Andy Warhol Foundation

There remains legal issues with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. A lawsuit questions if the authentication board made decisions based on financial reasons and not in the name of scholarship,  The information is coming from an expose in the New York Review of Books and the Art Newspaper.

The Art Newspaper reports

The case is a barely reported lawsuit between the Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The lawsuit, and related court papers, “raise the question of whether some of the decisions the board made about the authenticity of works [of art] were not based on disinterested scholarship, as the insurers may have believed, but were made for other reasons such as financial gain or the perceived need to save face”, writes the critic Richard Dorment in the NYRB article.

The Art Newspaper put a detailed set of questions arising from the NYRB article to Joel Wachs, the president of the foundation, who responded: “This is simply another rehash of the same lies, distortions and half-truths that have been made in the past, all of which have been completely discredited and not a single one of which has ever been proven in court.” He declined to comment further.

In April 2010, the NYRB reports, Philadelphia Indemnity filed a lawsuit against the foundation. The firm, which had been contracted by the foundation to provide liability insurance, refused to pay costs that had arisen from a court case filed by the collector Joe Simon-Whelan in 2007 against both the Warhol foundation and authentication board for denying the authenticity of a picture he owned from the artist’s 1965 series of “Red Self-Portraits”. (Simon-Whelan’s case subsequently collapsed.) Philadelphia Indemnity claimed the foundation had violated its contract by failing to notify the insurer—as its policy required—of “any specific wrongful act” committed by one of the foundation’s members, including the publication of material “with knowledge of its falsity”. The foundation responded by countersuing for full payment of its legal costs in the 2007 case—up to $10m.

Source: The Art Newspaper