The delicate sculpture now at the center of a new legal wrangle is described in the court papers as a “glass and wire mobile” consisting “of a number of intentionally-broken, colored glass pieces” with “wire figures, and connecting and hanging wire.”
It is one in a series of kinetic sculptures that Alexander Calder created decades ago. No one disputes it was once the work of the artist’s hand.
But in a federal lawsuit filed this month in Manhattan, Richard Brodie, an art collector, says his ability to sell the work has been undermined by the Calder Foundation, which the suit says wrongly claims the piece is now too broken to still be considered a Calder.
Mr. Brodie, who serves on the board of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in his home city, argues in the court papers that the artwork is not broken at all. The suit does not name the work, but describes it as valued at more than $8 million and says it was once owned by Henri Matisse’s son Pierre, who bought it directly from Calder.
Lawyers for Mr. Brodie say in the suit that the foundation’s president, Alexander S. C. Rower, actively worked to block a potential sale by asserting the mobile was damaged, and that scared off potential buyers.
“This case concerns a fraudulent scheme by Rower and the Foundation to destroy the market value of a multimillion dollar work of art owned by Plaintiff,” Mr. Brodie’s lawyers say in the legal papers.
The foundation says it is only acting to protect the artist’s legacy, that it has not acted improperly and that the work is indeed damaged.
“This meritless case was filed by a disgruntled collector who is attempting to bully the Calder Foundation into approving a damaged artwork that no longer reflects the artist’s intent,” said Luke Nikas, a lawyer representing the foundation and Mr. Rower, Calder’s grandson. ”
Everything from humidity to direct sunlight to clumsiness can pose threats to artwork, as Steve Wynn, the casino mogul, found that out when he accidentally stuck an elbow through his Picasso in 2006.
(Wynn’s Picasso painting, the celebrated 1932 masterwork “Le Rêve,” was eventually fixed and later sold to the billionaire hedge fund collector Steven A. Cohen for $155 million.)
But Mr. Brodie insists the damage cited by the Calder Foundation is fictional. In the court papers, he argues the work has suffered very minimal damage over the years, the most significant of which was inflicted by the Calder Foundation itself in 2018 when he submitted it for authentication. It was returned, the suit says, “without its original hanging wire hardware, and with a fresh break to one of its glass shards.”
All of the damage was repaired, according to the lawsuit.
Calder, who died in 1976, became famous in part for this kind of kinetic sculpture that hangs in the air. One of his practices was to break glass and incorporate the pieces into his mobiles, hanging them with wire.
Mr. Brodie, the current president of the Collections Committee at the Detroit museum, has collected more than 20 Calder works through the years. He bought the mobile in the court case in 1994 from Calder’s close friend and gallerist Klaus Perls. His lawyers contend in legal papers that it looks largely unchanged from when it appeared in a catalog of Calder’s work in 1989.
But when Mr. Brodie decided to try to sell it in 2018, and sent it to the foundation for a routine authentication — as is common before sales — he says the foundation declined to confirm its so-called “Application,” or “A” Number, a designation that signals it is embraced by the foundation in its registry as a true Calder.
The foundation is the accepted authority on Calder artworks, and the lawsuit says that without its imprimatur an artwork’s value is diminished. When Mr. Brodie tried again a year later to sell the work, a conservation expert, according to Mr. Brodie, reported no significant problems in November 2019.
But Mr. Brodie contends Mr. Rower subsequently interceded and asked the conservator to review the sculpture again at the foundation’s expense. During this second review, Mr. Brodie’s lawsuit says, Mr. Rower did not personally inspect the piece, but still “dictated” his views, after which, the expert found problems of significance in a December 2019 report.
“Many of the elements are missing sections of glass judging by sharp break edges — it was the artist’s working practice to run a tool along the edges of glass fragments to dull them,” according to the December 2019 assessment. “[I]t is suspected that the glass elements were once larger [and that] the mobile would have had a different appearance and different weights requiring the strings to be attached to both the bars and the elements in other locations.”
Mr. Nikas said the second review was a much broader, in-depth analysis of the work than the earlier one, which was narrower in scope and only two pages in length. The lawyer said Mr. Rower had reviewed images of the piece and had provided his observations and had not directed the conservator’s conclusions about what Mr. Nikas described as significant damage and improper modifications.
Art foundations are often viewed as something of the final arbiter of an artwork’s authenticity. But the Calder Foundation also has an inventory of Calder works, and the lawsuit said it and Mr. Rower both buy and sell pieces in the art market. The legal papers said this presents a potential conflict of interest because any restrictions on the number of works they authenticate can have the effect of raising the value of their own holdings.
Mr. Nikas said there was no conflict of interest and there had been no efforts to affect the market for Calder works. Any works by the artist that the foundation held, he said, were retained to assist scholars in their research.
Mr. Brodie resumed efforts to sell the artwork last year through an auction house and, according to his lawsuit, hired another conservation expert to inspect the work, which was found to be in good shape. But the foundation, the lawsuit said, has continued to say the piece is damaged and cannot be restored and that it was “no longer in a state that reflects the intentions of Alexander Calder.”
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