Park West Gallery Fiasco - Just the Beginning

A monumental legal dispute has been churning very quietly for the past several years in the Upper Midwest pitting Phoenix based Global Fine Art Registry against Southfield Michigan art gallery Park West. Park West Galleries, Inc. has hosted auctions on board cruise ships since the early 1990's and provided documentation from their appraisers as to authentication and value. Bottom line Fine Art Registry accused Park West of fraud. Park West sued Fine Art Registry for $46 million for defamation. Park West lost and Fine Art Registry was awarded $500,000 for trademark law violation. This now opens the door for all those buyers to come back at Park West for their own claims. This could potentially start an avalanche of claims against appraisers, Park West, and maybe the cruise lines as well.

Park West Galleries Inc. was not defamed by an Arizona art registry service, and will even have to pay $500,000 for infringing a federal trademark law while defending its reputation, a federal court jury found today.

Jurors took about a day and a half to reach a unanimous verdict against the Southfield art dealer and in favor of Phoenix-based Global Fine Art Registry L.L.C. Park West had sought $46 million in damages against the registry, its CEO Teresa Franks, owner Bruce Hochman of California-based The Salvador Dali Art Gallery, and a contract writer for the registry.

After a six-week trial before U.S. District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff, the jury on Wednesday awarded no damages in Park West's claims for defamation, tortuous interference and civil conspiracy.

It also awarded no damages in Fine Art Registry's and Franks' counterclaims of defamation and tortuous interference; but it did award $500,000 to Fine Art Registry for violations of the federal Lanham Act that governs several aspects of trademark law.

“I'm overwhelmed,” Franks said of the outcome Wednesday. “We went through three years of hell with this company (Park West), and I was honored by the witnesses and experts who came and helped us from around the country and all over the world. This was a company with three law firms and we were in a classic David and Goliath case, and I feel like we kicked rear-end today.”

The federal lawsuit stems from a series of online reports the Registry posted in 2007-08 about Park West, mainly involving buyers who claim fraud and violations of consumer protection laws in several states in art auctions that Park West hosts aboard cruise ships.

Many of those buyers are plaintiffs in eight other state and federal lawsuits seeking more than $22 million in damages; most of those cases were consolidated a few months ago into a multi-district federal lawsuit that heads to trial next year in Seattle.

Park West has hosted auctions aboard cruise lines since 1993, and the company has claimed they account for more than 80 percent of annual revenue, which peaked at nearly $300 million in 2006 and early 2007.

Celebration, Fla.-based Disney Cruise Line has ended its concession agreement to host Park West auctions last year and entered a new agreement with competitor West End Gallery Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. But Park West maintains its agreements with several other cruise lines.

Rodger Young, founding partner at Southfield-based Young & Susser P.C. and lead attorney for Park West, said he was shocked by the result and expects to file a motion next week for judgment as a matter of law, to supplant the verdict with a ruling by Judge Lawrence Zatkoff.

If that request fails, he said, the art dealer will take the matter to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"We are extraordinarily disappointed by the verdict," he said. "Absolutely anyone else in the courtroom must have heard a different case than the one the jury considered, and we intend to very vigorously appeal."

Robin Danek, director of marketing communications for Park West, could not be immediately reached. In a voicemail recording she deferred comment to Young.

Jonathan Schwartz, associate at Farmington Hills-based Kaufman, Payton & Chapa P.C., said the Lanham Act violation involved Park West's use of a Fine Art Registry trademark in sponsored links on search engines, to drive Internet user queries to a Park West reputation management page online.

He also hailed Wednesday's outcome as a win and a possible indicator of the strength of the buyer lawsuits. Kaufman Payton is also representing 10 art buyers in a civil lawsuit at Oakland County Circuit Court, and defended Franks and the Registry in the federal lawsuit in Port Huron.

“We mounted a defense of truth in the defamation case, and were able to bring witnesses and experts to support the claims that were made (online),” he said. “The (parties) are going to take a look at the buyer claims on a case by case basis, but if Park West wants to present this same case as a defense to those allegations, the outcome today might say something about the strength of presenting that defense.”
Compiled from: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20100421/FREE/100429940>

