A years-long dispute over an alleged “Rothko” forgery has culminated in a total victory for our client, a distinguished New York art dealer.

 

This past year was an exciting one for Grossman LLP, as we continue to build on more than a decade of groundbreaking litigation in the art-law arena.

The Grossman team has won a total victory dismissing all counterclaims in our suit on behalf of a prominent art collector against an art gallery for refusing to rescind a sale of paintings that turned out to be forgeries.

The Second Circuit recently affirmed the dismissal of a fraud claim by a buyer who bought an artwork in 1985 and had it appraised on several occasions beginning in 2007, but did not sue until after the work was deemed inauthentic in 2018.  The case focused on the work’s exclusion from the artist’s catalogue raisonné; the appraisals all expressly noted that the work’s authenticity was only “assumed” because the painting was not in the artist’s catalogue.  The court reasoned that in light of such a disclaimer, a reasonable person should have further investigated its authenticity, and therefore the fraud claim’s two-year statute of limitations began to run at that time. 

This fall has seen developments in two cases we’ve been following.  Each case raises unique substantive legal issues, but the recent developments also serve to highlight the costs and complexity of litigating art disputes in court.

This summer, a New York Supreme Court judge threw out another complaint filed in a long-running legal battle between London art dealer James Mayor’s gallery and members of the Agnes Martin catalogue raisonné committee, providing further comfort for art authenticators who may face litigation in retaliation for their opinions.

We have written on several occasions (see here, here, and here) about the tangle of disputes that have arisen from the discovery of multiple suspected forgeries of Old Master artworks.  Now, one such dispute has reached a settlement, and another has resulted in a judgment for Sotheby’s; but other questions about these works, and the Old Master market generally, remain.

​In an important ruling issued last week, a federal judge allowed fraud claims asserted by art collector Andrew Hall to proceed against a former art-history professor and her son, Lorettan and Nicholas Gascard, alleging that they sold him a number of forged Leon Golub works.  The court’s decision is instructive for collectors who may have been duped into purchasing forged artworks, only to discover many years later that they were fakes.

In an important ruling issued last week, a New York state court dismissed claims by an art dealer who sued an artist’s catalogue raisonné for rejecting works the plaintiff had submitted for authentication.  The case has the potential to set an important precedent protecting art authenticators from disgruntled art owners.

New Mexico jewelry merchant Nael Ali will soon become the first person ever sentenced under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (“IACA”), a decades-old federal law that prohibits the sale of fake Native American goods.

In a new lawsuit, the estate of American artist James Castle is suing publisher Scholastic and author/illustrator Allen Say over a forthcoming book about the artist, which the estate claims infringes on the copyrights of dozens of Castle works. 

Convicted forger Vincent Lopreto has been arrested again in connection with forged artworks, having allegedly commenced another art-fraud scheme just weeks after his release from a two-year prison sentence for a similar crime.

Andrew Hall will be able to pursue his suit against Lorettann and Nikolas Gascard, who Hall alleges sold forgeries of paintings by American artist Leon Golub. Hall sued the former art-history professor and her son last fall in federal district court in New Hampshire, claiming that he purchased twenty-four works, either directly from the Gascards or indirectly through auction houses. Hall sued the Gascards for fraud, seeking the return of the approximately $700,000 purchase price for the works.

We have continuously followed stories in the news and in the courts about the continuing efforts of the art market to deal with the problem of forgeries.  From the Knoedler scandal to the concerns about counterfeit Old Masters being peddled on the European market, this issue is clearly not going away anytime soon.  Today, we take note of developments in three more cases that shine a spotlight on this ongoing challenge.

In November, we wrote about increasing scrutiny of multiple Old Master artworks that have recently come under suspicion as potential forgeries.  And in January, we posted about a federal lawsuit Sotheby’s has filed in connection with the scandal; in that suit, Sotheby’s seeks to recover sale proceeds from a collector who sold one of the fake works at a 2012 Sotheby’s auction.  Now, the fallout continues; in February, Sotheby’s filed a second suit over another artwork, this time in the U.K. court system; as with the first suit, the auction house’s goal is to claw back the proceeds of a sale of a work sold through Sotheby’s that has since been shown to be a fake.

In November, we wrote about increasing scrutiny of multiple Old Master artworks that have recently come under suspicion as potential forgeries.  Now, federal litigation has commenced in connection with the scandal, as Sotheby’s attempts to recover sale proceeds from a collector who sold one of the fake works at a 2012 Sotheby’s auction.

Andrew Hall, a hedge-fund manager and art collector, filed suit against Lorettann Gascard, a former art-history professor at Franklin Pierce University, and her son, Nikolas, alleging that the Gascards sold him twenty-four artworks by the famed artist Leon Golub that actually were forgeries. The Gascards are now firing back that Hall alone should be held responsible for his failure to conduct adequate pre-sale diligence; a common refrain among accused fraudsters looking to cast blame back on sophisticated art collectors, like Hall.

Richard Prince is no stranger to controversy; indeed, it’s arguably an essential element of his art.  We’ve written in recent years about several copyright infringement cases against Prince involving his practice of “appropriation” of others’ artworks as part of his own.

We’ve written before about conceptual artist Cady Noland, whose works command huge prices in the market, but who has a history of being highly particular about how her creations are installed, maintained, exhibited, and sold on the secondary market.  This tendency has resulted, on at least two recent occasions, in litigation over her disavowal of previous works.  Now, both cases have been resolved, but without significant judicial examination of the contours of an artist’s right to disavow her own creations.