NEW YORK—Monaco-based British collector Robert Wylde announced in March that he was suing the Gagosian Gallery for several million dollars in compensatory damages following an awkward snag in his purchase of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting "The Innocent Eye Test" for $2.5 million in 2009.
Wylde's argument was that he was never informed by the gallery that the work — whoops — actually belonged in part to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns 31 percent of the painting and claims to have been promised eventual full ownership of it. When former art dealer and onetime Artforum editor Charles Cowles — whose mother, Jan Cowles, in fact owns the remaining 69 percent of Tansey's painting — sold the work to Wylde through Gagosian he failed to check up on just whose painting he was peddling. ("One day I saw it on the wall and thought, 'Hey, I could use money,' and so I decided to sell it," Cowles told the New York Times in March.) Now, the Met and Jan Cowles have filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court of Manhattan, seeking a declaratory judgment that would force Wylde to hand over the painting to the museum.
The Met says in the complaint that when Gagosian sold the painting to Wylde and co-defendant Cyprus-based company Safflane Holdings, "Gagosian was either the primary or exclusive worldwide representative of Mark Tansey ... and, therefore, possessed detailed knowledge of Mr. Tansey's works, including the painting and its ownership by plaintiffs." Nonetheless, the legal papers continue, "despite the plaintiffs' co-ownership of the painting being a matter of public record, neither Gagosian nor the defendants ever contacted either of the plaintiffs prior to the purported sale of the painting."
Wylde and Gagosian both also failed to check the ownership of the work on the Met's Web site, where "The Innocent Eye Test" is listed as a "partial and promised gift of Jan Cowles and Charles Cowles, in honor of William S. Lieberman, 1988." While the site notes that the painting is currently "not on view," the suit points out that the painting has been exhibited extensively at the Met "for extended periods of time" until 2004, when it "was placed in Charles's possession, at his request, to be placed in his home." It was allowed to hang there "based on an understanding that Charles would return the painting to the museum in accordance with the museum's rights as a co-owner."
Tansey's parodic, monochromatic, 10-by-6.5-foot work features a cow admiring a painting of other cows, which is propped against the wall of a gallery otherwise peopled with flinty, suit-wearing white male art specialists (like the ones who orchestrated this whole mess, one might note). As for Charles Cowles, when he spoke to the Times back in March, he played dumb, claiming, "I didn't even think about whether the Met owned part of it or not." Anyway, he remarkably doesn't seem to be in too much trouble with his mother, as the duo lunched at Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in Miami earlier this week, according to the New York Daily News.
(Artinfo)
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