A complex lawsuit between the financier and art collector Asher Edelman and Washington D.C.’s Geoffrey Diner Gallery has shed some light on the increasingly complicated business of art authentication and repair through foundations. 

The suit, filed in February, concerns a 1969 Pier Paolo Calzolari work, Five Neons say Rietuto, Mio Nome, Nebuloso, Avido, Farfallesco, which Edelman consigned to Diner in June 2015 for London’s Masterpiece art fair, staged that month. It was valued at $600,000. 

The complaint says that “on or around September 16, 2015”, the work, which is made of leather belts and neon lights, “suffered severe damage” en route to New York. The work was sent in a shipping container by Bourlet ArtLogistics and was covered not only by Diner’s AXA insurance, but by Edelman’s own policy with StarNet. But in this case, today’s art market has made things difficult. Edelman’s lawyers contend that the only way to repair the work properly is to do so through the 72-year-old artist and his Rome-based Fondazione Calzolari. This would entail authenticating the work, a process that has become ever more fraught in an art world still recovering from the scandal at the Knoedler Gallery. 

Anyone submitting a work to the foundation for any reason must first sign an application that waives any right to sue the foundation in perpetuity and to pay any costs or legal fees the artist incurs in connection with the work, perhaps even years after it is resold. 

Artists’ rights

Furthermore, it is not certain that Calzolari will deem it repairable, or will not later disown it—as many artists have with damaged works. Cady Noland did just that in a high-profile 2012 case—the Visual Artist Rights Act protects an artist’s right to say what is and isn’t their work in their lifetime. 

Artist Pier Paolo Calzolari in front of Untitled (1970) in New York, 2012. Photo: Josh Haner/The New York Times Redux / eyevine