We have written before about a long-running legal battle between the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and the heir to a Jewish Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in 1940.  The focus of the dispute is a diptych (two painted panels) titled Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.  A recent district court decision dealt a possibly fatal blow to the claims by plaintiff Marei Von Saher, although she plans to appeal.

An amended complaint has been filed in a case against art dealer David Zwirner, adding claims for violation of New York’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Law.  As we recently discussed, Zwirner has been sued by UK entity Blue Art Limited over a $2 million deal gone bad.   The initial complaint concealed the description of the artwork to avoid “possible further damage to the Work’s value,” but the amended complaint clarifies that the sculpture at the center of the dispute is Gazing Ball (Centaur and Lapith Maiden), by Jeff Koons.

Prominent art dealer David Zwirner and his eponymous gallery have been sued by a buyer over a $ 2million deal gone bad, in a case that should serve as a reminder about the importance of clear contracting regarding the timing of art transactions.

Two pending cases present opposite but equally curious issues of art authentication by a living artist.  In one, the artist Peter Doig is being sued because he disavowed authorship of a work that a collector says is by Doig; in the other, an artist claims authorship over works that another man claims to have forged.  Both cases pose interesting questions about who, if not the artist, is the final say on whether an artwork is by the artist’s hand.

As we’ve discussed on this blog before, infringement of copyrighted works posted online is rampant, rendering artists marketing through social media vulnerable to infringement of their intellectual property.  A recent case highlights this risk to photographers posting their works online.

Fast-fashion-brand Zara is facing a potential lawsuit—as well as an ongoing publicity battle—over accusations by a growing number of independent artists claiming Zara copied their designs. The firestorm began in mid-July when LA-based artist and designer Tuesday Bassen went public on Twitter with her belief that Zara had ripped off her designs for a series of pins and patches by reproducing them on Zara’s own line of iron-on patches.

This summer has brought several stories about the continuing and complex efforts to address the painful impact of Nazi Germany and World War II on the world’s cultural heritage and the global art market.

A recent settlement involving several major art-world players raises some important points about contracting in art transactions.

A dispute between two powerful figures in the international art world has been playing out on a global stage for months.  Now, a major auction house has been dragged into the fray, sparking even more debate about the role of confidentiality in a market that often operates with minimal transparency and places a premium on secrecy.

While this blog often writes about the “fair use” defense in federal copyright law, we also frequently take note of cases that grapple with larger questions about copyrightability—that is, whether a work is covered by copyright protection at all.  In that vein, the Supreme Court announced earlier this month that it will review a Sixth Circuit decision regarding a thorny issue of copyrightability, in a case that may have implications across the art, fashion, and design industries.

Appropriation art is back in the news, as two of the biggest names in the field navigate the latest legal claims filed against them.
A few months ago, we wrote about a new lawsuit filed against Jeff Koons over his appropriation of a photograph from a 1980s liquor advertisement.  The defendants in the case (Koons and auction house Phillips) filed answers to the complaint, but in mid-April, the parties informed the court that they had reached a settlement, and the case is now closed.  But shortly after the Koons complaint was filed, another giant of appropriation art, Richard Prince, was haled into court for his latest dance on the line between fair use and copyright infringement. 

The art-law community pays close attention to legal developments in the copyright arena, including cases involving the fair use defense to copyright infringement. This blog has been watching the Google Books litigation unfold for years; the case deals with whether Google’s ambitious project—in which the search engine company has undertaken a massive initiative to scan, digitize, index, and make publicly available short “snippets” of millions of books, many of which are still under copyright—constitutes infringement of the copyrights in those works. 

This blog has previously covered the ongoing litigation concerning California’s Resale Royalties Act (CRRA).  A federal district court recently struck down the state statute on the grounds that it is preempted by federal copyright law, dealing a heavy blow to artists seeking royalties in connection with the resales of their artworks.

After a long legal battle in multiple federal courts, the University of Oklahoma has reached a settlement regarding a claimant’s attempts to recover a Nazi-looted artwork by celebrated Expressionist painter Camille Pissarro.
We have previously written about this case, which involves a claim by 75-year-old Leone Meyer, who says that the painting, La Bergère Rentrent des Moutons (“Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep”), was stolen from her family by the Nazi regime during World War II. 

Move over, graffiti art—the next frontier in federal copyright litigation may be tattoo art.  A lawsuit filed in federal court last month seeks to enforce the intellectual property rights of a group of tattoo artists who created tattoos on several pro basketball stars; the complaint alleges that those rights were infringed when defendants, creators of the video game “NBA 2K16,” incorporated images of the players—including their tattoos—into the game.  See Solid Oak Sketches, LLC v. Visual Concepts LLC et al., S.D.N.Y. Docket No. 16-cv-724.

After much legal wrangling, a jury heard testimony last month in the first civil trial arising out of the art forgery scandal that took down one of New York’s most prominent galleries.  The story began in 2011 when word spread that, over the course of more than a decade, the once-venerable Knoedler Gallery had sold about $60 million worth of artworks—purported to be by Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement—that later turned out to be forgeries.  Since then, more details have emerged.

Famed “appropriation artist” Jeff Koons was sued in federal court last month over his alleged copyright infringement of a photograph used in a 1986 liquor advertisement. Koons is no stranger to litigation, having been sued on several different occasions for his appropriation art.  The results of those suits have been mixed.  For example, one of his works, “String of Puppies,” in which he created a sculpture based on a photograph without permission from the photographer, became the subject of an important court decision when the Second Circuit rejected Koons’s argument that his copying of the photograph was protected by the fair-use doctrine.

This blog has written often about the Knoedler scandal, which exploded in 2011 when a once-venerable art gallery closed following revelations that, over the course of more than a decade, it had sold about $60 million worth of artworks—purported to be by Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement—that later turned out to be forgeries.  Our previous posts contain more detail, but in short, the works all came to Knoedler through a Long Island art dealer, Glafira Rosales, who claimed to represent an anonymous collector liquidating a collection of previously-unknown masterworks.  It turned out that the seller was a fiction, and the works were actually created by a little-known artist in Queens at the behest of Rosales (who in 2013 pled guilty to a litany of federal crimes).

Back in 2013, this blog covered the dismissal of a libel case against the New Yorker over its portrayal of an art authenticator.  The Second Circuit has now affirmed that decision, signaling the likely end of this dispute—even as the art world continues to struggle with the complex problem of authentication.

This blog has previously covered the case of Bilinski v. Keith Haring Foundation, Inc., a federal lawsuit filed last year in the Southern District of New York.  Collectors of artworks they believe to be by famed artist Keith Haring, sued the artist’s foundation claiming that it had improperly denied authentication, thereby damaging the value of their holdings.  This past spring, a federal judge dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims in a decision that explored some of the complex legal issues posed by artist foundations and authentication boards.  The Second Circuit has now affirmed that ruling.