The Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani is considered to be one of the most faked artists in history.  So it is unsurprising that there are more than a handful of unsuspecting owners of counterfeit Modiglianis.

As tax season nears, taxpayers may be interested to learn that the Internal Revenue Service enlists an Art Advisory Panel—a team of prominent art scholars, dealers, and curators—to make recommendations regarding the value of works of art involved in income, estate, and gift tax returns.

Austrian museums are no strangers to the issues surrounding the restitution of Nazi-looted art to their rightful owners.  Perhaps the most well-known case is that of Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally, which was exhibited to the public last year for the first time in over a decade after the Leopold Museum reached a $19 million settlement with the heirs of Lea Bondi—the painting’s owner at the time it was seized by the Nazis in 1939.

Although Chelsea galleries were not fully up and running by mid-December, as some had initially hoped, the recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy continue.   At the same time as construction workers and gallery staff continue to rebuild onsite, insurance claims mount.  AXA Art Insurance, one of the largest art insurers, expects to pay out $40 million to New York art galleries damaged by the hurricane, while Reuters is reporting that physical damage to the galleries themselves as well as art losses may reach $500 million—the largest loss the art world and its insurers have ever sustained.

We wrote yesterday about the legal considerations raised by a museum’s accessioning of artwork.  In today’s New York Times, Patricia Cohen discusses additional issues that may arise when museums are challenged with trying to honor “donor intent.”

Museums acquire artworks in a variety of ways, including through gifts and bequests from private collectors.  Though the legal considerations raised by a museum’s accessioning of artwork may vary based on the purpose and nature of the gift, in any case the parties should seek legal counsel and properly document the transaction by a comprehensive written agreement.

Collectors lined up to spend record amounts at this week’s contemporary art auctions in New York City.  On Wednesday, Christie’s contemporary-art auction brought in a record $412.2 million. And the evening before, Sotheby’s set a record of its own, bringing in $375.1 million, the highest total for any sale in Sotheby’s history. Thursday’s evening sale at Phillips de Pury, while far behind its larger peers, was solid in its own right, totaling $79.9 million, in the middle of the pre-sale-estimate range.

Pierre Konowaloff is the sole heir to the estate of his great-grandfather, Ivan Morozov, a Russian national whose modern-art collection—which included a Cézanne painting known as Madam Cézanne in the Conservatory (the “Painting”)—ranked among Europe’s finest before World War I.  On December 19, 1918, the Bolsheviks decreed that Morozov’s art collection, including the Painting, was “state property,” and therefore it confiscated all Morozov’s artwork.

Six years ago, a resale royalty law was passed in the United Kingdom requiring a percentage of profits from secondary-market art sales to be paid to the artist or her estate.  Some cried that the law would cripple the British art market, positing that collectors would not buy contemporary art if they also had to pay a resale royalty on top of already skyrocketing prices.  But these fears have not been realized, as demonstrated by the continuing trend of healthy sales for modern and contemporary works.  A Christie’s spokesman said that the royalty law has, in fact, proven to be “pretty irrelevant” and not much of a topic for discussion in the art world.

In a recent post we looked at the immediate impact of Hurricane Sandy on the New York art world, in particular the gallery-dotted Chelsea neighborhood.  The most immediate concern was salvage and conservation, and in the past month there has been considerable progress. In Brooklyn, for example, a 90,000-square-foot warehouse has been transformed into an artwork “emergency room.”  The impromptu art recovery center, with its climate-controlled storage rooms and staff of on-site conservators, consultants, and art handlers, has been a destination for dozens of artists, gallery owners, and collectors.  Leslie Gat, director of the Art Conservation Group, characterized the effort as a “M.A.S.H. unit” with the goal of “stabilizing the effects of the flood.”

After artist Cady Noland disclaimed authorship of one of her works (the “Work”) under the Visual Artists Rights Act (“VARA”) based on her assertion that the Work had been damaged subsequent to its creation, she demanded that Sotheby’s withdraw it from an upcoming auction. Sotheby’s obliged, citing to the section in its standard consignment agreement with the Work’s owner, Marc Jancou Fine Art Ltd. (“Jancou”), providing, among other things, that Sotheby’s could withdraw the Work at any time before sale if, “in its sole judgment,” “there is doubt as to [the work’s] authenticity or attribution.”

All of New York has felt the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy—the art world is no exception. With the Fall auction season approaching, for example, major auction houses have been trying to refocus collectors’ attentions on the upcoming sales. Sotheby’s even postponed its first major sale of Impressionist and modern art to give potential bidders more time to get in and preview the offerings.

This past February, Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s auction house in New York, called the Evansville Museum to inquire about a layered glass mosaic by Picasso, entitled Seated Woman with Red Hat, whose provenance he had traced to the museum. Though museum officials at first thought Ettinger was mistaken, in fact the artwork had been stashed in a shipping crate in the museum for over forty years, mislabeled and all but forgotten.