We are launching a new series of articles which take up the cause of the artist. These will either be written by us as a result of interviews on a particular artist, or will be contributed by the artists themselves and published on the Fine Art Registry® or Fine Art Advocacy™ websites. They will tend to be about abuses and infringements which artists have been subjected to. The aim is to expose these situations so that other artists and also collectors can be warned and avoid them.
The first story in this series came as a result of shocking revelations in the form of court documents which might never have seen the light of day had we not come across them in our investigations.
Future stories will be along similar lines. If you feel you have a story for this section of the web site, please contact us with details.
In the conduct of our investigations into abuse of artists and art collectors, we came across some court documents and other material which indicated that an internationally known and successful artist had been crushed and all but destroyed by a ruthless art gallery owner and his organization using a team of lawyers and by the artist's own fickle, unscrupulous agent. To make matters worse, a US court had entered a default judgment and injunction against this artist who was unable to appear in the US court to defend himself as he lives in another country. The injunction, issued by a judge who does not appear to consider that the administration of justice is any part of his responsibility, forbade the artist from publishing statements against his malefactor on his own website or elsewhere. The artist agreed to tell us his story without revealing the names of those involved to avoid the possibility of further SLAPP suits from the organization.
We are therefore publishing his story, exactly as told by the artist in his own words. The story is one which would be of the greatest help in warning other up and coming young artists of the pitfalls that lie in wait for those who make the mistake of getting involved with the seamier, more squalid and unscrupulous elements in the world of art galleries, dealers, brokers, agents and artist's reps.
Read the story and take it to heart.
This is a long story so we will publish it in parts. There are a total of five parts.
I was painting and teaching art in my own studio. My paintings sold well until the economic crisis hit my country in 1982, after which I sold a lot less; but I had my private students to whom I taught painting.
Towards the end of 1993, a friend of mine brought a publicist friend of his to my studio to show him my paintings. This gentleman, a fellow countryman of mine from Israel, owned a company that printed luxury calendars. He was interested in making prints from my works at his company but he began by buying some of my work on a monthly basis and did the same for some other artists.
In 1994 this businessman (I say businessman because he was not an art dealer) took a booth at the Expo in LA and it was there that a gallery owner from Chicago discovered my paintings and bought ALL of them. That was a great success and an entrance into the market of that continent.
Time went by and this agent had still not produced any of the print series we had agreed to in a work contract which we had both signed. Rather he was showing up at more and more art expos in that continent with my original works; in the 1995 Expo in New York, the same gallery owner from Chicago who had earlier bought most of my paintings at the Expo in LA again bought most of my paintings before the opening of the expo to the public, another success on that continent.
Around the middle of 1995 this publicist-businessman was still not producing the agreed-upon prints and I was working very hard to keep up with the numbers of paintings he was buying from me every month at a very low price. Our contract was very simple: he was committed to buying X number of paintings and I to sell them to him. One time I visited his business and discovered that there was no activity going on with regard to prints. I therefore reminded him that according to our contract he was supposed to print X number of print editions per year and at the rate I saw things going, they wouldn’t be done for a long time to come. I also heard some rumors that he was in serious financial difficulties and so on, which alarmed me. But the most important factor, and the one which caused me to cease working with him that same year, was that for each monthly selection of pictures which I took him he would criticize them and try to get me to change the colors, saying, "Look, these people in that country need the colors to be extremely bright; you paint too gray and muted, - the colors will look too pale in the prints," and that alarmed me more: that a publicist would try to change my painting style, my taste and colors and put off his promises and obligations to me, giving me implausible excuses.
Around the middle of 1995, I ceased working with him and we parted on good terms. I continued giving private lessons and painting what I wanted to in my studio, happy and relaxed.
Early in November 1995 I got a phone call from someone who introduced himself as an art dealer, telling me that he had been following my great career since my success in LA in 1994 and in New York in March 1995 and that he knew I no longer had a rep and so on (in other words, he was well informed about me and my situation) and that he wanted to come to my studio to visit me and talk about possibly representing me, and that he worked with several galleries on various continents, etc.
