Alec gets $ for ‘fake’ art
ALEC Baldwin and art dealer Mary Boone have settled a lawsuit in which the actor alleged that Boone misled him over the sale of a Ross Bleckner painting for $190,000. Baldwin gloats over the victory in an upcoming New Yorker piece, even joking, “Maybe I’ll have Ross paint a picture of the seven-figure check that Mary paid me to settle.” The settlement includes “several Bleckner paintings, including one commissioned to [Baldwin’s] specifications.” According to the New Yorker, Boone’s “agreed to write [Baldwin] a seven-figure check” to settle the civil-fraud case over Bleckner’s 1996 painting “Sea and Mirror.” Baldwin’s suit alleged that, in 2010, the “30 Rock” star asked Boone about buying the work he coveted from another collector. Baldwin bought it but began to suspect the painting was a fake. The actor’s suit claimed that when Boone could not procure the original, Bleckner reproduced it. When Baldwin asked why the work looked different, he says that Boone explained it was “cleaned” since the previous collector was a smoker. The New Yorker reports that before his 2016 suit, Baldwin “decided to confront Bleckner” and “the artist admitted that the painting was a copy, and later wrote, in an email to Baldwin, ‘I’m so sorry about all of this. I feel so bad about this.’ ” Baldwin claims, “Mary cried on the phone. She said, ‘You caught me. I wanted to make you happy.’ ”
In April, a judge cleared the way for the case to head to trial. But with it now settled, the New Yorker says, “The reproduction of ‘Sea and Mirror’ is now crated up in the basement of Baldwin’s East Hampton house,” and he’ll donate half the proceeds to the Sag Harbor Cinema. The star even boasts that he’ll put the painting on a lecture series on “art fraud,” saying, “I’ll call it the Boondoggle Tour.”
Bleckner commented to the New Yorker, “It is resolved. I am sorry the whole thing happened.” Boone commented to Page Six: “Words like ‘counterfeit’ and ‘fake’ are being used in a sensational fashion. No one is contesting that Ross Bleckner is the artist who made this painting; therefore, the work cannot be fake. The significant thing is that Alec Baldwin liked the painting that he bought from me so much that not only did he keep it, but he commissioned the artist recently to make him two more paintings for his collection. Just last week at the Paley Center, Alec Baldwin admitted to ‘bullying women’ and ‘treating women differently than men.’ This never would have happened the way it did if I was a male dealer.”