The complaint says that, as no major auction house will accept a work unless it has been included in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, “a refusal by the defendants to include an artwork [is] recognised in the worldwide marketplace as a conclusive statement that the artwork is a fake”.
Mayor Gallery, based in Cork Street, sold 13 works by American abstract painter Agnes Martin for $7.2m between 2009 and 2013. It included Day & Night, an acrylic from 1961-64 bought for $2.9m by the investment banker Jack Levy in 2010.
Levy first submitted it to the authentication committee in 2014 in the hope of including it in a forthcoming catalogue raisonné.
When it was rejected, Mayor bought the work back and resubmitted it to the committee, this time with new information about its provenance and the results of radio carbon testing. It was rejected for a second time, with a dozen other works bought from Mayor similarly dismissed in 2014 and 2015.
Other not-for-profit artist foundations - including those for Calder, Basquiat and Warhol – no longer take part in authenticating works to avoid lawsuits from those whose works are rejected. A bill designed to protect art authenticators practicing in good faith has twice been passed in the New York State Senate (most recently in April 2016) but is yet to move beyond the committee stage.
