Tag Archives: picasso

Foundation’s arguments thwarted in New York case of Nazi-looted Schiele

Posted on: March 17, 2022 by Stephanie Drawdy

Just a year before the Spanish flu claimed him in 1918, Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele used hues of orange and red to portray his wife as she looked away, hands folded (left). Some 20 years later in Nazi-occupied Vienna, this portrait would be looted. And now, over 80 years after that, the work is the […]

Application of HEAR Act brought into question by U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review Picasso restitution case

Posted on: April 17, 2020 by Stephanie Drawdy

The U.S. Supreme Court seemed inclined to fold its arms and look out the proverbial window when it recently refused to review a case that time-barred a restitution claim over a Picasso sold in late 1930s Europe. By its refusal, America’s highest court has raised questions over the application of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery […]

U.S. Court of Appeals Finds The Met is Rightful Owner of Picasso’s The Actor

Posted on: July 12, 2019 by Stephanie Drawdy

The great-grand niece of a Jewish couple from Cologne, the Leffmanns, has again received an adverse ruling in a New York federal case in which she seeks possession of a painting sold by the Leffmanns after Nazi-rule necessitated their departure from Germany. In its June 26, 2019 decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld […]

Art, AI and copyright

Posted on: November 9, 2018 by Alexander Herman

A big splash was made when a lot sold at Christie’s New York last month for $432,500. That sort of amount is usually small change for the major international auction house, but not when it comes to a particular sort of artwork: one made by artificial intelligence (or AI). In fact, this was reported to […]

Crowdfunding allows Swiss to retain a Picasso

Posted on: August 2, 2018 by Hélène Deslauriers

In December 2017, a Swiss crowdfunding website, Qoqa, offered visitors to the site the opportunity to purchase a Picasso painting, Le Buste du Mousquetaire (1968).   For three months, a careful and efficient campaign was mounted, culminating in a victory, with sufficient funds raised to buy the Picasso. Le Buste du Mousquetaire now belongs to the Swiss people.  […]

Public domain and the internet

Posted on: May 24, 2017 by Alexander Herman

A number of issues arise when we use images of artistic works online. Here, I am referring to copyright and to the specific treatment of images of older works that may – or may not – have fallen into the public domain. Of course, once copyright has expired in a work, that work will enter the public […]

Lubaina Himid and the power of appropriation art

Posted on: February 16, 2017 by Alexander Herman

There is a very intriguing exhibition on at the moment at Modern Art Oxford featuring the artist Lubaina Himid. She makes political, opinionated and at times furious pieces in various media, from sculpture to canvas to pottery. The show is called Invisible Strategies and spans work going back to the artist’s early days in the 1980s to pieces created just last year. […]

Copyright calculator for EU

Posted on: April 23, 2015 by Alexander Herman

For those of you who have taken the IAL’s Diploma in Intellectual Property and Collections (DipIPC) course, you will know that an important module of the course deals with the duration of copyright. This can be an especially challenging issue when it comes to the visual arts, where digitisation can make a work instantaneously available throughout the world. But different […]

Settlement reached in Tricorne Affair

Posted on: June 17, 2014 by Alexander Herman

In the saga commented on earlier by Hélène Deslauriers here, a settlement has now been reached between the owner of the Seagram Building in New York and the New York Landmarks Conservancy. The dispute arose over the treatment of Picasso’s stage curtain Le Tricorne, which had hung prominently in the Seagram Building since 1959. The owner […]

Picasso painting to stay in Four Seasons Restaurant… for now

Posted on: May 9, 2014 by Hélène Deslauriers

In Manhattan, Justice Matthew Cooper of the New York State Supreme Court ruled recently to prevent the owners of the Seagram Building from removing, at least for the time being, a stage curtain painted by Picasso stating there is ‘clearly a danger of irreprable injury’. The painting, known as Le Tricorne was executed by Picasso […]