Category: Art Law

A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

Impressionist painting of Dieppe harbor on a bright afternoon, seen from above. A long sandy quay curves across the foreground, lined with a dense crowd of small figures watching sailboats with white and rust-colored sails in a pale green basin. People stroll and a horse-drawn cart passes in the lower right. Beyond a low jetty, red-roofed houses and factory chimneys rise against green hills under a blue sky full of pinkish clouds. Signed and dated lower left, "C. Pissarro 1902."
Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902), oil on canvas, 65.3 × 81.2 cm. Listed in France’s 1947 Répertoire des biens spoliés, the painting sold at Sotheby’s London in June 2024 for £1.2 million under a settlement signed by two of Salomon Flavian’s heirs. Seven others are now asking a Paris court to undo it. Image: Sotheby’s.

A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

In June 2024 Sotheby’s London sold Camille Pissarro’s Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902) for £1.2 million. That was a bit below its £1.5–2.5 million estimate. The catalogue carried the now-familiar line: the work was “offered for sale pursuant to a settlement between the current owner and heirs of Salomon Flavian.” Settlements like this have become the ordinary way Nazi-era spoliation claims to privately held works get resolved at auction. The consignor gets clean title and the claimants get a share of the proceeds. The auction house gets to sell the picture.

Except that not everyone was at the table. As Vincent Noce reports in The Art Newspaper, seven of Flavian’s heirs appeared before a Paris court on September 18 and asked it to retrospectively cancel the sale and annul the contract behind it. Only two heirs, Gilles and Nicolas Flavian, signed the agreement with the seller. They were represented by Mondex, the Toronto restitution firm, and they waived all their rights. The other heirs say they were never consulted. They apparently found out in a Mondex letter dated October 17, 2024, nearly four months after the hammer fell, which offered them an 8% share of the net sale price. The same letter mentioned a 16% commission owed by the two signatories. Mondex’s founder James Palmer says the firm received no payment for the transaction. A decision is expected November 5.

Was it looted at all?

The provenance fight is the more interesting half of the case. Salomon Flavian was a Jewish banker whose Paris collection was seized in 1941. The painting appears in the Répertoire des biens spoliés, France’s 1947 register of property looted during the war. Sotheby’s own catalogue lists the Répertoire under literature, so nobody disputes that the entry exists.

The seller commissioned research from Mary Kate Cleary, who has since become curator of provenance at Princeton University Art Museum. She concluded the painting was not among the 45 works seized from Flavian in 1941. She found it on no Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscation list. She also found that Paul Rosenberg’s archives, together with the 1939 Pissarro catalogue raisonné, point to a sale around 1938 to the British painter and collector Edward Le Bas. Mondex accepted that finding, which is a somewhat unusual position for a firm in the business of making claims. Palmer says it did so “in the interests of rigour and intellectual honesty.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, for the heirs, has several answers. Works were regularly scrubbed from ERR lists with the help of unscrupulous dealers. Rosenberg’s postwar notes are allegedly imprecise. The catalogue entry does not mention that Flavian had owned the painting since 1935. Rosenberg may simply have confused this Dieppe with another picture Le Bas bought. And its seems Cleary may have worked from Rosenberg’s archives without checking them against the Flavian family’s own papers.

They can’t both be right. Sotheby’s published provenance has the painting going from a 1935 Drouot sale to Flavian and then to Rosenberg “by 1937,” with no date for when it left Flavian. That undated step is the whole case. The Répertoire is an important document, but it was compiled largely from owners’ own postwar declarations, made in chaos and grief, and it has errors in it. A 1939 catalogue predates the seizures, and that counts for something. But dealers’ stock books are not neutral records either.

A couple of tangents

The first is that the archive doing the most work for the seller belongs to Paul Rosenberg. He was one of the most celebrated dealers in Paris and was himself among the ERR’s biggest victims after he fled to New York in 1940. The 1939 catalogue raisonné by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi was published by Rosenberg’s own gallery. So the records of one looting victim dealer are now being used to show that a looted victim banker’s painting was never looted. Nobody has suggested Rosenberg did anything improper here. Still, it shows how much of our knowledge of this period rests on a handful of dealers’ paperwork.

The second is that the provenance runs through David Rockefeller, by way of Sam Salz, before ending up in the Dreitzer estate and a 1985 Sotheby’s New York sale. The painting was exhibited at the Tate in 1952 and the Met in 1966. It is a reminder that “hiding in plain sight” is the normal condition for works like this, and that no one apparently raised the Répertoire entry for decades.

