A Case Study in What Happens When the Courts Meet Stolen Art
September 24th, 2007 by FineArtRegistry
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE and the Purloined Paintings of Princeton
Georgia O’Keeffe’s images of the American West sparked a wave of “western” decorating style, and her larger-than-life flower images, at once abstract pop-art and highly erotic, continue to be popular icons on everything from posters to aprons. But aesthetic popularity did not render O’Keeffe immune to legal entanglements. In the mid 1970’s, Georgia O’Keeffe filed a lawsuit against the Princeton Gallery of Fine Art, claiming they were in possession of three of her paintings which she said had been stolen from her husband’s gallery decades earlier.
The New Jersey Supreme Court used O’Keeffe’s case as an opportunity to significantly change state law regarding lawsuits over stolen property. But for artists and art collectors everywhere, the case provides an instructive and valuable guidebook to how all courts think about and approach legal issues of long-ago-lost-or-stolen art – and especially how courts think about the steps that artists and subsequent art owners take to inventory, register, and protect their works of art.
In this article, attorney and Fine Art Registry™ legal analyst Cindy Hill takes you this intriguing case step-by-step, explaining the positions of both the artist and the gallery, which appears to have been wholly unaware that the paintings were claimed to be stolen, and then walking you through the reasoning of the trial court, appeals court, and New Jersey Supreme Court to its final surprise ruling that changed the law regarding stolen property forever. The resolution when something has been stolen long ago and then shows up in the hands of an unsuspecting new owner may be different than you think. The New Jersey Supreme Court suggested that problems like this could be averted in the future if only there were an easily accessible registration database for artists to log in their works and record transactions – the very solution now offered by Fine Art Registry. Read this article to learn why courts have such a difficult time wrestling with the issue of the return of stolen art, and why registering your art with Fine Art Registry can prevent lawsuits like O’Keeffe’s from ever happening.
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