Gagosian Sued for Selling Lichtenstein Painting Without Owner’s Consent


A prominent art collector has sued the dealer Larry Gagosian, claiming that he sold a 1964 Roy Lichtenstein painting from her collection without her consent. The suit, filed Wednesday in state court in Manhattan, is part of a tangle of art deals that led to two earlier lawsuits against the dealer in federal court, one of which Mr. Gagosian settled for $4.4 million last year, according to court papers.

In the new suit, the collector Jan Cowles, 93, claims that in 2008, her son, Charles Cowles, a New York art dealer who was in desperate financial straits, transferred a Lichtenstein painting, “Girl in Mirror,” to Mr. Gagosian to sell, even though Mr. Cowles did not own the painting and had no permission from his mother to sell it. The suit contends that Mr. Gagosian later fraudulently claimed that the painting was damaged and sold it to an unnamed collector for $2 million, less than its market value, taking a $1 million commission on the sale. The suit, which asks for punitive damages of $10 million, accuses Mr. Gagosian of “such wanton dishonesty as to imply criminal indifference to civil obligations, with reckless disregard of Mrs. Cowles’s rights.”

Last year, a British collector sued Mr. Gagosian in federal court in Manhattan over another painting Mr. Cowles put up for sale through the dealer. In that case – the one that was settled – the collector contended that the gallery sold him the painting, by Mark Tansey, in 2009 without telling him that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the work had once been on display, already owned 31 percent of it and had been promised by Mrs. Cowles, who owned the rest, that the museum would eventually get the whole thing.

In an interview last year, Mr. Cowles said that in his dealings with Mr. Gagosian he had simply forgotten that the Met owned part of the painting. Before that case was settled and the British collector returned the painting, the Met and Mrs. Cowles also filed a federal lawsuit demanding the painting back.

David Baum, a lawyer for Mrs. Cowles, who has suffered from dementia for several years, declined to comment. The Gagosian Gallery called the allegations in the new lawsuit “outrageous and baseless” and said that the entire dispute was the fault of Mr. Cowles, who “never divulged that he had no authority” to dispose of the paintings.

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