Displaying items by tag: legal dispute

The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans was found guilty of copyright infringement in a legal dispute over a portrait he created in 2011. A civil court in Antwerp ruled on 15 January that Tuymans’s painting "A Belgian Politician"—a dramatically cropped image of the MP Jean-Marie Dedecker—borrowed too heavily from a photograph taken one year earlier by Katrijn Van Giel, a photojournalist for the Flemish newspaper "De Standaard."

The court has forbidden Tuymans from publicly exhibiting the painting or making additional versions of the work; he faces a €500,000 penalty if he does not comply.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has launched a grant program to help artists and other creative professionals tackle pressing international and social issues. The Artist as Activist program offers artists, designers and other creative thinkers the opportunity for a two-year fellowship as well as smaller, ongoing travel and research grants. The foundation is now accepting proposals via an open call on its website.

The Rauschenberg Foundation suffered a blow in court last month when a Florida judge awarded $24.6m to three of its trustees following a long-running legal dispute.

The trustees sued the foundation for compensation for their “extraordinary services” in administering the trust. Under Florida law, trustees are entitled to “a reasonable fee” should the terms of the trust not specify their remuneration.

The trustees, Bennet Grutman, Darryl Pottorf and Bill Goldston, argued that they deserved a combined sum in the region of $51m to $55m. The foundation argued that this figure should be around $375,000 only.

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary evening art auction garnered over $127 million on February 14, 2013, the highest total ever for a February sale of its kind at Christie’s London. Out of the 72 lots presented, 65 were sold; the auction total cruised past the pre-sale estimate of $86.8 million to $120.8 million.

The top lot of the night was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) text-laden acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas titled Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983), which sold for $14.5 million. French collector John Sayegh-Belchatowski purchased the work, which carried a third-party guarantee. In 2012, Museum Security was pulled from a Christie’s New York auction after a legal dispute between an owner, the British aristocrat Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, and dealers, Gerard Faggionato and Alberto Mugrabi, broke out. The case was settled out of court and the work was re-offered at Christie’s last night.

Other highlights from the blockbuster sale include Gerhard Richter’s (b. 1932) Abstraktes Bild (889-14) (2004), which sold to a telephone bidder for $13.2 million; Francis Bacon’s (1902-1992) Man in Blue VI (1954), which was also snapped up by a telephone bidder for $7.8 million; and David Hockney’s (b. 1937) figurative painting Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes (1963), which went for $5.5 million.

Basquiat, Bacon, and Richter garnered major sales at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, who’s contemporary sale the night before brought $116 million, proving that the category has not lost its edge in the art market.