The fee question, again

Readers with long memories may recall the Bermann-Fischer Pissarro I wrote about years ago. Gisela Bermann-Fischer found her family’s painting in a Zurich vault, and the fight over what the experts who helped find it should be paid ended with Jonathan Petropoulos resigning from Claremont McKenna amid extortion allegations. The Art Loss Register had proposed a sliding scale of 20% of the first million and less above that. I said then that money is a key focus of restitution, and the Flavian case is that point in a new form. Here the money question isn’t how much the intermediary takes. It is whether an intermediary acting for two heirs can bind a family it never spoke to, and then offer the others a fixed percentage after the sale. If French law treats the claim as belonging to all the heirs jointly, it is hard to see how two of them could settle it alone. If the painting was never looted, there was no claim to settle, and the settlement was simply insurance the seller bought to make the picture marketable.

Can Paris undo a London sale?

Sotheby’s also argues that a French court has no business ruling on a sale made in London between two clients with “no relationship with France.” Since Brexit, the EU’s Brussels I bis rules no longer sort out jurisdiction between France and the UK, so the Paris court will I think apply its own rules. And even a French annulment would still have to be enforced against a buyer whose identity hasn’t been reported and a painting that may be anywhere. The French courts have not been shy about Nazi-era claims. In the Bauer case, another Pissarro, La Cueillette des pois, was seized while on loan to the Musée Marmottan. Its American owners, who bought in good faith, lost it under the 1945 ordinance voiding acts of spoliation, and the Cour de cassation upheld that in 2020. But Bauer involved a painting physically in Paris. This one sold in London to an unnamed buyer.

That leaves a lot to watch on November 5. Will the court even reache the merits? Are the heirs proceeding under the 1945 ordinance or on ordinary contract and succession principles? How will a judge weigh a 1947 government register against a dealer’s catalogue from 1939?

Pissarro must be among the most litigated artists in restitution law. Cassirer, Bauer, Bermann-Fischer, and the University of Oklahoma’s Shepherdess all turned on a Pissarro. I can only speculate about why, but a few reasons might be: First, he was prolific. There are simply more of them out there to be lost and later found. Second, his collectors; many were the assimilated Jewish families of Paris, Berlin and Vienna whose collections were seized or sold under duress after 1933. Third, the money; a Pissarro is valuable enough to justify years of litigation, but not so famous that it couldn’t pass quietly through the postwar market. And finally, he liked to paint in series. He returned to the same harboror bridge again and again, in different weather and light. A wartime claim form or a dealer’s stock book that says “Pissarro, port of Dieppe, 1902” could describe several canvases, and the heirs here argue that is exactly what happened with Rosenberg’s records.

Why so many fights now? Part of it is that the evidence is easier to get at. The ERR card files, the Répertoire and dealers’ archives like Rosenberg’s are all searchable now in ways they weren’t a generation ago, so a listing that sat unread for decades can surface with a few keystrokes. Part of it is the auction houses themselves, which now want a settlement in hand before a flagged work goes on the block. And part of it is simple arithmetic. Eighty-five years on, a claim belongs to grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered across several countries, which is exactly the situation that produced two signatories and seven plaintiffs here.

Whatever the court decides, it has a lesson for the settlement model the market depends on: a deal that gives clean title is only as good as the list of heirs who signed it.

Vincent Noce, Was this Pissarro painting—sold at Sotheby’s in 2024—looted by Nazis? A Paris court deliberates, The Art Newspaper (Sept. 24, 2026), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/09/24/was-this-pissarro-paintingsold-at-sothebys-in-2024looted-by-nazis-a-paris-court-deliberates.

Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée, Lot 49, Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s London (June 25, 2024), https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/modern-contemporary-evening-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/darse-de-peche-et-bassin-duquesne-dieppe-apres (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Heirs of a Jewish Collector Contest Sotheby’s Sale of a Pissarro Painting Possibly Looted by Nazis, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/heirs-jewish-collector-sothebys-sale-pissarro-nazi-looted-1234799464/ (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Bureau central des restitutions, Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945 (1947), digitised by the French Ministry of Culture, Accès au Répertoire, https://www.culture.gouv.fr/rechercher-une-publication-du-ministere-de-la-culture/bases-de-donnees/mnr-historique-de-la-publication/acces-au-repertoire (last visited Oct. 1, 2026);

Répertoire des biens spoliés en France pendant la Guerre 1939-1945, Lootedart.com, https://www.lootedart.com/MFEU4B37276 (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

The Art Institute Chicago Schiele Ruling and the Limits of Object-First Enforcement

On Thursday the New York Appellate Division, First Department handed the Art Institute of Chicago a significant win in its long dispute over Egon Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner. Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg’s report in the Times frames it as a blow to the Manhattan DA’s investigators. I’d go a step further. This ruling lands on the signature feature of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit’s method, which is that it goes after the objects first and worries about the people later.

