{"id":193894,"date":"2025-11-22T06:16:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T06:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/193894\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T06:16:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T06:16:16","slug":"collector-sues-sothebys-over-modigliani-work-with-authenticity-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/193894\/","title":{"rendered":"Collector Sues Sotheby’s Over Modigliani Work with Authenticity Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhile Sotheby\u2019s 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<\/a> in 2003.<\/p>\n

\n\tCharles C. Cahn, Jr. alleged on Wednesday that Sotheby\u2019s would not resell his $1.55 million painting\u2014even despite an agreement that the two signed in 2016 that would\u2019ve required the house to do so.<\/p>\n

\n\tFiled in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, the lawsuit contends that Sotheby\u2019s had raised authenticity concerns about the painting, titled Portrait de Leopold Zborowski and dated to 1917. The work depicts Modigliani\u2019s dealer, a frequent subject of portraits by the artists, and appeared in a 1934 Modigliani retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel, according to Sotheby\u2019s catalog entry. A provenance from 2003 states that Zborowski himself once owned the work.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tBut according to Cahn\u2019s lawsuit, \u201cthe authenticity of the Painting as attributable to Modigliani was
called into question by Sotheby\u2019s 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\u2019s operates.\u201d Sotheby\u2019s 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\u2019s in which the auction house states that the document would \u201cresolve\u201d an unspecified matter.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn that agreement, Sotheby\u2019s 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\u2019s would pay back the original purchase price, plus a 2.5 percent compound annual interest.<\/p>\n

\n\tCahn 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\u2019s in September. Cahn claims that Sotheby\u2019s did not respond to that document either. The collector is seeking $2.67 million from the house.<\/p>\n

\n\tA representative for Cahn did not respond to request for comment. Sotheby\u2019s said it could not comment on any pending litigation.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven at the time Cahn purchased the painting, it would\u2019ve been far less expensive than other works by Modigliani. Nu couch\u00e9 (sur le c\u00f4t\u00e9 gauche), a well-known 1917 painting by Modigliani, sold that year for $26.9 million. In 2018, the same work sold again at Sotheby\u2019s for\u00a0$157.2 million, making it the most expensive work ever publicly auctioned by the house at the time. (That was just shy of Modigliani\u2019s record of $170 million, held by a different Nu couch\u00e9 painting.)<\/p>\n

\n\tFaked Modigliani paintings are common in the market; the forgeries have frequently generated investigations and legal drama. A 2017 Vanity Fair story<\/a> by the late journalist Milton Esterow, a former editor of ARTnews, termed the phenomenon a \u201cModigliani forgery epidemic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Sotheby\u2019s was busy preparing to bring record-setting work by Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt to the block…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[107793,365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,17,4075,35507],"class_list":{"0":"post-193894","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-amedeo-modigliani","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-lawsuits","19":"tag-sothebys"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115591891286588041","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}