Jasper Johns Assistant Accused of Stealing

The NY Times is reporting that Jasper Johns assistant of 27 years has been charged with stealing at least 22 pieces of Johns work and sold them through a New York gallery.  The gallery sold the painting for $6.4 million and the Johns assistant netted $3.4 million.

The NY Times reports

On Wednesday, Mr. Meyer was arrested for stealing at least 22 works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Mr. Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official compendium of the artist’s work, known as the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Meyer kept $3.4 million of that, according to the indictment, with purchasers agreeing to keep the art private for at least eight years, without exhibiting or reselling it.

Arraigned in a Hartford courtroom, Mr. Meyer pleaded not guilty to federal charges, and was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond.

An artist himself, Mr. Meyer, now 51, has talked about how lucky he was to find himself working with one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. In an unpublished interview from the 1990s with the writer Matthew Rose, Mr. Meyer recounted how he made a cold call to Mr. Johns’s studio in 1984, when he was 22 and painting knockoffs of van Gogh and Matisse at $6 an hour to hang on the walls of Beefsteak Charlie’s.

With his résumé and slides of his work in hand, Mr. Meyer said, “I put on a suit, too, and went over to Johns’s Houston Street studio — this large old bank building — tapped on the door.”

Though he didn’t get through the front entrance, he dropped off his package. When he returned the next day to retrieve his slides, Mr. Johns opened the door and invited him in for coffee.

“Come back tomorrow and we’ll take it day by day,” Mr. Meyer remembered Mr. Johns saying. He said that he sometimes drew lines on Mr. Johns’s canvases, which the artist would later erase and redraw. According to the indictment, while employed at the Johns art studio, Mr. Meyer also “maintained a file drawer containing pieces of art that were not yet completed,” and began removing the works from September 2006 to February 2012.

Source: The NY Times