Egon Schiele, "Russian War Prisoner" (1916), watercolor over graphite on cream paper. It shows the head and hand of a uniformed Russian prisoner of war, with the artist's signature at lower right.
“Russian War Prisoner” by Egon Schiele, via Manhattan District Attorney

To be precise about what the court did: it did not decide that the Art Institute owns the drawing. It didn’t decide that the drawing was looted, or that it wasn’t. It decided that a turnover order under Penal Law § 450.10 was the wrong tool for a sharply contested ownership dispute. The court vacated the warrant and the orders requiring the museum to surrender the work, and it said in terms that its decision shouldn’t be read as a determination of the rightful owner. It sent the title question to the earlier-filed civil case in federal court in the Southern District of New York.

matter-of-art-institute-of-chicago-app-div-2026-09-17Download

A quick recap

Fritz Grünbaum was a Viennese cabaret performer and an outspoken critic of the Nazis. He was arrested in March 1938 and died in Dachau in 1941. His collection of dozens of Schiele works was inventoried by the Nazis, and then, for the most part, vanished from the record until 1956, when pieces surfaced with the Swiss dealer Eberhard Kornfeld. Some went on to Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, and Russian War Prisoner was ultimately bought by the Art Institute in 1966.

The DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit took an interest after Grünbaum’s heirs came to them in 2022. In September 2023 authorities in New York seized the drawing in place at the Art Institute, along with two other works in Pittsburgh and Ohio, on the theory that they were stolen from Jewish families by Nazis. The other two institutions, the Carnegie and Oberlin’s Allen Memorial, returned their Schieles in January 2024. The Art Institute did not, and the museum insisted the work was not looted but lawfully sold by surviving family members after the war.

Picture of a man in a suit, black and white, autographed.
Fritz Grünbaum, Österreichisches Theatermuseum, public domain photograph via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fritz_Gr%C3%BCnbaum.jpg

Meanwhile the heirs’ separate civil suit had been dismissed by Judge Koeltl as time-barred, a ruling he declined to revisit in February 2024. In April 2025, Justice Drysdale sided with the DA. The ruling ran 79 pages and described the drawing as stolen property for the last 86 years. She reached that conclusion without an evidentiary hearing.

Why the appeals court said no

For a first-year-property-class reason, mostly. Section 450.10(5) says stolen property that comes into a court’s custody is to be delivered to the owner “on satisfactory proof of his title.” The Appellate Division reads that as a mechanism for quickly returning property to an obvious owner, not as a way to adjudicate a hotly contested title. The statute doesn’t say who decides title, what procedure applies, or who bears what burden. And the court leaned on a 1913 Court of Appeals decision, People ex rel. Simpson Co. v. Kempner, which said a title dispute between contending parties “must be determined in a civil action,” with notice, a hearing, and a jury if demanded.

The court was also unimpressed by the DA’s description of what happened below as “summary judgment-like.” There were no pleadings, no meaningful discovery, and no defined burdens of proof. And because the turnover orders can’t be appealed directly, the Art Institute could only get review through an Article 78 petition for a writ of prohibition. The court treated a deprivation of property without due process as the kind of clear legal right that makes that extraordinary remedy appropriate.

The object-first model

Here is what I think matters beyond this one drawing. According to the opinion, the DA told the court that New York County judges have signed more than 100 turnover orders, returning more than 4,000 antiquities and artworks. The NY Times reports how those cases typically end: rather than bring criminal charges and face potentially lengthy cases, investigators negotiate agreements, and the holders usually hand over the objects without contesting that they were stolen.

That is an object-centered model, and it has been enormously productive. In its statement to the Times, the DA’s office pointed to the return of more than 6,000 stolen artifacts. But the same statement cites 18 convictions. I don’t want to be unfair about that comparison, because convictions and objects measure different things. Still, it captures a pattern I wrote about after the Worcester seizure : the objects are returning to where they were taken from, but the prosecution of the individuals responsible has lagged well behind.

The object-first approach worked because it let everyone skip the hard part. A holder who cooperates gets no charge, no trial, and a quiet press release. The office gets the object and a headline. Nobody has to prove that a particular person committed a particular crime, and nobody has to adjudicate title. The Art Institute is, so far as I can tell, the rare possessor to refuse the deal and then follow through on the refusal, all the way to a writ of prohibition. The opinion also notes that the DA brought no criminal charges in connection with the work.

Why Schiele works are so contested

This is the part I think a general audience finds most interesting, and the reasons pile up.

First, the objects are portable and the paper trail is thin. Schiele’s works on paper are small, easy to move, and were easy to lose track of in the mass spoliation of 1938 to 1945. The Nazi inventory of Grünbaum’s property listed 81 Schiele pieces but, as the court notes, did not list Russian War Prisoner by name. Identifying a specific drawing with a specific line in a wartime inventory is a big part of the fight.

