This past year was an exciting one for Grossman LLP, as we continue to build on more than a decade of groundbreaking litigation in the art-law arena.

The Grossman team has won a total victory dismissing all counterclaims in our suit on behalf of a prominent art collector against an art gallery for refusing to rescind a sale of paintings that turned out to be forgeries.

In recent weeks, the families of two different victims of Nazi persecution have filed suit in federal court, each suing a major museum over artwork taken from their ancestors during the Nazi era.  These cases continue to raise complex legal questions about the painful legacy of a brutal regime and its massive displacement of art throughout Europe during the years before, during, and after World War II.

Last week, the International Criminal Police Organization (better known as INTERPOL), an international organization that facilitates cooperation by law enforcement organizations around the globe, announced a new project that may be of interest to art collectors, dealers, and anyone involved in high-end art transactions.  INTERPOL has released a mobile application that allows a user to, among other things, quickly and conveniently determine whether a work of art appears in INTERPOL’s database of stolen artworks.  The app, called ID-Art, is free and available in several languages, and on Android or iOS mobile devices.

​In an important ruling issued last week, a federal judge allowed fraud claims asserted by art collector Andrew Hall to proceed against a former art-history professor and her son, Lorettan and Nicholas Gascard, alleging that they sold him a number of forged Leon Golub works.  The court’s decision is instructive for collectors who may have been duped into purchasing forged artworks, only to discover many years later that they were fakes.

Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued the latest—and likely final—ruling in Marei von Saher’s decades-long attempt to recover artwork looted by the Nazis from her late father-in-law.  In ruling against von Saher, the Ninth Circuit has ensured that the Cranachs will remain in the museum, and accessible to the public, for the foreseeable future.  This ruling will have significant implications for heirs of those who originally owned Nazi-looted artworks, especially where such heirs have already tried and failed to recover artwork through the official restitution channels instituted by European governments in the post-war years.  

We continue to follow the ongoing conversation in the art world about how best to handle disputes over artwork that was looted or displaced during the chaos and persecution of World War II.  As one recent story demonstrates, sometimes a current possessor demonstrates willingness to return a work to rightful claimants but looks to a third party for compensation for the loss.

We’ve written before about a high-profile case involving a Modigliani work, Seated Man with a Cane, which was allegedly taken from Oscar Stettiner, a Jewish art dealer who fled Paris in 1939 as the Nazis took over the city.  Last week, a New York state court judge permitted a representative of his estate to proceed with claims against the work’s current possessors.

The descendants of Austrian-Jewish cabaret performer Fritz Grunbaum have been working for years to recover some of the art that Grunbaum owned in the years before the Nazis rose to power.  Now, the Grunbaum heirs have achieved a new victory.  

New Mexico jewelry merchant Nael Ali will soon become the first person ever sentenced under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (“IACA”), a decades-old federal law that prohibits the sale of fake Native American goods.

In a lengthy opinion issued earlier this week, Judge Loretta A. Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the Metropolitan Museum of Art may keep a noteworthy Picasso artwork, even though its German-Jewish former owners sold it for a fraction of its actual value to finance their safe passage out of fascist Italy.

In our ongoing coverage of case law involving Nazi-looted artworks, we have written before about the long-running lawsuit over a Pissarro painting, Rue St. Honore, après midi, effet de pluie. Back in 2015, we wrote about a district-court decision that dealt a possibly-fatal blow to the claimants, who were seeking to recover the work from a collection controlled by the Spanish government. Earlier in July, however, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, meaning the painting’s claimants can continue their fight in the federal courts.

We have continuously followed stories in the news and in the courts about the continuing efforts of the art market to deal with the problem of forgeries.  From the Knoedler scandal to the concerns about counterfeit Old Masters being peddled on the European market, this issue is clearly not going away anytime soon.  Today, we take note of developments in three more cases that shine a spotlight on this ongoing challenge.

While we often write about high-profile litigation over Nazi-looted artworks, it’s worth noting that in recent months, there have been a number of important examples of voluntary restitution, as parties increasingly seek to resolve such disputes outside the courtroom. In January, a German food company, Dr. Oetker, took steps to return four artworks from its corporate art collection whose provenances had been traced to victims of the Nazi regime.

A recent conference in Geneva reflects an attempt by private art-market actors to raise awareness and address the problems of illicit trafficking of art and antiquities.  While such illegal activity in the art market is hardly limited to Switzerland, the nation’s freeports and custom-free zones make it particularly vulnerable to attempts to circumvent international laws.  And the Geneva Freeport specifically is reeling from recent negative publicity—including the feud between Yves Bouvier and Dmitry Rybolovlev, the discovery of an allegedly Nazi-looted Modigliani painting, and the seizure of looted Syrian antiquities. 

In November, we wrote about increasing scrutiny of multiple Old Master artworks that have recently come under suspicion as potential forgeries.  Now, federal litigation has commenced in connection with the scandal, as Sotheby’s attempts to recover sale proceeds from a collector who sold one of the fake works at a 2012 Sotheby’s auction.

The heirs of a prominent Jewish art dealer have sued the Bavarian state over a group of eight valuable paintings that were allegedly looted when the dealer fled Nazi Germany.  See Docket No. 16-09360 (S.D.N.Y.).  The filing likely marks the start of another complex litigation against a sovereign state over artwork clouded by actions taken during the Nazi era.

The art world is watching with concern the unfolding story of a fake Frans Hals painting; facts are still developing as of this writing, but it’s possible that the work may not be an isolated forgery but rather the harbinger of a larger group of well-executed fakes that could shake up the Old Master market.

We have previously covered the litigation arising out of the 2007 sale of a Rothko masterpiece; the work’s seller sued the buyer and an intermediary dealer over alleged violations of a confidentiality provision in the sale contract, after the buyer and dealer resold the piece in a highly publicized 2009 auction.  In late September, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in favor of the defendants, in an opinion that serves as a reminder about the importance of clear contracting in art transactions.

Litigation involving art displaced during World War II—and with it the continued focus on the need for adequate pre-acquisition due diligence—is in the news again with the recent filing of complaint against the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding Pablo Picasso’s The Actor.  See Estate of Leffman v. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 16-cv-7665 (S.D.N.Y.)