The same day that this artist’s rep visited me (mid November 1995) and after taking a superficial look at the paintings hanging on the walls in my studio, he stood in the middle of the studio and announced: "I will buy it all!!" I was astonished, because, though I had sold well there in 1994 and early 1995, that didn't mean I was so lucky that someone who didn't know my work in any depth should say that. Well, I explained to him that at that moment I was working on a series of abstract paintings which were not very commercially attractive, that I was giving private painting lessons which took up most of the space in my studio and that I had left my more commercial Impressionist and figurative work somewhat to one side recently. He answered, "Well, now you will have to leave your abstract paintings on one side and concentrate on your Impressionist-Expressionist salable pieces 'with a lot of color' because I have an excellent offer for you. This made me think twice about it, because my children were at school and I had to think of their future studies from an economic point of view. That was the only reason for my considering entering into some sort of working relationship with someone who was not a "gallery owner". When I told him that I had little faith in the promises of artist's reps since I had already been burned with one of them once, he told me he was also a "gallery owner", not just an artist's rep, and that he had two galleries in the city, one of which was in a great hotel. In passing he told me about his father who had owned a gallery downtown for many years. This reassured me somewhat because I knew that gallery, although I never knew who owned it until that moment.
This fellow had a natural charm and was very young for an artist's rep. He was just 30 years old, pale, with very white skin and black hair, with some premature baldness and with a baby face and a self-confident smile glued to his face under his diminutive "John Lennon" glasses - a young man who was very sure of himself.
That same day he drew up, using a pencil that he happened to find on the desk in my office and on a piece of paper that was flying about there, and offered me a sort of preliminary agreement of a contract: X number of paintings per month, sizes and media and four limited edition serigraphs each year of so many examples per edition and other details regarding exclusivity - something simple without a lot of detail.
I told him to draw it up more accurately and in more detail, particularly with regard to my author's rights, and I told him that in general terms I viewed the proposal favorably, but emphasized that the prices he was offering me in his proposed contract were lower than those I received from my previous rep a year before. To this he answered that these could not be compared because he would "promote me heavily over there" and that he was a professional with many contacts and that my previous rep was an inexperienced adventurer who had gone broke financially.
By around mid December 1995 he had already bought ten pieces which I painted specially for him with more "vibrant colors" as he had requested. We were working without any signed contract. Early in March 1996 this young man arrived at my studio with a more detailed rough version of a working contract printed on a sheet of paper, for a period of one year and renewable each year for three years if neither party objected. We signed it on April 5, 1996.
In that contract three different sizes of original paintings were specified. Additionally there were the four series of limited edition serigraph prints which he committed himself to produce annually and it specified how I should sign them and the numbers of prints per series which he was committing to printing.
Altogether this packet of work helped me quite well in terms of my children's futures. Obviously when I argued with him about the low prices of the originals, he answered that the originals in this case hardly counted and that the real money would come from the limited edition prints, that that's where "the big money" was, "in prints", and that he would raise the prices, as stated in the contract, 10% every year, compound. That would compensate for everything according to him (in those good years the 10% annually was not bad). He left me the contract to study and said I should call him with an answer. Naturally in passing he said I was a very good artist and that we would have great success working together, etc. etc.
On the 5th of April 1996 we signed the contract in my studio, just the two of us, no legal representatives on either side present when we signed and no lawyer signed this contract either together or separately. It was a sort of friendly agreement, all drawn up in our language, Hebrew, and without any translation into another language, let alone a legally valid translation of its contents.
Around the middle of 1996, I saw no signs on the horizon of any progress with the serigraph prints, which brought back to mind my previous experience with the agent in 1994, so I asked him, "When do you plan to start? Because I don't believe that with what's left of the year you are going to manage to print these series. I understand a bit about it and have an idea of the amount of time it takes to do that work." He answered that he would without any problem have the four series ready to sign by December of the same year.
That year nothing was printed and I complained a great deal to him about it, seeing that the money for the originals was only part of the packet agreed to in our contract.
In September of 1996 he brought me a commission to paint a large painting for one of his clients in the city of Chicago, a job which was outside the scope of the sizes specified in our contract and I worked extra hours on that large painting so as to finish it and the ten paintings I was due to complete, something like 16 hours a day for more than three weeks without a break. He paid me $1,500 and I found out later that he and his associates had sold it to those clients for $31,000 including framing and shipping from Miami; but at that time I knew nothing of this.
The clients of that commission invited us to a sort of "opening party" for the painting which was already framed in the living room of their mansion - very rich people. There I found in their living room three other large originals of mine which they were very proud of. My agent paid my travel expenses for the unveiling of the painting. We found ourselves in Miami in October and it was only then that I had the opportunity to see which galleries he worked with at those times. It was a chain of very good galleries with more than 30 branches spread throughout the country. That gallery only sold retail - bought and sold - representing very few artists on a very exclusive basis, if they represented them at all. That chain still exists and has a very good reputation amongst commercial fine art galleries in that country. The branch offices are all designed in the same style. I was happy to see where my paintings were. We flew to Chicago and there I met others of my collectors, good people, friendly and very honest, all very happy to meet me in person as was I to meet them.