Second, there is a gap and a story to fill it. Nothing is documented between 1938 and 1956. Kornfeld filled it by saying he had bought the works from Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs. The Appellate Division in Reif v. Nagy did not credit that account, and this opinion recites why: no documentation of a transfer, no mention of Lukacs in earlier catalogues, and a claim made decades after the fact. The Art Institute still relies on the Lukacs account, as does the museum’s position that the family lawfully sold the work. That account has worked before: in Bakalar v. Vavra, the heirs lost a case involving a different Grünbaum Schiele on laches grounds, which is a reminder of how much turns on which court you’re in and which doctrine is doing the work.

Third, the money. The Grünbaum heirs sold six Schieles at Christie’s in fall 2023, and four of them collectively fetched $18 million. That helps explain both why heirs pursue these works so persistently and why holders defend them so hard.

Fourth, the New York connection. Kallir’s Manhattan gallery handled a good number of these works after the war. That’s what gives a New York prosecutor a jurisdictional hold on a drawing that sat in Chicago for sixty years, and it is exactly the connection the Art Institute has challenged.

Finally, the Art Institute’s own conduct. The opinion recites that there’s no record of a provenance check in 1966, and that in 2002 a museum intern asked Kornfeld about the work and there is no record the museum ever tried to independently verify his answer. The Second Circuit, when it revived the civil suit in March 2025 in a non-precedential summary order, said the Art Institute isn’t an ordinary non-merchant purchaser but a sophisticated one with expertise in Nazi-looted art. Nothing in this week’s decision undercuts that.

The reaction

The museum welcomed the ruling, telling the NY Times that the court rejected an unlawful attempt to use the criminal process to resolve disputed property rights, and that the matter belongs in civil court. The DA’s office said it is reviewing the decision and evaluating next steps. Two museum groups, the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, had filed a joint brief supporting Chicago.

Nicholas O’Donnell, who represented a family that turned over another artwork in 2024, told the NY Times the decision “sharply reduces the D.A.’s ability to pursue the seizure of cultural property.” As the NY Times summarizes his view, owners accused of holding stolen art could now decline to hand it over unless a criminal case is brought, a crime is proven, and title is fully adjudicated. Raymond Dowd, who represents one of the Grünbaum heirs, sharply criticized the reasoning, comparing the objects to contraband that police can seize the way they seize drugs or drug money. Legal experts told the NY Times it is unlikely that holders who already returned works would try to reopen those seizures.

The ruling doesn’t just slow the DA down. It changes the price of contested cases. Where a holder disputes title, the shortcut is closed, and the office has two choices: bring a criminal case against someone, or send the claimants to civil court. That pushes toward what I’d argue was always the harder and more important work, which is investigating and prosecuting the dealers, middlemen, and facilitators who moved this material.

That work has its own problems. In the Schiele story, the central figures are dead. Kallir died decades ago, and Kornfeld is described in recent reporting as the late dealer. The trial court itself noted that every witness with first-hand knowledge of the wartime events had died. You can’t indict a dead man, and a “continuing conspiracy” theory of the kind the trial court accepted is a long way from a case a prosecutor can try. Proving a crime against a living person means proving what that person knew, and gaps in provenance, however damning they look to us, are not the same thing. So for Nazi-era claims like this one, the civil courts really may be the only place a resolution is possible, which is more or less what the Appellate Division said.

The picture is different for the antiquities trade the unit built its reputation on. There, the dealers, collectors, and trusts are often alive, the records are more recent, and the networks are the story. If the office is now pushed away from the easy object-first seizure, the question is whether it has the appetite and the resources to build cases against people. I hope so. The illicit market runs on the individuals who supply, launder, and buy them.

There is a fair case on the other side, too. Dowd’s point deserves a serious answer: police do seize contraband without a trial, and a museum drawing with a disputed, decades-old chain of title is arguably not the same thing as a looted Cambodian statue. Voluntary returns will also presumably continue. Many holders return works because they don’t want the fight, not because a statute compels them, and nothing in this ruling stops that. And it’s possible that the unit will simply reach for other tools. The DA said only that it is evaluating its next steps.

Procedurally, the Appellate Division stayed enforcement for 30 days, and the grand jury investigation can continue. The action that matters now is in federal court, where the case has been stayed pending this decision. There the parties will have what the Appellate Division said was missing: discovery, defined burdens, and a real fight over the evidence. For the heirs, who have waited nearly two decades, that is at once a setback and a chance to finally litigate the merits.

I’ll be watching for whether the next big move from Manhattan is another seizure, an appeal or something else. And nothing here would prevent the parties from coming to some kind of truce and settling their dispute outside of court.

