Displaying items by tag: federal court

In a forgery scandal that shook the art world, the now-shuttered Knoedler Gallery and its former director Ann Freedman will have to go to trial in two cases involving the sale of fake Abstract Expressionist paintings, Manhattan’s federal court ruled on Wednesday, 30 September.  

In his three-page order, Judge Gardephe denied the gallery’s and Freedman’s motions for summary judgment in the lawsuits brought by the New York collector John Howard and Sotheby’s chairman Domenico De Sole and his wife, Eleanore.

After vigorously fighting claims that they knowingly sold a string of fake Abstract Expressionist paintings totalling $60m, the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery and its former director Ann Freedman have quietly settled three of the ten lawsuits brought against them by angry buyers. The settlement terms were not disclosed.

Two of the cases against them, brought in Manhattan federal court, were closed this summer. The Manny Silverman and Richard Feigen galleries settled their suit last Tuesday, August 4.

Manhattan’s federal court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elizabeth Bilinski and 19 other collectors against the Keith Haring Foundation over its refusal to authenticate 111 works.

According to the court papers, Bilinski submitted works she owned by Haring, which she and the other plaintiffs had acquired from Angelo Moreno, a friend of the artist, to the foundation in 2007. But the foundation, without giving a reason, rejected the pieces as “not authentic.” When Bilinski submitted what she considered more evidence of authenticity, including a statement from Moreno, the foundation refused to reconsider its decision. The collectors said that a forensic report indicated that the art could have been created during Haring’s lifetime, and that experts at Sotheby’s believed the works to be authentic, but the auction house refused to sell them without the foundation’s approval.

The IRS taxed a Texas tycoon $40.6 million on the false belief he had taken ownership of a treasure trove of art including works by Picasso, Monet and van Gogh, his widow claims in court. Barbara B. Allbritton sued the United States for herself and the estate of her husband, self-made millionaire Joe L. Allbritton, on Jan. 30 in Federal Court.

Joe Allbritton died in 2012 at 87, ending a life fit for the big screen. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, and graduating from Baylor College of Law, Allbritton took out a $5,000 loan to buy land outside Houston. He made a nice profit selling the land, which was used to build a freeway from Houston to Galveston, and founded San Jacinto Savings and Loan.

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).

An East Hampton man accused of selling dozens of fake paintings and sketches purported to be by famous artists, and using some of the money to buy a submarine, pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday to one count of wire fraud.

Prosecutors said the man, John Re, 54, claimed the pieces were by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and caused about $2.5 million in losses to victims. For nine years beginning in 2005, Mr. Re tricked art collectors by creating a false provenance, the document that shows the history of a piece of art, prosecutors said. He bought the submarine, which he called the Deep Quest, with the proceeds from a fake Pollock painting, they said.

In the spring of 2010, a Queens foundry owner offered to sell a bronze sculpture of a U.S. flag to an art collector. The creator, the foundry owner said, was American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, and the price was around $10 million.

On Thursday, the foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty in January to three counts of wire fraud, including one for making an unauthorized copy of the sculpture, named “Flag,” and creating false documents purporting that it was a rare gift from Mr. Johns.

In what has been termed a “document dump”, previously undisclosed information and inflammatory allegations in two of the Knoedler gallery art-forgery lawsuits are now public for the first time. Last Wednesday, Knoedler, its former director Ann Freedman, the head of a related holding company Michael Hammer, and a former employee Jaime Andrade filed motions seeking to dismiss the lawsuits. The next day, the collectors Eleanore and Domenico De Sole and John Howard struck back, arguing that their cases must go to trial and accusing Freedman of perjury “on multiple occasions, including before this court”, a charge she vigorously denies.

More than 500 pages of legal arguments and thousands of pages of exhibits are now before Manhattan’s federal court.

The American contemporary artist, Jasper Johns, testified in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, January 23, saying that he never authorized foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, to make a bronze copy of his Sculptmetal painting, ‘Flag.’ Johns had given Ramnarine a mold of the work in 1990 with instructions to make a single wax cast mold.

Prosecutors are trying to prove that Ramnarine, owner of the Empire Bronze Art Foundry in Long Island City, Queens, attempted to sell an unauthorized bronze sculpture of the painting in 2010. Johns stated in court that Ramnarine had never returned the original mold to him and that somebody later showed him a flag sculpture that he had never seen before, but he believed had been made from the mold in Ramnarine’s possession.

Ramnarine attempted to seek a buyer for the alleged Johns sculpture, telling interested parties that he was willing to sell the work for $11 million. Potential buyers were suspicious of Ramnarine as Johns had made only six ‘Flag’ sculptures and had kept several in his own possession (another is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago and another was given to President John F. Kennedy by the art dealer Leo Castelli). In an attempt to quell wariness, Ramnarine would provide interested parties with a letter said to be from Johns as well as a certificate of authenticity. Johns said he had nothing to do with either document.

Ramnarine has pleaded not guilty to the charges levelled against him.