Quick Takes March/April 2010

1. Irwin Hersey Dies in New York April 2, 2010
HERSEY--Irwin. Born Irwin Herskowitz, editor and nationally known authority on tribal art died in Manhattan April 2 at age 89. Born September 15, 1920, Mr. Hersey was a graduate of City College and received his masters degree from Columbia University. In World War II he was commissioned and trained as a Japanese linguist and served in Tokyo on General MacArthur's staff. He was recalled to active duty in Korea. He left the army a captain and worked as a business editor for Fairchild and Hearst Publications. In 1957 he became editor of the Journal of the Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics and director of publications of the American Rocket Society. Later he became a consultant to cities wanting to expand business meetings and conventions, worldwide. His knowledge and expertise of African tribal art led to his work as an appraiser and was among the first to try to provide professional standards to the field. From 1978 to 1983 he founded and edited the Primitive Art Newsletter. Objects from his collection are represented in major U.S. museums. He is survived by his wife Marcia. (Published in The New York Times on April 6, 2010 )

2. Major Archaeological Discovery in Egypt
CAIRO (AP).- Archaeologists have unearthed a massive red granite head of one Egypt's most famous pharaohs who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities announced Sunday. The head of Amenhotep III, which alone is about the height of a person, was dug out of the ruins of the pharaoh's mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor. The leader of the expedition that discovered the head described it as the best preserved sculpture of Amenhotep III's face found to date. "Other statues have always had something broken: the tip of the nose, the face is eroded," said Dr. Hourig Sourouzian, who has led the led the Egyptian-European expedition at the site since 1999. "But here, from the tip of the crown to the chin, it is so beautifully carved and polished, nothing is broken." The head is part of a larger ... More

3. Israeli Art Theft Of 30 Million Watch Solved
LOS ANGELES (AP).- The widow of a notorious Israeli thief has been convicted of receiving stolen property from a 27-year-old heist that included more than 100 expensive timepieces and museum artifacts, including what's been called "the Mona Lisa of the clock world." Nili Shamrat, 64, of Tarzana, was convicted Feb. 23 and sentenced to five years' probation and 300 hours of community service, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner announced Tuesday. In 1983, 106 timepieces, paintings and artifacts were taken from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem. It was hailed as the costliest theft in Israeli history and included a pocket watch made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials valued at more than $30 million. There ... More

4. Annie Leibovitz New Problems
NEW YORK (AP).- Photographer Annie Leibovitz is facing new accusations of balking at bills, less than a month after she struck a deal intended to resolve financial problems that had risked her rights to some of pop culture's most famous images. Investment firm Brunswick Capital Partners LP said in a lawsuit filed Friday that Leibovitz owes more than $800,000 in fees for its help arranging her recent financing agreement with another firm, Colony Capital LLC. Through a spokesman, Leibovitz declined to comment Monday. New York-based Brunswick said it "made exhaustive efforts" to link Leibovitz with investors who could help her out of a financial hole that had threatened to cost her control of her life's work. Leibovitz has photographed figures ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Queen Elizabeth during her 40-year career. Sometimes theatrical, often provocative, her work includes such famous images as a nude and very pregnant ... More

5. Milwaukee Public Open Quilt Show
Milwaukee Art Museum to Show American Quilts: Selections from the Winterthur Collection
MILWAUKEE, WI.- One of the world’s finest collections of early American quilts will be on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum May 22–September 6, 2010. Featuring rare surviving textiles of the late 1700s and early 1800s from Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, Delaware, American Quilts outlines America’s earliest cultural landscape in stunning detail. American Quilts features more than 40 exquisite quilts whose fabric, design, and stitching combine to provide an extraordinary visual experience. These works of art also present a wealth of new information about the lives of their makers and the world around them. Quilts make political statements, celebrate marriages, and document the early global textile trade. Close examination of these quilts show the frugal recycling of a pair of men’s wool breeches, or the special purchase of fashionable and expensive fabrics. The exhibition includes some of the finest and earlies ... More

6. The Middle East and icanaffordart.com
DUBAI.- Art enthusiasts can now shop online for some of the region’s most talented emerging artists with the launch of icanaffordart.com, the Middle East’s first affordable online art gallery. icanaffordart.com brings together a unique collection of over 20 artists from more than 10 nationalities, with artworks ranging in price from US $250 ranging to US $4,000. According to the website’s founder, Dubai-based Arij Baidas Kamal, icanaffordart.com showcases a variety of mediums from paintings, sketches, drawings to photography. “As well as offering superb artworks at an affordable price, the website is an important vehicle for artists to gain exposure in a wider market,” Ms. Baidas Kamal said. “It is our ambition to place icanaffordart.com at the heart of the region’s art community.” Artworks are sold unframed so they can be shipped safely and economically. Buyers can browse for artworks according to size, subject, price range and the arti ... More