Many thanks to the reporters who’ve followed this for years, especially Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg at the Times, and The Art Newspaper.

Sources and further reading

Court decisions

Reporting

Commentary and analysis

A Whale of a Moral Rights Claim in Dallas

Aerial view of a cityscape featuring tall skyscrapers, a large blue mural on a building, and a parking lot with several parked cars.
Julio Cortez/Associated Press

A large mural depicting dolphins swimming in the ocean, located on the side of a building. The mural showcases a blue water scene with clouds and marine life, set against an urban backdrop with a parking lot filled with cars.
History of the Dallas, Texas Wyland Whaling Wall 82
-Ocean Life
Whaling wall 82
Texas Utilities Building
505 Akard Street Dallas, Texas
Back: 164 Feet Long x 82 Feet High
Side: 50 Feet Long x 78 Feet High
Dedicated April 16, 1999

For nearly three decades, Wyland’s Whaling Wall 82, also known as Ocean Life, covered two sides of a downtown Dallas parking garage at 505 N. Akard Street. Painted in 1999, the mural showed blue whales and other marine life swimming across a landlocked city. Then, ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the whales began to disappear under blue paint.

The plan, apparently, was to replace Wyland’s mural with World Cup-related images. Dallas and North Texas are preparing to host nine matches, more than any other World Cup host city. The problem is what had to be erased to make the gesture possible.

The reporting has been especially grim because the loss seems to have resulted less from one dramatic act of hostility than from a chain of institutional shrugging. Someone identified the wall as a good site. Someone noted that the mural was old. Someone checked whether it was part of the City of Dallas public art collection. It was not. Someone apparently assumed that was enough. And then, as Robert Wilonsky wrote in the Dallas Morning News, “someone said: Here’s a wall you can probably paint over. And because no one else said: No.”

Wyland says he was not consulted before the work was painted over. His lawyers have reportedly issued a cease-and-desist letter invoking the Visual Artists Rights Act, the federal moral rights statute that protects some works of visual art from intentional destruction, distortion, mutilation, or modification. The legal questions will turn on facts that are not yet fully public: whether there was any waiver, what agreements governed the original installation, who controlled the wall, and whether the mural qualifies as a work of recognized stature.

But if public recognition matters, the reaction to the erasure is itself part of the story. A work does not have to be in a city collection to matter to a city.

That distinction is important. Public art is not only the art a city formally owns. It is also the art a public comes to know. A mural can become part of a place even if it sits on private property.

The World Cup angle makes the whole episode sharper. Mega-events arrive wrapped in the language of unity, celebration, legacy, and global connection. They also arrive with deadlines, sponsors, temporary beautification, and a tendency to flatten local meaning into marketable spectacle. Cities are asked to show off for outsiders. Too often, that means clearing away the awkward, faded, beloved, or locally specific thing and replacing it with something smoother.

There is also a wider unease surrounding the U.S. hosting of the World Cup this year. Reports suggest that hotel bookings in many U.S. host cities are softer than expected. AP reported that hotel demand has been lighter than anticipated in most of the eleven U.S. host cities, with operators pointing to international travel concerns, visa delays, high ticket prices, and transit costs. Al Jazeera, citing an AHLA survey, reported that many hotel operators saw bookings below initial forecasts, with visa barriers and geopolitical concerns among the cited reasons.

That matters because the World Cup is supposed to be an invitation. Yet the United States is hosting it at a moment when many people have good reason to ask what kind of invitation is being extended.

Immigration enforcement is part of that anxiety. The federal government has reportedly left open the possibility that ICE activity could occur around World Cup events. And this tournament is arriving after a the brutality of immigration enforcement in which the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis became symbols of state violence.

So when Dallas paints over a beloved mural to make room for World Cup imagery, the episode lands in an already uneasy atmosphere. It is not only about marine conservation. It is about the strange promise that a mega-event will showcase local culture while the machinery of preparation helps erase it.

There were obvious alternatives. Caitlin Clark at D Magazine asked the simplest question: why not use a vinyl banner? The World Cup lasts 39 days. The mural had previously been covered by advertising and later re-emerged. A temporary covering would have allowed Dallas to celebrate the tournament without permanently destroying a work that had become part of the city’s visual fabric.

Instead, Dallas now has a legal controversy, an angry artist, national attention, and a half-erased mural. Organizers have said that a portion of Wyland’s mural will be preserved as a tribute. But preserving a remnant after painting over the work is a strange kind of tribute. It is a bit like knocking down a historic building and saving a doorknob.

This story may become an important VARA dispute. It may tell us something about murals, private property, public memory, and the continuing importance of moral rights in the United States. But even before the legal issues are resolved, the cultural lesson is clear enough.

