Displaying items by tag: Court

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 Manhattan judge has ruled in favor of Mount Sinai Beth Israel, allowing the hospital to keep $4 million in donations, including an Édouard Manet painting, given by the late heiress Huguette Clark. Her relatives had sued, claiming Clark was manipulated into giving away her fortune.

Clark spent the last two decades of her life at Beth Israel. After an operation in 1992, she opted to remain under the institution's care, rather than returning home. She died in 2011, at 104 years old.

Yesterday we noticed that a copy of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” in Chicago is in the works in Karamay, China, promoted as a giant, stainless steel drop of oil. The artist is still unknown, but it’s definitely not Kapoor, who was “shocked at the blatant plagiarism” of his work when news of the Cloud Gate-gate reached him in London.

“It seems that in China today it is permissible to steal the creativity of others,” Kapoor said in a statement sent to Hyperallergic. “I feel I must take this to the highest level and pursue those responsible in the courts. I hope that the Mayor of Chicago will join me in this action. The Chinese authorities must act to stop this kind of infringement and allow the full enforcement of copyright.”

The Art Newspaper has discovered that the largest and most powerful due diligence service used by the art world is at the center of three separate provenance disputes, two of which are working their way through international courts.

The Art Loss Register (ALR), a company founded by Julian Radcliffe that works with law enforcement officials worldwide, more than 80 auction houses, most major art fairs and innumerable collectors and dealers, has provided certificates confirming that works of art were free from claim, when they were in fact subject to claims by third parties or stolen.

A court handling the late art collector Cornelius Gurlitt's inheritance says it has formally authorized the return of the first two paintings from his trove to their rightful owners' descendants.

The Munich district court said Tuesday it approved the handover of Henri Matisse's "Woman Sitting in an Armchair" and Max Liebermann's "Two Riders on the Beach" after both potential heirs to Gurlitt's collection endorsed the move.

A former longtime Jasper Johns assistant was ordered Thursday to spend 18 months behind bars after admitting he stole artworks from the pop artist's Connecticut studio and arranged for them to be sold by a Manhattan gallery for nearly $10 million.

James Meyer, 53, of Salisbury, Connecticut, was also ordered to pay $13 million in restitution and to forfeit $3.9 million.

U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken said he believed Meyer was genuinely remorseful and was primarily a "kind, caring, thoughtful" man who committed a serious offense, selling unauthorized artworks on at least three occasions from 2006 to 2011, pocketing more than $4 million.

California’s District Court has emphatically denied a motion to dismiss a case about the ownership of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s life-size "Adam and Eve," around 1530.

This court ruling is the latest twist in a bitter legal battle that began in Federal Court in 2007 when Marei von Saher, the heir of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, filed for ownership of the paintings.

They were part of a collection of more than 1,200 works owned by Goudstikker, who fled the Netherlands in 1940 after the Nazi invasion. The painting were hung outside the home of Nazi Reichsmarschall Herman Göring at one point during the war, according to von Saher’s court filings, but were returned by Allied Forces to the Netherlands in 1945.

A federal appeals court has given new life to a Holocaust survivor's claim that the University of Oklahoma is unjustly harboring a Camille Pissarro painting that the Nazis stole from her father during World War II.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan has directed a lower-court judge to consider whether the lawsuit she threw out should be transferred to Oklahoma, saying she has authority to do so.

The court's order Thursday came as the school found itself amid a racial controversy after video of fraternity students engaged in a racist chant spread across the Internet.

A Spanish court sentenced a man on Wednesday to 10 years in prison for crimes including the theft of a priceless medieval document considered the first guidebook to Spain's Saint James pilgrimage trail.

Police recovered the unique 12th-century manuscript in July 2012, a year after it was found to have gone missing from a safe in the famous cathedral of the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela.

Judges in a court in the nearby city of La Coruna said in a written ruling that they "consider it proven" that an electrician who worked for years at the cathedral, Manuel Fernandez Castineiras, stole the manuscript.