At that opportunity I also visited, along with my agent, a gallery in Chicago which had bought almost all my paintings in the Expos of 1993-4 and the executives of that gallery were very pleased to meet me in person. It was a great pleasure to see the quality of that gallery. On that occasion I proposed to my agent that it would suit us to work with them as well, seeing that they already knew my work and were selling it well, to which he replied, "We'll see."
In the early part of 1997 my agent told me that he had already started working on the first of the four series of prints promised annually in the contract. I made it clear that he now had eight series due as a result of not having produced the four from the previous year, which is quite a lot of work and that I didn’t believe he would be able to finish this whole project.
Well, at that point he told me that things were not going very well financially for him, that the print shop with whom he wanted to work was in very bad shape and gave me other strange excuses such as: that he was considering buying that print shop and that he was investing a lot of money, but that I shouldn't worry as all "would soon be well."
This made me think this was a "déjà vu" and that I always fall into the hands of beginners, but since the most important thing for me was my children's futures, I told myself to hang on. I also tended to believe this charming youth with his friendly talk (I should stress that I never heard him raise his voice, nor did I ever see him sad, he was always optimistic and with a permanent smile on his face); anyone would fall for his charm.
A few months later he called me to go to his own house in Tel Aviv to sign the first edition of serigraph prints. It was all very amateur in terms of organization, including the fact that as I was signing the prints on the right hand side of the paper in pencil he was numbering them on the left hand side of the paper, also in pencil 1/350...2/350 to the end of the limited edition of 350/350. That series on thick paper looked good.
I for my part calmed down seeing this beginning, albeit late - it was something.
The whole year went by and he still hadn't printed the rest of the eight series he owed me - that is to say, he owed me seven.
He was still selling my original paintings to that chain of galleries in the USA and I had understood that he was also selling them to another gallery in Europe.
The only advance in this regard was that by the middle of 1998 we had only signed another three more series, which is to say, he still owed me around 8 of the 12 series which had accumulated since 1996.
The hand embellishment of the prints on canvas was done by some Russian employees of that company after I left them instructions of how to do it for each image. He never paid me for that work. Many times I emphasized to him that that dubious process is ruining the images and that they looked awful, and that those employees did it in a huge rush because they were paid very little for that and in order to save time they did a terrible job. That was endangering my reputation as an artist because the public would be convinced that they were embellished by my own hand, which is not true. I told him on several occasions that I consider that process completely unnecessary and harmful for the prints. He paid no attention to me, as usual.
Meanwhile I knew that in that year of 1998 he founded an art publishing company in Florida, USA; in other words, he transferred his business to that country.
During that year, 1998, on several occasions he told me that he was in conversation with a major company which he referred to as "The Big One". When I asked him what the name of this mysterious company was his answer was always the same, "I can't disclose the name yet because we are mid talks."
At the beginning of 1999 I was already very impatient due to the delays of the series of limited edition prints which he owed me and the monthly earnings from so much work were not enough to go around. I was also continuing with my painting classes to supplement my income, and all that together added up to very arduous work seven days a week and more than 12 hours a day.
At one point, also in early 1999, I told him that I was at the point of no longer believing that the matter of the prints was something that he would keep his promise about and in the end he told me that he would receive from the aforementioned "Big One" a chunk of money with which he would be able to settle all his financial problems. I understood from this that it would be a sort of "loan". For a long time he didn't disclose to me the nature of that company, nor its professional role, nor where it was located; in other words I still did not know if it had to do with an artist's rep, a gallery owner or something related to art. In fact I rather had the idea that it was something in the field of finance from the way he expressed himself when he talked about this mysterious company.
Towards mid 1999 my rep came to see me in my studio and told me that the boss of "The Big One" would come to our country to visit various artists' studios and an art printing company. It was only then that he gave me to understand that "The Big One" was in some way connected with the field of art.
That day my rep told me vaguely what that American company was. "It's an enormous gallery." And so with these grandiose words he impressed upon me, "They move more than $300 million a year," and that they held hundreds of art auctions and had many "Monopolies."
It seemed greatly overblown to me and I asked him for more information about who this mysterious person was who would come and visit artists in my country and also asked him if he would visit my studio among others. He said it was very likely seeing that the boss was inspecting the artists that he (my rep) represented. I asked him which artists he represented and he answered, "Several."
My rep was always very cautious and evasive in providing any detailed information about his business affairs but when he wanted to boast about his private life he was incautious, very immature. One of the things which intrigued me the most was the nature of the relations my rep had had up to that time with "The Big One". I asked him about it and he told me by way of a "secret revelation", like gossip and in a low voice, smiling as if it was something very amusing, that the boss had a name like those thugs in the twenties in the northern Windy City and that he was a egocentric who loved to boast about his extravagant wealth and that he was loaded with millions. I started to laugh at the connotations of those names. He also told me the "big boss" had a great mansion where he invited people to impress them. Of course he didn't reveal anything but the gossip.
