Is it a Rothko, or is it fake?
NBCUniversal’s Ron Meyer files lawsuit against two art dealers over ‘forged’ work.
NBCUniversal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer has filed a $10-million lawsuit against two art dealers, claiming they sold him a forged Mark Rothko painting.
In 2001, Meyer purchased the painting for $900,000 from New York dealer Susan Seidel, after another dealer, Jamie Frankfort, introduced them. Frankfort received a 5% commission, or $45,000, for brokering the deal, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The lawsuit alleges that Seidel misrepresented the work to Meyer as a signed Rothko, falsely claiming that it would be included in the artist’s catalog — then in the process of being compiled — and that it had been acquired directly from the seller’s family.
A representative for Seidel could not be reached for comment.
For the last 18 years, the painting has hung in Meyer’s California home.
According to the complaint, Meyer learned in January that, “Contrary to the representations of Seidel, known to and approved by Frankfort, the painting is not, in any part, the work of Rothko, but is a total forgery, that it has essentially no value at all, that it had never been accepted for inclusion in the Rothko Catalogue Raisonné and that it had never been owned, possessed, signed or even seen by Rothko or acquired from Rothko by the seller or the seller’s family or anyone else.” As such, the suit contends that the painting “has virtually no value and never will.”
Meyer is seeking damages of more than $10 million. He could not be reached for comment.
Rothko, a Russian American painter, is known primarily for his abstract canvases. In 2014, “Rothko No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red)” sold for $186 million.
The lawsuit follows several other high-profile incidents of art-world “dupes” involving Hollywood heavyweights in recent years.
In 2016, Alec Baldwin sued New York art dealer Mary Boone, claiming he received a copy of the Ross Bleckner painting “Sea and Mirror” rather than the original for which he paid $190,000 in 2010. In 2017, the actor received a seven-figure settlement from Boone.
In 2006, two years after actor Steve Martin sold (at a loss) a 1915 Heinrich Campendonk work that he bought from a Paris gallery for $850,000, it was discovered to be a fake. Martin had had the painting, “Landscape With Horses,” authenticated, but it was later discovered to have been part of a massive German forgery ring.