Doig Authentication Trial Starts

The NY Times is reporting on the start of the Peter Doig authentication trial. The trial is about the accusation that Doig is falsely denying one of his own early works. The plantiffs claim they can prove the work is by Doig, and they want $5 million in damages and a court declaration the work is by Doig.  This will be very interesting as it plays out.

The NY Times reports

The artist Peter Doig took the stand here Monday in an odd federal court case in which the owner of a landscape painting is accusing Mr. Doig of falsely denying that he created the work while a young man in Canada.

In a brief opening statement, William F. Zieske, a lawyer for the owner, said the evidence would prove that a painting bought in 1976 by his client, a former correction officer named Robert Fletcher, and signed “Pete Doige,” is “indeed the work of Peter Doig.”

The painting was carried into the courtroom in a cardboard box and unceremoniously placed on a metal easel a few feet from the artist and his team of lawyers. “This is not a work painted by someone with no artistry or no artistic talent,” Mr. Zieske said. “It is a work of master artistic talent.”

But Matthew S. Dontzin, a lawyer for the artist, a popular painter whose works routinely fetch $10 million, argued that his client has been suffering through a nightmare of “bullying tactics” and money demands from plaintiffs who “have not produced any documents or one witness to show that Doig painted this or Doig didn’t.”

The dispute began five years ago when a friend noticed a painting hanging on Mr. Fletcher’s wall and told him that the work was by a famous artist. Mr. Fletcher said he knew Mr. Doig in the 1970s, when the artist attended Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, and later, while working in a Canadian detention center, and that the painter indeed created the work while a young inmate there.

Mr. Fletcher said that he had been the young artist’s parole officer, helped Mr. Doig find a job through the Seafarers International Union, and bought the painting from Mr. Doig for $100. The painting, an untitled acrylic on canvas showing a rocky desert, is signed “Pete Doige 76.”

Peter Bartlow, a Chicago art dealer who agreed to help Mr. Fletcher sell the work and is now a co-plaintiff in the case, says the acrylic of the forlorn desert scene contains early echoes of Mr. Doig’s trademark eerie landscapes, which have made him famous.

But Mr. Doig has said he was sent a photograph of the canvas by the owner and did not recognize it. He said he never attended Lakehead, was never near the detention facility (the Thunder Bay Correctional Center, several hours north of Toronto), and has never been incarcerated. He grew up in Canada, before attending art school in England. He was 16 or 17 in 1976, he has said, and living with his parents in Toronto.

The lawsuit, brought by Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Bartlow, charges that Mr. Doig is either confused or lying, and that his denials wrecked their plan to sell the work at a Chicago auction house for what they said could have been millions of dollars.

The plaintiffs are suing the painter for at least $5 million in damages and, in addition, are seeking a court declaration that the artwork is authentic.

Mr. Doig took the stand on the first day of the trial, called as an adverse witness by the plaintiffs, whose lawyers asked him to go through the minutiae of how he creates art. The plaintiffs contend the work resembles other paintings by Mr. Doig and employs colors he typically uses.

Mr. Doig, dressed in a light gray suit, answered politely through several hours of testimony, describing how he used projections and other tools to help create images. Most of his answers revolved around technical issues, not direct commentary on whether he had created the work.

Asked, for example, to describe how he would create a silk-screen on punk-rock T-shirts, Mr. Doig said, “You slop on varnish and you paint the paint through a screen.”

Mr. Doig and his lawyers have identified a man, Peter Edward Doige, who they say was the real artist.

He died in 2012, but his sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, said he had attended Lakehead University, served time in Thunder Bay, and painted.

Mr. Fletcher, who lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and Mr. Bartlow have no record of Mr. Doig being jailed in Thunder Bay, but they have focused on what they assert is an incomplete account of his teenage years in Canada, when he cannot fully explain where he was or what he was doing.

Mr. Fletcher testified in the afternoon and said that he remembered Mr. Doig well, partly because, he said, he had known him at Lakehead University and then later when he worked at the detention center.

While at Thunder Bay, Mr. Fletcher recalled watching the person he said was Mr. Doig work on the desert painting over a period of months. “He was almost bragging and said how good he was getting at it (painting),” Mr. Fletcher said.

And his progress as a painter showed in the work, Mr. Fletcher told the court. “The painting stood out,” he said. “I fell in love with it.”

The auctioneer, who the owner had intended to sell the painting through, also testified briefly.

Judge Gary Feinerman of the United States District Court for Northern Illinois decided that there was enough evidence for the case to go to trial and will rule after what is expected to be about a week of testimony.

Source: The NY Times