If a city wants to host the world, it should begin by paying attention to what its own people already value. The whales were not just old paint. They were part of Dallas’s public memory. And in trying to manufacture a legacy for a global event, the city may have destroyed one it already had.

Caitlin Clark, The Downtown Dallas Whale Mural Drama, Explained (updated May 18), D Magazine (last visited May 21, 2026).

Dallas Express, Cease-and-Desist Issued As Crews Cover Dallas Landmark Whale Mural For World Cup, Dallas Express (May 20, 2026).

Jesus Jiménez, A Beloved Whale Mural in Dallas Is Painted Over Ahead of the World Cup, The New York Times (May 19, 2026).

Robert Wilonsky, All the Mistakes that Led to the Extinction of Wyland’s Dallas Whale Mural, Dallas Morning News (May 18, 2026).

Jamie Stengle, An Outcry Erupts as a Whale Mural Beloved by Many in Dallas is Replaced with Art for the World Cup, AP News (May 19, 2026).

Urgent Legal Battle: Wyland Fights Dallas Mural Paint-Over, NewsRadio 1080 KRLD (last visited May 21, 2026).

Philip Marcelo, U.S. Hotel Operators Say Promised Boon from Hosting World Cup Hasn’t Materialized Yet, AP News (May 12, 2026).

AFP, Low U.S. Hotel Bookings Paint Grim Hospitality Picture at the World Cup, Al Jazeera (May 6, 2026).

Melissa Hellmann, Eight People Have Died in Dealings with ICE So Far in 2026. These Are Their Stories, The Guardian (Jan. 28, 2026).

Maanvi Singh & agencies, ICE Officer Charged over Shooting of Venezuelan Man in Minnesota, The Guardian (May 18, 2026).

Reuters, Minnesota Officials Charge ICE Agent in Shooting of Venezuelan Immigrant, Reuters (May 18, 2026).

What will happen to art made for the Black Lives Matter movement?

A BLM Mural painted on what I think are plywood panels at the Station Museum in Houston’s 3rd Ward.

Art works with and through social movements. It informs; works to inspire; and just generally supports collective action. In our current digitally connected age it is easier than ever now to document and share the proliferation of art meant to protest, encourage, and criticize the current state of institutional racism in the United States and elsewhere. I snapped a picture with my phone on a walk earlier this week in front of the Station Museum. We are in a way fortunate that so much of this art can be preserved, perhaps in only a limited way, by cell phone cameras and drones. But the physical objects may be left without a good means of preservation. What will happen to all these sanctioned and unsanctioned murals on plywood and buildings?

In July volunteers painted a Black Lives Matter mural on the street outside the site of the original Burns BBQ (Photo by: Godofredo A. Vásquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer)

Alex Brady has written a thoughtful piece for Salon thinking about some of these questions. In Oakland, California, a handful of organizations like Oakland’s Black Cultural Zone and others are working to preserve some of these panels by storing the mural panels when they have been taken down:

Alongside other Black-led organizations and Black artists, BCZ is working with Oakland Endeavors, Oakland Art Murmur, and the Oakland Museum to de-install panels and store them in facilities throughout the city. And while many museums throughout the country are making efforts to highlight African-American history, the Oakland Museum and other ally organizations are taking their orders from BCZ when it comes to the influx of plywood murals and other street art in the city.

“We wanted to set it up such that we [BCZ] could create the infrastructure because the institutions typically have the infrastructure,” [Randolph] Belle said.

The BCZ is neither curating nor collecting but is currently storing 20 de-installed panels and anticipating more. The group has an online form for businesses, developers, and landlords to identify murals and artwork, and to notify BCZ when the panels get taken down so that the group can track the work, safely store it, and contact the artist(s) about desired next steps.

Oakland Endeavors, one of the organizations working with BCZ (Endeavors also worked with Wolfe-Goldsmith on Oakland’s downtown Black Lives Matter street mural) is standing by to store more, along with the other partner organizations.

Eventually, BCZ anticipates cataloguing and storing hundreds of panels.

Of course because artists and those who view it are a diverse group, some do not even want the art preserved or preserved in an institutionalized way. That of course means much of this art will be lost or destroyed.

Another interesting angle to consider is that much of this art is reproducing many of the same ideas, themes, and images. They seem to me to be working to use the tragic deaths and murders of people of color to advance collective action and effect a more just and equitable society. That seems to be the real overarching goal, and preservation of the artwork does seem to be a secondary consideration. But the art speaks to the moment, and it would be a shame if we are not left with the physical reminders of this social movement. As more and more cities are making the long-delayed and sensible decision to remove the racist symbols of the confederacy, these murals have taken their place in many cities. There are BLM murals and symbols of hope and solidarity all over my city, Houston, as the last few handful of confederate monuments are slowly being removed.

