A prominent art collector has filed a major lawsuit against Sotheby's auction house, claiming the company refused to honor a 2016 agreement to resell a painting attributed to Amedeo Modigliani that he purchased for $1.55 million in 2003. Charles C. Cahn Jr. filed the complaint in New York State Supreme Court, seeking $2.67 million in damages from the prestigious auction house.
The disputed artwork, titled "Portrait de Leopold Zborowski" and dated to 1917, depicts Modigliani's art dealer who frequently served as a subject for the Italian artist's portraits. According to Sotheby's original catalog entry, the painting appeared in a 1934 Modigliani retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel and was reportedly once owned by Zborowski himself, based on provenance records from 2003.
The legal dispute centers around authenticity concerns that Sotheby's allegedly raised about the painting in 2016. According to Cahn's lawsuit, the auction house's own appraisal concluded that "the painting failed to satisfy certain criteria and that the painting would have no sale value in the international art market in which Sotheby's operates." While Cahn's lawyers did not provide written proof of these specific statements, they did submit a 2016 agreement between the collector and Sotheby's.
Under the terms of that 2016 agreement, which was designed to "resolve an unspecified matter," Sotheby's granted Cahn the right to resell the work through the auction house within 15 years. If he chose to consign the piece, Sotheby's would pay back the original purchase price plus 2.5 percent compound annual interest. The agreement appears to have been Sotheby's way of addressing concerns while providing Cahn with a potential exit strategy.
Cahn claims he attempted to exercise this option in June of this year when he approached Sotheby's with plans to resell the painting, but the auction house never responded to his initial request. His attorney then sent a follow-up letter to Sotheby's in September, but again received no response from the company, according to the lawsuit.
The timing of this legal action is particularly notable as it comes during Sotheby's major fall auction week in New York, when the house was preparing to sell record-setting works by artists including Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt. Sotheby's has declined to comment on the pending litigation, while representatives for Cahn have not responded to requests for comment.
The price Cahn paid for the disputed Modigliani in 2003 was significantly lower than other works by the artist, even at that time. For comparison, Modigliani's "Nu couché (sur le côté gauche)," a well-known 1917 painting, sold for $26.9 million in 2003. The same work later sold again at Sotheby's in 2018 for $157.2 million, making it the most expensive work ever publicly auctioned by the house at that time, just shy of Modigliani's overall auction record of $170 million held by a different "Nu couché" painting.
The case highlights a persistent problem in the art market: the prevalence of forged Modigliani paintings. Fake works attributed to the Italian artist have frequently generated investigations and legal drama throughout the art world. The late journalist Milton Esterow, a former editor of ARTnews, described this phenomenon as a "Modigliani forgery epidemic" in a 2017 Vanity Fair article, underscoring the widespread nature of authentication issues surrounding the artist's work.
This lawsuit represents yet another chapter in the ongoing challenges facing auction houses, collectors, and experts when it comes to authenticating works by popular artists whose paintings command millions of dollars. The outcome of Cahn's case against Sotheby's could have significant implications for how auction houses handle authentication disputes and honor agreements with consignors in similar situations.
