While Sotheby’s was busy preparing to bring record-setting work by Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt to the block this week during its New York sales, the auction house faced a lawsuit from a collector who purchased a painting attributed to Amedeo Modigliani in 2003.
Charles C. Cahn, Jr. alleged on Wednesday that Sotheby’s would not resell his $1.55 million painting—even despite an agreement that the two signed in 2016 that would’ve required the house to do so.
Filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, the lawsuit contends that Sotheby’s had raised authenticity concerns about the painting, titled Portrait de Leopold Zborowski and dated to 1917. The work depicts Modigliani’s dealer, a frequent subject of portraits by the artists, and appeared in a 1934 Modigliani retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel, according to Sotheby’s catalog entry. A provenance from 2003 states that Zborowski himself once owned the work.
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But according to Cahn’s lawsuit, “the authenticity of the Painting as attributable to Modigliani was
called into question by Sotheby’s own appraisal of the Painting, which stated that the Painting failed to satisfy certain criteria and that the Painting would have no sale value in the international art market in which Sotheby’s operates.” Sotheby’s allegedly stated this in 2016 to Cahn, whose lawyers did not submit written proof of those statements, though they did submit an agreement from that year between Cahn and Sotheby’s in which the auction house states that the document would “resolve” an unspecified matter.
In that agreement, Sotheby’s states that Cahn has the ability to resell the work through the auction house within 15 years. If he were to consign the piece, Sotheby’s would pay back the original purchase price, plus a 2.5 percent compound annual interest.
Cahn now claims that he approached the house with plans to resell the painting this past June, but that the auction house never responded. His lawyer then sent another letter to Sotheby’s in September. Cahn claims that Sotheby’s did not respond to that document either. The collector is seeking $2.67 million from the house.
A representative for Cahn did not respond to request for comment. Sotheby’s said it could not comment on any pending litigation.
Even at the time Cahn purchased the painting, it would’ve been far less expensive than other works by Modigliani. Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), a well-known 1917 painting by Modigliani, sold that year for $26.9 million. In 2018, the same work sold again at Sotheby’s for $157.2 million, making it the most expensive work ever publicly auctioned by the house at the time. (That was just shy of Modigliani’s record of $170 million, held by a different Nu couché painting.)
Faked Modigliani paintings are common in the market; the forgeries have frequently generated investigations and legal drama. A 2017 Vanity Fair story by the late journalist Milton Esterow, a former editor of ARTnews, termed the phenomenon a “Modigliani forgery epidemic.”