One remedy for artists who create these murals with permission, and if they achieve the nebulous status of “recognized stature” as the Visual Artists Rights Act requires may be entitled to certain rights of integrity and attribution should the murals be threatened with intentional destruction or mutilation. Those remedies are taking on increasing importance as arts lawyers and street artists slowly litigate life into the idea that artists are entitled to certain important rights that follow the significant works of art they create.

Clowney on corruption in the art market and in prostitution

Maddalena penitente (Mary Magdalene Penitente), By Caravaggio, c. 1594-1595, currently hanging in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome

Professor Stephen Clowney of the University of Arkansas School of Law has written an interesting article examining the role of markets in certain special categories: things like organs, human lives, sex, and works of art. He has an interesting summary of the scholarship critical of markets; and he suggests I think that markets are not inherently corrupt. He ably points out flaws in the scholarship which criticizes commodification, yet he makes his own grave errors in relation to the role of the market on the art trade and its allied fields and disciplines. His approach is a kind of ethnographic study of art appraisers and prostitutes. The article is well-written and entertaining, but I just don’t think you get a complete picture of the art market by only talking with appraisers. He also ignores large areas of helpful scholarship from criminologists, totally ignores the Knoedler forgery scandal, and does not acknowledge the problems presented by the antiquities trade. But if you want an entertaining read, I can recommend it.

Clowney, Stephen (2020) “Does Commodification Corrupt? Lessons from Paintings and Prostitutes,” Seton Hall Law Review: Vol. 50 : Iss. 4 , Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/shlr/vol50/iss4/3

Victory for 5Pointz Artists in the Second Circuit

5pointz artworks being whitewashed in 2013

In a ruling which will likely feature in future art law coursebooks, the Second Circuit has affirmed a $6.75 million judgment against a real estate developer for whitewashing a number of murals at 5Pointz. This is a rare victory for artist’s moral rights in an American court.

The site became known as a prominent aerosol art haven in 2002 when the developer Gerald Wolkoff asked Jonathan Cohen to install some art on a warehouse in Long Island City in Queens. Cohen curated the space and had a rotation of various artists use the building. It attracted worldwide attention. It also displayed itself to passengers every time a 7 train would pass by:

As is often the case with moral rights cases that have been litigated under the Visual Artists Rights Act, changed circumstances for the building led to the deveoloper seeking to capitalize on the new-found gentrification of the neighborhood. In 2013 artists learned that Wolkoff was planning to destroy the warehouses to build a condominium complex. The artists sought landmark status and asked for an injunction under the Visual Artists Rights Act. That injunction was not granted, and rather than wait for the legal process to play out, or wait to let the artists preserve their works, Wolkoff whitewashed the art. That act probably did more harm to Wolkoff’s argument than any thing, with the district court finding the art had achieved recognized stature and imposing the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work (45 works in total) of art in order to sanction Wolkoff’s conduct and to vindicate the policy supporting the moral rights act.

Donn Zaretsky in commenting on the ruling wrote that the damages may have been the most interesting part of the ruling:

Now, it may be the facts of this case were so unique and so egregious that it won’t have a wider impact — basically what happened is that early in the litigation the artists got a TRO preventing the demolition of the site, it expired, and, while the district court was considering their application for a preliminary injunction to replace it, the developer had the work painted over, “without any genuine business need” to do so, “simply, as the district court found, an ‘act of pure pique and revenge.'” But the idea that significant statutory damages can be awarded in a VARA case even where actual damages can’t be proven could be a big deal.

The Art Law Blog

Moral rights are rights that have been around for a very long time. They originated in the French Revolutionary idea of ‘droit moral de l’auteur’, stemming from the idea that if art is harmed, the artist also is harmed.

I am always surprised when I encounter art lawyers and academics who are critical of the idea of moral rights. They will often make the argument that artists do not want or need moral rights, and developers like Wolkoff will not allow art anywhere near their buildings ever again. But this elides the reality, these condominium developments have as I understand it been built to take advantage of the newly gentrified neighborhood, and the new ‘luxury’ development will still be called 5 Pointz, and feature aerosol art. The art will happen no matter what, this ruling just gives the artists vindication for the personality of these artists that was bound up and integral in these images. Developers like Wolkoff claim that these moral rights damage their property rights; but a moral right is not an economic right. Instead it accounts for the psychological suffering which takes place when an artist’s art has been harmed in some way.

The IFAR Art Law & Cultural Property Database

This is an unsolicited plug—I have no doubt that many folks are very familiar with the good work that the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) has done for many years. But one of its most remarkable accomplishments is its Art Law and Cultural Property Database. If you are a student, attorney, art professional, or cultural heritage advocate and not availing yourself of this resource, you are likely duplicating work and failing to account for much of the advocacy and scholarship which has come before. I encouraged my own librarians to secure a subscription for my work, and the work of students in my Art Law Seminars. I’ve used this terrific resource many many times in preparing lectures and informing my own scholarship, and I encourage you to consider adding a subscription for your own firm or institution.