7. Brooks Joyner Goes to Allentown
ALLENTOWN, PA.- J. Brooks Joyner has been appointed by the Board of Trustees as the Allentown Art Museum’s Priscilla Payne Hurd President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Joyner will assume his new post, vacated by Gregory J. Perry in September 2009, on May 1, 2010. Joyner comes to the Allentown Art Museum from the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Neb., where he was director from 2001 to 2009. In formation since 1931, the Joslyn Art Museum's collection now contains more than 11,000 works of art from all over the world, antiquity to the present, with a concentration on 19th and 20th century European and American art. Highlights of the permanent collection include works by Lorenzo di Credi, Titian, El Greco, Veronese, Claude de Lorrain, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre August Renoir, and Camille Pissarro. American masters such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hart Benton, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow ... More

8. Now That's a Super Bowl Bet
NEW ORLEANS. LA.- The New Orleans Saints weren’t the only winners on Superbowl Sunday. E. John Bullard, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director, won an online betting match with Maxwell L. Anderson, the Melvin & Bren Simon Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). The spoils? A three-month loan of "The Fifth Plague of Egypt", 1800, a landscape by British artist J.M.W. Turner, which was unveiled on Thursday. “Dreams DO Come True!” Bullard said. “Both teams made their cities proud. We are looking forward to our friends at IMA, Colts fans, Saints fans and all football and art lovers visiting the New Orleans Museum of Art to see the Turner, our Lorrain and all the museum’s masterpieces. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, ‘Who Dat?!’” The betting war began on Monday, January 25, when arts blogger Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes (artsjournal.com/man) tweeted: “@ ... More

Most of the articles abover were compled by artdailey.org

New Intern at the Gallery - Courtney Brown

We are delighted to announce the appointment of a new intern that has been selected to participate in all phases of the gallery, appraisal business, and our online presence.

Courtney Brown lives in Dallas, Texas. and is currently working on completing her Bachelors of Fine Art at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her work has been exhibited at 500x Gallery, The Gallery at University of Texas at Dallas, and Gallery West at University of Texas at Arlington. Courtney has been studying Lakota tradition and native spirituality since the age of sixteen. Her studies at UTA are focused on exploring the function of ritual and ceremony based painting and performance. Courtney will be working directly with John Buxton and Kim Kolker at Shango Gallery in Dallas, Texas. She hopes to gain invaluable insight into the work featured at Shango. When asked for a quote Courtney offered the following. "I am particularly interested in contemporary curatorial practices and standards in the dealing of tribal art. I am really looking forward to working with Kim and John at Shango."

Welcome Courtney!

Ash and Lightning Above an Icelandic Volcano

Explanation: Why did the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland create so much ash? Although the large ash plume was not unparalleled in its abundance, its location was particularly noticeable because it drifted across such well populated areas. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland began erupting on March 20, with a second eruption starting under the center of a small glacier on April 14. Neither eruption was unusually powerful. The second eruption, however, melted a large amount of glacial ice which then cooled and fragmented lava into gritty glass particles that were carried up with the rising volcanic plume. Pictured above two days ago, lightning bolts illuminate ash pouring out of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

Dr. Edmund P. Pillsbury: 1943-2010

Ted Pillsbury, who passed away on March 25 os this year was certainly a major figure in the art world for over 35 years. We have reprinted the Dallas Morning News article from March 26, 2010.

Dr. Edmund P. Pillsbury: 1943-2010
Edmund P. "Ted" Pillsbury, director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth from 1980 to 1998 and a major figure on the American art museum scene, died on Thursday. He was 66.

