The bust of Picasso’s muse and mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, 1931
The international Gagosian Gallery chain has entered the New Year at the center of two legal controversies. In one case, Armenian-American art dealer Larry Gagosian is vying with a Qatari royal family over a Picasso sculpture which both seem to have purchased. In the other case, photographer Donald Graham is suing Gagosian, his gallery and artist Richard Prince for copyright infringement.
The Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery chain which began in Los Angeles in 1979, where Gagosian was born. The Gallery is now based in New York with fifteen spaces spread internationally — mostly in the US and Europe, plus one location in Hong Kong. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal called Gagosian the “most powerful art dealer in the world.”
Marie-Thérèse Walter
The Picasso sculpture in question is a major work from 1931 that features the bust of Picasso’s muse and mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and is currently on display in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMa) exhibition “Picasso Sculpture.” The sculpture was sold twice by his 80-year-old daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso — first to Pelham Holdings, the agent of a Qatari family, in November 2014 for $42 million. According to the New York Times, after Widmaier-Picasso was “reminded” of higher offers, she returned Pelham’s partial payment of $6.5 million and asked to cancel the sale in April 2015. Pelham then sued her in May in order to uphold the sale.
Also in May, the second sale to Gagosian was made for $105.8 million with the understanding that he would resell it. He has already made a deal with a New York collector who expects to receive the sculpture after the current exhibition closes on February 7. To date, Gagosian has paid 75 percent of the total purchase price. He apparently did not learn about Pelham’s claim until October 2015 after the title was passed to him. Gagosian filed a lawsuit against Pelham at the federal court in Manhattan on January 11 and maintained that the dispute is not with the royal family itself, a “longtime friend” of his gallery.
About two weeks earlier on December 30, photographer Donald Graham filed a lawsuit regarding his photo, Rastafarian Smoking a Joint. The photo, captured by Graham in Jamaica in 1996, was reproduced as a screenshot of an Instagram post and displayed at the Gagosian Gallery as part of Richard Prince’s New Portraits exhibition.
No credit was given to Graham by Prince, a painter and photographer who has been quoted as saying that “copyright has never interested [him].” Graham’s complaint notes that Prince has “achieved notoriety in the ‘appropriation art’ industry for his blatant disregard of copyright law,” repeatedly claiming sole authorship for work that incorporates others’ works without permission. Prince has been active on the issue on Twitter.
Gagosian has displayed Prince’s work in his galleries since 2004 and may be credited for raising the prices of Prince’s work in general. Though he has had this effect on many of his artists’ work, he seems to have an exceptional relationship with Prince. He reportedly gives Prince more of a cut from the sales of his work than he gives to other artists. In 2011, Prince said that Gagosian takes “good care of [him].”
It remains to be seen how and if the Gagosian’s longtime relationships with both the Qatari royal family and Prince will affect these cases.
