Displaying items by tag: legal battle

The descendants of heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim lost their case in a French court Wednesday over her extensive collection of works housed in an 18th century palace on Venice's Grand Canal.

The French branch of the family launched legal action against the New York-based Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, which manages the collection.

The relatives are angry at the way the collection of paintings by artists including Picasso, Miro and Matisse are displayed and have called for it to be restored to its original configuration.

A long-running legal battle between the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the US arm of the Armenian Apostolic Church over the ownership of a group of 13th-century manuscript pages has ended with a compromise. The Getty has agreed to acknowledge that the church is the rightful owner of the eight brilliantly illustrated pages. The church, in turn, has pledged to donate the pages to the museum. The manuscript pages have been in the Getty’s collection since 1994, when the museum bought them from an Armenian American family.

Lee Boyd, an attorney for the church, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the settlement represents the first restitution of art from the Armenian genocide.

Cooper Union has struck a deal–overseen by Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general–that could help solve the school’s fiscal crisis, and might also lead the institution to eventually return to its longstanding tuition-free model. The school’s administration started charging students in 2014, breaking Cooper Union’s long tradition of tuition-free education. This is all according to the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU), an organization that has been involved in a legal battle with school trustees, prompting an investigation by the attorney general’s office.

The legal owner of Henry Moore's sculpture Draped Seated Woman (1957-58) is Tower Hamlets Council, the High Court in London ruled on July 8, ending a long-running legal battle with Bromley Council over the work.
 
The former mayor of the east London borough, Lutfur Rahman consigned the work to auction in February 2013. But the sale was postponed after the Art Fund charity and the Museum of London discovered evidence that suggested ownership of the sculpture lay with Bromley Council in south London.

On a sunny morning in late February, Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer, flew into Nice and drove 20 miles along the French Riviera to Monaco to meet his top client, Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. Bouvier had come to work out the final payment for Mark Rothko’s No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), which Rybolovlev had agreed to buy for €140 million back in August. Bouvier, 51, entered the lobby of the cream-colored, belle époque mansion where Rybolovlev’s penthouse apartment overlooks Monte Carlo’s yacht-filled marina.

Assuming business as usual, Bouvier approached a man he thought was one of Rybolovlev’s bodyguards.

Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev had decided to send off a tough 2014 in New York City. The Monaco-based billionaire had been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons after a Swiss judge awarded his ex-wife Elena $4.5 billion in their seven-year divorce battle. An avid art collector, Rybolovlev decided to spend New Year’s Eve with Sandy Heller, Steve Cohen’s well-known art advisor. As they exchanged war stories, one particular tale made his jaw drop: it was about a beautiful "Nude" by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani that Cohen sold for a juicy $93.5 million to a mystery buyer. What Heller didn’t know was that behind the veil of anonymity stood Rybolovlev, fuming internally on that December 31. Rybolovlev had paid his trusted friend and art broker Yves Bouvier $118 million for the piece, more than $22 million above what he just found out the market value should’ve been, including the fee.

The woman, carved from limestone, sits with her arms resting on her pulled-up legs and looks enigmatically ahead. She is regarded as one of Romania’s finest modernist artworks, yet the Bucharest government’s refusal to say whether it wants to buy her has left the €20m (£15m) sculpture in a murky legal limbo, and its owners unable to sell.

The statue, "The Wisdom of the Earth" by Constantin Brâncuși, has a history that reflects the tumult in its creator’s native land. First sold in 1911, it was confiscated by the communists in 1957 and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending in 2008 with it returned to the family of its original owner.

Following a seven-year legal battle over a Sandro Botticelli painting "Madonna and Child" (1485) that was caught up in the collapse and ensuing bankruptcy proceedings of Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, rulings by two New York judges last month have resulted in the painting—worth an estimated $10 million—being returned to its rightful owner, Panama-based Kraken Investments. Ronald Fuhrer, a Tel Aviv-based dealer and advisor to Kraken, confirmed to artnet News that he had retrieved the painting on behalf of the investment firm on December 8. At various times, it looked as though the painting would be classified for legal purposes as gallery collateral and thus one of the assets that should be sold to repay creditors, despite the owners insistence that it had merely been loaned for a show.

The New York Times has a thorough rundown of a very messy battle over the estate of the late reclusive photographer Vivian Maier, whose talent only came to light after her death in 2009, aged 83, and “nearly penniless and with no family.” Maier spent most of her life working as a nanny for wealthy Chicago families, quietly pursuing her passion for photography out of the public eye and producing poignant, documentary scenes of everyday life in Chicago, New York, and other American cities.

Since 2007, John Maloof, a former Chicago real estate agent who purchased tens of thousands of negatives for under $400, has been actively promoting and overseeing her work through commercial galleries (most notably with the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery), exhibitions, books, and a recent documentary that he helped direct, Finding Vivian Maier.