Unlike many of the city’s galleries, New York’s museums made it out of Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed. But even as the storm raged, they were quietly facing another battle—
in court.
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Yesterday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s decision in a seven-year legal dispute over the ownership of a drawing by Egon Schiele, saying the current owner of the drawing could keep it despite a claim by heirs of a collector killed during World War II that it had once been stolen from his estate. The case gives a measure of relief, in some instances, to people who buy art in good faith and then have their ownership questioned by allegations that the art was once stolen. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a bill that makes it a misdemeanor for an art dealer to use funds owed to an artist from the sale of an artwork to pay for gallery operating expenses and creditors. The Senate passed the bill in June, and Gov. Cuomo signed it earlier this month. Its was inspired by instances of dealers dipping into artists’ funds when experiencing financial hardship. Read More
In 2010, some 150 pieces of art and three books by James Castle, the artist best known for his psychologically charged drawings in soot and saliva, were found in the ceiling of a home in which he had once lived, in Boise, Idaho, by its current resident, Jeannie Schmidt, who claims she is the rightful owner of the work. Members of the extended family of Mr. Castle, who died in 1977, argue that they rightfully own the works, which could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Now the two sides are battling it out in court, the Associated Press reports. Read More
Eight years ago, while a group of paintings by the Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich was on loan to the Menil Collection in Houston, the artist’s heirs, who had been attempting to recover them, sued the city of Amsterdam, home to the Stedelijk Museum, which had loaned the works. In 2005 the U.S. federal court hearing the case ruled that even if loaned art could not be seized under federal law, the presence of the artwork in the U.S. could still provide a basis for suing the foreign-government lender for damages. The decision effectively opened up a new path to allow litigation for chasing wrongfully taken art, and some foreign governments refused to lend to U.S. museums out of fear that they would be hauled into court. Read More
As Chuck Close and a group of other artists wage a legal battle against Sotheby’s and Christie’s, alleging that the houses owe them hundreds of thousands of dollars under a California resale royalties law, the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA), a nonprofit group that defends the intellectual property of its more than 6,000 international artists, is lobbying for the passage of a federal royalties law that might resolve the issue for future resales. Read More
