COLLECTOR FILES SUIT, CLAIMS HE WAS SOLD LEON GOLUB FORGERIES
Andrew J. Hall, a Wall Street trader and art collector, claims a number of Leon Golub works he purchased are forgeries, reports Graham Bowley of the New York Times_. Hall has amassed a vast art collection—five thousand pieces—from hundreds of artists. He owns forty works by Golub, whom he started collecting in 2003. He opened a private museum in Reading, Vermont, where he planned on organizing a Golub exhibition. While putting together the show, however, Hall discovered that more than a third of the works were fakes, according to a lawsuit he filed in September. The people who advised him in these purchases were Lorettann Gascard, an art history professor at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, and her son Nikolas. It seemed that they previously owned many of the artist’s pieces—Hall purchased eight works from the Gascard’s collection through various auction houses and bought sixteen more directly from Gascard and her son. Hall is seeking damages and a reimbursement of the $676,250 he paid for the works. But the professor and her son seem to have vanished.
Gascard said she knew Golub when she was one of his students at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey during the late 1970s. According to court papers, she said they became close friends until his death in 2004. But when Samm Kunce, a former studio assistant to Golub and a representative of the foundation that promotes the work of Golub and his wife, Nancy Spero, came to investigate Hall’s pieces, she found “a number of unusual formal characteristics during in-person examinations of the paintings.” A lawyer for the Golub-Spero foundation, Elisabeth McCarthy, said that the foundation had been contacted by Hall but that it “did not opine on the authenticity of the artwork in [his] collection.” Golub and Spero’s son, Stephen Golub, said he and his siblings had never heard of Gascard. In an email to Hall last year, Stephen Golub said, “Our parents, and Leon in particular, were quite gregarious and their friends frequently came to our residence for dinner, so it’s surprising that we have never heard of Gascard.”
The Golub works Gascard consigned to auction houses in New York—one at Sotheby’s and six at Christie’s, where Hall bought them—only relied on Gascard’s story regarding her friendship with the artist for provenance. Representatives from both houses are now investigating the works. Sotheby’s said it sold two more Golub paintings originally owned by Gascard to other parties and is in the process of contacting those buyers.