Information on the database is available here.

Essay on Financial Innovation and the Market for Pop Art

Jasper Johns ‘Flag’ (1954-55) Museum of Modern Art, New York. The work was included in an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958.

The art market owes much of its success to tax policy. A new essay in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts examines many of the financial structures used by Pop Art gallerist Leo Castelli in the middle of the 20th Century. The Essay is authored by Michael W. Maizels (visiting researcher at the Harvard metaLAB) and William E. Foster (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Arkansas School of Law)

This essay focuses on the efforts of an enterprising art gallerist, Leo Castelli, to aggressively promote his stable of Pop artists through the development of several financial structures, including some designed to leverage the relatively generous income tax deductions and anemic enforcement regime of the time. In doing so, Castelli not only seeded the ground for the international ascendance of American visual art, but also engineered financial arrangements that fostered the development of a lucrative and resilient art market that endures to this day. With the aim to provide insights into both the legal-political and the art historical registers, this essay describes a tax law framework that provides a key piece missing from the art historical puzzle.

Maizels, Michael and Foster, William E., The Gallerist’s Gambit: Financial Innovation, Tax Law, and the Making of the Contemporary Art Market (November 21, 2019). Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2019. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3491207 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3491207

Supreme Court waiting on Solicitor General before deciding on certiorari in the Guelph Treasure dispute

The arm reliquary of St. Sigismund

The Art Newspaper has a useful update on the current state of the Guelph Treasure dispute. The Supreme Court has asked the Executive Branch, specifically the Solicitor General of the United States for an opinion on the case, in order to aid in its decision over whether or not to hear an appeal of the case from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here’s a quick background on the dispute. The Welfenschatz, or Guelph trove, a collection of 42 objects dating from the 11th-15th centuries is currently in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and has been claimed by successors of art dealers who were fleeing the holocaust. These objects were originally housed in the cathedral in Braunschweig, owned by the House of Guelph. During the First World War, the House of Guelph lost reign over Braunschweig and in the 1920s the pieces were sold to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers, including 82 items in 1929. Later in 1935 the Prussian state, led by Hermann Goering, bought the remaining pieces of the hoard in what the claimaints allege was a “genocidal taking”. In 2014, a German government commission found that the transaction was not a forced sale.

The claimants then brought suit in the United States. The current possessors, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have defended that action on the grounds that as a Foreign Government, they are immune from suit in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Claimants have argued that the actions of the Prussian government fall under one of the exceptions to that law, that the actions of the Prussians was a violation of International law, namely genocide.

For some further helpful background from the perspective of the claimants, Nicholas O’Donnell, counsel for the claimants, has an excellent blog where he often updates this dispute.

Martha Lufkin, Supreme Court Delays Guelph Treasure Appeal so US Government Can Add Its Views to Case, The Art Newspaper, Jan. 21, 2020, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/supreme-court-delays-guelph-treasure-appeal-so-us-government-can-add-its-views-to-case [https://perma.cc/3UGP-SCJ2].

Gerstenblith on Provenance

John Myatt forged a number of prominent Old Masters, and his conspirator John Drewe invented provenance for many of the works.

Prof. Gerstenblith has a new Piece in the International Journal of Cultural Property titled “Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable“. Here’s the abstract:

Provenance, the ownership history of an artifact or work of art, has become one of the primary mechanisms for determining the legal status and authenticity of a cultural object. Professional associations, including museum organizations, have adopted the “1970 standard” as a means to prevent the acquisition of an ancient object from promoting the looting of archaeological sites, which is driven by the economic gains realized through the international market. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), one of the museum world’s most influential professional organizations, requires its members to list the ancient artworks and artifacts that they have acquired after 2008 that do not conform to the 1970 standard in an online object registry. The study presented here of the AAMD’s Object Registry for New Acquisitions of Archaeological Material and Works of Ancient Art analyzes the extent to which AAMD member museums do not comply with the 1970 standard and, perhaps of greater significance, the weaknesses in the provenance information on which they rely in acquiring such works. I argue that systematic recurrences of inadequate provenance certitude are symptomatic of the larger problem of methodology and standards of evidence in claiming documented provenance. A museum’s acceptance of possibly unverifiable provenance documentation and, therefore, its acquisition of an object that may have been recently looted, in turn, impose a negative externality on society through the loss of information about our past caused by the looting of archaeological sites.


Gerstenblith, P. (2019). Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable. International Journal of Cultural Property, 26(3), 285-304. doi:10.1017/S0940739119000171