cole painting was retained by the foundation.

The work, which depicts what is now Letchworth State Park in western New York, has been on view at the Seward Museum for 170 years and not everyone is pleased with the Foundation’s decision to sell it. A group known as the Seward Legacy Preservation, which formed in April 2013, includes descendants of Seward, and is poised to fight to restore the painting to its former place in the Seward House.

Seward’s great-great-grandson, Ray Messenger, also voiced his opposition to the sale. Although he served as the president of the Seward House’s board until 2009, Messenger was shocked by the decision. On Tuesday, May 7, 2013, Messenger asked a judge to make him the administrator of Seward’s estate, the initial step in filing a lawsuit to block the sale.

Portage Falls, which measures roughly 7 feet by 5 feet, was said to be worth around $20 million dollars in 2007. If the painting is sold, the Foundation and the Seward Museum plan on splitting the profit. The painting is currently being kept in a secure storage location.

When Steven Brooks, a collector of Old Master paintings, purchased Louis-Michel van Loo’s Allegorical Portrait of a Lady as Diana Wounded by Cupid from Sotheby’s in 2004, he was unaware that the work was once owned by the German war criminal Hermann Goering. After it surfaced that Nazis possibly looted the work, Brooks deemed the painting worthless and decided to sue Sotheby’s for not thoroughly researching the work’s provenance.

The painting’s problematic past was revealed when Brooks tried to sell the painting at Christie’s in 2010. Specialists at the auction house discovered that Goering had purchased the painting in 1939, leading Christie’s to decline the offer to sell Portrait of a Lady on behalf of Brooks. Brooks’ lawsuit claims that Sotheby’s also refused to auction the work and won’t refund the nearly $90,000 he spent on the painting in 2004.

While there is no solid proof that the work was looted by Nazis, the uncertainty surrounding the painting makes it unsalable and in turn, monetarily worthless. Sotheby’s 2004 catalogue lacked any information on the painting between 1906 and 1987 and Christie’s was unable to determine anything other than the fact that Goering once owned the work. It is typical for private dealers to avoid works whose ownership cannot be traced between 1933, when the Nazis came to power, and 1945, when World War II ended, because of potentially problematic provenances.

There are currently no claimants for van Loo’s Allegorical Portrait of a Lady as Diana Wounded by Cupid.

Lynn Orr, the former curator of European art at San Francisco’s Fine Art Museums, is suing the institution for illegally dismissing her. Orr claims she was let go for supporting a union demonstration and protesting financial deception. Orr has worked for the museums for 29 years and served as a curator for 11 years until her firing on November 20, 2013.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, April 16, 2013 in San Francisco superior court. In her claim, Orr stated that the museums’ human resources director told her that she was being dismissed because of her performance but she had never been confronted about her work in the past. Orr did say that museum officials criticized her attendance at a demonstration held on September 7, 2013 at San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Museum, which was organized to oppose the museums’ management’s stance in labor negotiations.

Orr’s lawsuit also touched on an incident during which she and other employees claimed that the museums were undervaluing a painting that was to be shipped overseas, which she considered to be deceitful. A fellow employee who objected to the situation was fired within a few months of the incident. Orr is seeking unspecified damages from the city of San Francisco and the private corporation that runs the museums.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the modern-leaning M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the neoclassical California Palace of the Legion of Honor, has been involved in a number of recent uproars. The tumult has included tense labor negotiations, firings of senior staff member such as Orr, and scathing criticism of the museums board’s president, Diane Wilsey.

The heirs of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a prominent German Jewish banker during the early 20^th century, filed a lawsuit against the German state of Bavaria for failing to return a Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) painting that once belonged to their relative. The plaintiffs claim that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), was forced to sell the painting titled Madame Soler (circa 1903) after ending up destitute at the hands of the Nazi regime.

Mendelssohn’s descendants say that the Bavarian State Paintings Collection, a division of the Bavarian state, acquired Madame Soler in 1964 from New York-based art dealer Justin Thannhauser, who had purchased the work from Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in 1934. The plaintiffs have been attempting to seek restitution from the German state since 2009.

Madame Soler, which is from Picasso’s seminal blue period, is said to be worth approximately $100 million.