Displaying items by tag: court filings

It is a sad 20th birthday for the Musée Maillol in Paris, which shut its doors indefinitely this weekend. The museum has posted a message on its website that says the closure is due to planned renovation work, but there is more to the story. On February 5, the company that manages the museum, Tecniarte, filed for bankruptcy.

According to court filings, with only €11,000 in cash in its coffers, Tecniarte could not possibly cover its €3.3m debt, which is “due immediately.” The list of creditors has not been made public and the foundation that runs the museum has declined to comment since the bankruptcy filing.

The Department of Justice is giving up its fight to reclaim for Egypt a 3,200-year-old mummy mask that disappeared from that country decades ago and later found its way into the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum.

“The Department of Justice will take no further legal action with respect to the mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer,” U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan said in response to questions from the Post-Dispatch on Monday, the deadline for the Department of Justice if it wished to prolong the court battle.

Museum officials couldn’t be reached immediately for comment. According to court filings, both sides are still discussing payment of the museum’s legal fees.

When the influential American painter Cy Twombly (1928-2011) passed away two years ago, he left the bulk of his artwork and millions of dollars in cash to the Cy Twombly Foundation of New York. The wealth of money and art passed from a trust to the foundation, which is devoted to protecting and promoting Twombly’s legacy. The Cy Twombly Foundation now finds itself embroiled in a lawsuit that was filed on Wednesday, March 13, 2013 in a Delaware state court.

The lawsuit claims that Thomas H. Saliba, one of the four individuals in charge of the foundation, took over $300,000 in unauthorized fees for investment services and assisted another foundation director, attorney Ralph E. Lerner, in pocketing funds. The claim was filed by Nicola Del Roscia, Twombly’s companion and the foundation’s president, and Julie Sylvester, a curator, Twombly expert, and the foundation’s vice president. Roscia and Sylvester also assert that Lerner and Saliba inflated the value of Twombly’s works in order to pad commissions for their own financial gain. Lerner and Saliba have refused to disclose their trustee commissions, making it impossible to determine the extent of their wrongdoing.

The recent lawsuit comes a month after Lerner asked the same Delaware court to appoint Twombly’s son, Alessandro, as a fifth board member in order to break the stalemate over the dispute. Roscia and Sylvester stated in recent court filings that Lerner’s request was an attempt to outmaneuver them. Roscia and Sylvester claim that Lerner hoped to bring Alessandro, the third trustee of Twombly’s trust, on board to help cover up Saliba’s wrongdoing.

While Twombly is a powerful force in the art market, highly inflating the prices of his work could prove dangerous for the foundation by creating confusion about the true value of his art and in turn destabilizing the Twombly market.