It seemed to me very strange and out of place for my agent to be speaking that way about a businessman with whom, supposedly he was working or would work. Those references to this businessman or gallery owner seemed comical and childish. I tended to believe that he was saying all of that so that I wouldn't get too excited at the prospect that at some future point I would want to work directly with these people with such great resources and not through him as an exclusive representative. That whole story seemed very strange and unconvincing.
Up to that time I had not understood clearly why "The Big One" wanted to visit my studio.
My agent was my exclusive representative and that was enough, I asked my rep if he was his partner or something. He answered, "We are in talks," and that the problem with the delay of the print series should be resolved very soon! This I saw as something positive for me and if for that reason "the Big Boss" had to visit my studio, then I would accept that he come and visit me even if I have nothing to do with him and don't have much time for socializing.
Around the middle of 1999, I don't remember if it was April or June, my rep called me on the phone and let me know that the big boss wanted to visit my studio that day. I asked him what time and how long he planned to be there, because for this visit I had to remove all my students' easels which were in the middle of the studio and put more of my own paintings on show like an exhibition, specially arranged for the event, as my rep had asked me to do in that phone conversation. I told him I only had an hour for this, seeing that I didn't really see the purpose of the visit and that the relationship between them (rep and big boss) wasn't clear to me. My rep answered that it would be a short visit because the Boss had to visit other artists' studios as well as a print shop in which, according to him, the boss was interested, all on the same day. So I accepted and got ready.
At about 2 pm my rep appeared at the door to my studio with a rather tall person of sportsmanlike build. "May I introduce you to the great boss". Pleased to meet you, come on in. The alleged big boss spent several minutes walking around the studio looking all around in silence with his hands behind his back, nodding his head in an appreciative gesture, and murmuring, "Aha!" strutting around the studio like a sort of proud peacock. I noticed that my agent had a satisfied look. Then the alleged big boss pointed with outstretched arm and almost touching the fabric of one of my recently begun paintings with a still wet and crude, rough intense cobalt blue base of a sky for a landscape of Obidos in Portugal, a sky without any style or grace, no clouds or anything, since it hardly had a first coat of paint which was still in the process of drying so that afterwards the work on that sky could begin, and he burst out in a loud voice with the following: "What a beautiful sky, isn't it?" (to my rep) "Very well executed!" I became impatient, which got me thinking that this fellow was one of those many boorish people who can't wait to pronounce their opinions without having the very least technical concept of how a painting is developed, least of all one of mine. I told him that that painting was in its early stages and that you couldn't have an opinion or appreciation of the sky since even from a great distance you could see that it was just begun, that it was just like an opaque blue stain and the only thing in the sky was the color blue, a color which skies usually contain, and that it had no "artistic work" in it at all yet, neither good nor bad.
The fellow was astonished and, with slightly flushed cheeks, turned to a painting which was already signed (I can only think that because it was signed he felt he could give his opinion about it) and exclaimed loudly, (to my agent) "DEFINITELY (my name) IS A GREAT ARTIST!!" I almost exploded but my agent looked at me and winked as if to tell me to "hold tight" for a few more minutes.
In the remaining moments of the visit, the alleged big boss asked me several general questions about my past in that country, and in what other styles I painted or had painted in the past. I told him that I very much liked abstract painting. My wife brought in some cookies and lemonade and we spoke for a few minutes about the security problems in my country. At 3:30 the strange visit ended.
My agent was going to call me on the phone later.
The disagreeable impression I was left with of this "big boss" was one of an arrogant, rich lout, very ignorant on the subject of art; a loudmouthed, vulgar boor; one of the many nouveau-riche who open art galleries without knowing the subject, or who become art collectors because it is fashionable to have works of art and cover one's walls with something; a conceited imbecile who doesn't know what to say at any given moment; an empty and shallow fool who brought nothing of interest to his improbable visit to my studio other than the "Aha" with his hand on his chin.
He reminded me of the sinister "Mr. Brown" of the famous book by G. García Márquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude in his first visit to Macondo, where nobody in that impoverished village understood the nature of his first visit.
But it was all the same to me since I was working exclusively for my agent and it was he who could give an opinion about my paintings, like them, buy them and pay me. I was not worried about or interested in the private business relationships of my agent with other people.
This is an account of the first time I had the disagreeable opportunity of meeting the alleged "big boss."
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