Displaying items by tag: Supreme Court

On Wednesday, Reed Galin, an investor in a painting by Andrew Wyeth entitled Ice Storm, sued an art dealer in New York State Supreme Court for the proceeds from the May sale of the painting at Christie's.

The painting is at the heart of a long-standing dispute between Galin and disgraced art dealer David Ramus, Galin's a childhood friend.

According to the New York Post's Page Six column, a multimillionaire investor who deliberately keeps himself cash poor through a maze of trusts and byzantine financial arrangements, was ordered by a Supreme court judge to turn over $2 million worth of art, antiques, furs, and jewelry in order to satisfy a longstanding debt. According to the Post, the property in question includes work by Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.

The US Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum in the case of the ownership of Lucas Cranach the Elder's paintings "Adam" and "Eve" (both circa 1530). The artworks originally belonged to Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who in 1940 was forced to flee the Netherlands following the Nazi invasion.

The case, which has been in federal court since 2007, was originally dismissed in the museum's favor in 2012. Goudstikker's daughter-in-law, Marei Von Saher, got a second chance last June, when a judge ruled that the pursuit of her claims did not conflict with US federal policy (see Norton Simon's Nazi-Looted Adam and Eve to Head Back to Court).

It’s the end of a case that lasted more than a decade. France’s supreme court, the Council of State, has ruled that the foreign affair ministry was right to have turned down a restitution claim for three artworks seized by the American army in Austria at the end of World War Two.

They hadn’t been there long. In 1940, a German-American dealer had sold the three drawings by Adriaen Van Ostade, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier to an Austrian dealer in charge of building a permanent collection for a regional museum in Salzburg. The pieces then entered the possession of an Austrian private collector. Suspected of being Nazi loot, they were retrieved by the Allied Forces and repatriated to France.

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.

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.

Last Spring, the Canadian Artists’ Representation (CARFAC) took to the Supreme Court following an eleven-year battle with the National Gallery of Canada to reach an agreement on copyright laws and artist fees. Now it looks as like it has landed an important victory. The collective — which serves Canadian artists much like a union, and calls itself “the national voice” of Canada’s professional artists — has been issued a unanimous decision from the bench that allows an appeal on behalf of artists.

Long battling the NGC, CARFAC regards this decision to represent a landmark victory. This appears especially true because the court typically takes two or three months to decide its ruling, but as the Ottawa Citizen notes, “the judges made their ruling for the artists within minutes of hearing arguments from both sides.”

The New York Public Library has pulled the plug on its planned stack attack.

The NYPL announced Wednesday it was abandoning plans to turn its iconic branch on 42nd St. from a research facility into a circulating library, a scheme that would have required the demolition of the historic book stacks under the landmark building’s Rose Reading Room.

“Throughout this process our focus has been making this library even better for our millions of visitors by creating an improved space for our largest circulating branch,” library president Tony Marx said.

India’s Supreme Court ordered authorities in the southern state of Kerala to set up a museum to help preserve a treasure worth at least $20 billion discovered at a Hindu temple.

The museum may either be attached to the temple or the gold coins, diamonds and other precious stones may be housed in a facility run by the state in its capital Thiruvananthapuram, judges R.V. Raveendran and A.K. Patnaik said in their interim order today in New Delhi. Curators should also be hired to appraise the value of the items, they said.

Bags of diamonds, an 18-foot (5.5 meter) gold necklace and 19 kilograms (42 pounds) of precious coins are among the 900 billion rupees ($20 billion) of items found so far, according to the website of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala. The chambers were opened after a local lawyer asked the court to take stock of what was in the temple amid accusations that it was being mismanaged.

The court also told the state to lock up the remaining riches, left out of display from the planned museum, in a vault.

The temple is run by a trust controlled by descendants of the royal family of Travancore, who ruled an area that is now part of southern Kerala state until after the country gained independence from the British in 1947. The treasure is thought to have been given to the temple by the royal family, the Times of India reported.