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Wednesday, 31 August 2011 05:09

Former NYC art dealers disappeared with $15M in Art, suit claims

A photo of "Nu Couche" by Pablo Picasso. A drawing by the same name was listed among the allegedly stolen artworks. A photo of "Nu Couche" by Pablo Picasso. A drawing by the same name was listed among the allegedly stolen artworks. Flickr/cosmonautica

A Pennsylvania art collector filed a lawsuit this week against the owners of a shuttered Upper East Side gallery, accusing the couple of disappearing with $15 million worth of art from his collection.

Collector George Ball first enlisted married Manhattan art dealers R. Scott Cook and Soussan A.E. Cook as art advisors and dealers in the mid-1990s, according to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan’s federal court last week.

The Cooks, who owned the Cook Fine Art gallery on Madison Avenue near East 81st Street, housed and managed Ball’s multimillion-dollar collection for more than a decade without incident, the suit said. The Cooks kept the artwork at the gallery and in a unit at the New Yorker Storage Co. on the Upper West Side.

However, Ball became concerned last month when the Cooks allegedly failed to forward the proceeds from several works sold through Christie’s auction house in London, according to the complaint.

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