Pace Gallery is suing over a fake Georges Seurat drawing purchased for $2 million from a man purporting to be the descendant of the famed Pointillist, according to a lawsuit filed this week. The news was first reported by the Daily Beast.
The lawsuit was filed in the New York Supreme Court on May 10. With “willful malice and abuse and intent to damage,” the lawsuit alleges, Jean-Pierre Seurat and his associates provided Pace with “false, misleading, and irreverent” documents to attest to the drawing’s authenticity.
The work was purchased in November 2021; after the sale, the gallery learned that the seller claimed to be the artist’s grandson — Seurat, however, had no grandchildren. (On the seller’s website, he claimed to be Seurat’s “distant cousin”).
The work in question is the 1882 conté crayon drawing Le Suiveur (The Follower), which depicts a man and woman ambling on a French boulevard; the couple has stopped outside of a storefront, which is brilliantly illuminated from within.
The lawsuit claims Jean-Pierre Seurat worked with fine art consultant and dealer Constance H. Schwartz, former director and chief curator of the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor. Schwartz, who is named as a defendant, allegedly contacted the gallery last year with an offer to acquire the drawing from an anonymous art collector based in France who the gallery “would be proud to know.” She reportedly said that if the gallery “dealt correctly,” it could gain access to other “...
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