Dr. Edmund (Ted) Pillsbury is pictured with a painting by Bartolome Esteban Murillo in 2006.
A spokesman for Dallas' Heritage Auction Galleries, where Dr. Pillsbury had served as chairman of fine arts since 2005, said he died of an apparent heart attack after visiting a client in Kaufman County. According to Pat Laney, a representative for the Kaufman County sheriff's office, the death is under investigation.
"Ted was one of the latter 20th century's most important museum directors," said Richard Brettell, chairman of art and aesthetics at the University of Texas at Dallas and former director of the Dallas Museum of Art. "He was, in some ways, single-handedly responsible for turning the Kimbell from an institution with a great building into one whose collection matched its architecture in quality."
Urbane, outgoing and dapper, Dr. Pillsbury was called "one of the most gifted men in the American museum profession" by New York Times critic John Russell.
"Ted was part showman, part scholar," said current Kimbell director Eric Lee. "He had an unusual combination of qualities that made him just right for the Kimbell at that particular moment."
Janet Kutner, former Dallas Morning News art critic, said, "He had a wonderful eye and was a very hard worker. I can't think of a single person who has had that positive an influence on the art world in Dallas and beyond."
Dr. Pillsbury, who held a doctorate in Italian Renaissance art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, attracted international attention with acquisitions of important works by Caravaggio, de la Tour, Watteau, Manet, Monet, Matisse and others. He was also responsible for mounting major exhibitions, publishing scholarly catalogues and creating innovative educational programs. He hired an outstanding curatorial staff and made the Kimbell an important force in art conservation.
He helped negotiate the first international loan exhibition from the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, which broke attendance records during its 1994 run at the Kimbell.
"Ted Pillsbury will forever be remembered by the Kimbell, and within the art world," Lee said.. "When I walk through the galleries every day, when I look at the acquisitions he made hanging on the walls, I have such appreciation for what Ted did here.
In 1989, Pillsbury unveiled and promoted a plan by architect Romaldo Giurgola to expand the Kimbell's acclaimed Louis Kahn building, but after an international outcry the project was shelved. Architect Renzo Piano is now refining a new plan for an addition to the museum.
After escalating disagreements with the Kimbell board, Dr. Pillsbury resigned in 1998 and switched over to the commercial side of the art world. He took over the Dallas branch of the Gerald Peters Gallery, which then became Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art.
He then spent two years, from 2003 to 2005, as director of the Meadows Art Museum at Southern Methodist University, helping the museum find its direction in its new home. He left to work with Heritage Galleries and served as "consultative director" of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas.
"He turned down the Getty [Museum] to work for us," said Heritage co-director Jim Halperin. "He started our fine arts department and museum services department almost from scratch.
"He was a dynamo, our rock star. He was a brilliant, brilliant guy and very likable – really had a way with people. Every time he would give a speech, crowds would show up."
A Minneapolis native, Dr. Pillsbury was a great-grandson of the founder of Pillsbury Milling Co., now a division of General Mills. He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University before going on to graduate studies.
Before becoming the second director of the Kimbell, Dr. Pillsbury was director of the Yale Center for British Art. His first position was as a curator of European painting and sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Survivors include his wife, Mireille; son Edmund P. Pillsbury III of Dallas; and daughter Christine Pillsbury Raniolo of Singapore.
Ted Pillsbury: a career in art
1966: The Kimbell Art Museum, designed by Louis Kahn, opens in Fort Worth.
1980: Edmund P. "Ted" Pillsbury, the 37-year-old founding director of the Yale Center for British Art, becomes director of the Kimbell after the death of its first director, Richard Brown.
1981: Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in Connoisseur magazine, identifies the Kimbell as "America's best small museum," It acquires Cheat With the Ace of Clubs (late 1620s) by Georges de La Tour. The purchase was begun by Brown but completed during Pillsbury's first year.
1982: Pillsbury buys On the Pont de l'Europe (1876-77) by Gustave Caillebotte, an underappreciated French impressionist whose work has grown in favor.
1984: Four Figures on a Step, (1655-60) by Bartolomé Esteben Murillo, an enigmatic genre work by a Spanish painter known for his religious subjects, is purchased .
1986: Pillsbury finds The Apostle Saint James Freeing the Magician Hermogenes (1426-29) by Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole), an exquisite panel from an unidentified altarpiece.
1987: The Cardsharps (c.1594) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of Pillsbury's greatest scores. 1989: Pillsbury unveils expansion plans that add wings to the Kimbell building, which are quickly abandoned because of protests by architects and Kahn's family.
1997: "Monet and the Mediterranean," consisting of 71 of the French impressionist's paintings, opens. By the time it travels to New York , it is the third-best-attended exhibition in the museum's history.
1998: Pillsbury abruptly resigns as Kimbell director. That same year the Kimbell Art Museum receives the American Institute of Architects' 25 Year Award.
1999: He teams up with gallerist Gerald Peters to form Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art. The union dissolves in 2003.
2003: He becomes director of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. This position lasts for two years.
2005: He begins working for Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, expanding their fine art auctions to a $50 million business. He consults on the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas.
2009: Pillsbury alerts new Kimbell director Eric Lee to a Michelangelo painting in play. The Kimbell eventually buys The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487-88), and it becomes the only Michelangelo on exhibit in the Western Hemisphere.