I was proud to advise the Allentown Art Museum, which announced today that it has reached an agreement with the heirs of Henry and Hertha Bromberg concerning Portrait of George, Duke of Saxony by Lucas Cranach the Elder and...more
I attended today’s press conference at District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.’s office in Manhattan at which a drawing by Egon Schiele, Seated Nude Woman, Front View, was transferred to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum. I represent...more
I was honored to be among the speakers this week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on March 5, 2024. Convened by the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the U.S. State Department, the event announced the...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled on January 9, 2024 that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid is the owner of Rue Saint–Honoré, après-midi, effect de pluie (1892) by Camille Pissarro, a...more
1/15/2024
/ Appeals ,
Art ,
Art Collections ,
Art Sales ,
CA Supreme Court ,
California ,
Choice-of-Law ,
Fine Art ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Spain
A new lawsuit seeking to seize a painting by Van Gogh currently at the Detroit Institute of Arts for the show “Van Gogh in America,” a painting which the plaintiff alleges was unlawfully taken has brought back into focus the...more
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed into law a new requirement requiring museums to indicate publicly any object in their collection that was displaced by the Nazis as part of what Congress has rightly called the...more
Sullivan has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the upcoming Supreme Court case Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. The brief was filed as counsel of record for copyright scholar...more
Consistent with efforts in recent years to apply banking laws to the art market, the prospects of passage of a bill in Congress that would apply those rules to a broad category of advisors and attorneys have recently...more
After a two-year hiatus, the Responsible Art Market Initiative is planning a return to its in-person annual conference at the end of this month in Geneva. For anyone who has attended RAM events or used its catalogue of...more
Today I am pleased to announce that I have filed a brief in the Supreme Court of the United States as counsel of record for amicus curiae Mark B. Feldman, former U.S. Department of State Acting Legal Adviser. We filed the...more
We were privileged to file today a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of our client, art dealer Alexander Khochinsky. The petition asks the Court for reinstatement of a lawsuit...more
11/8/2021
/ Art Dealers ,
Due Process ,
Extradition ,
Fine Art ,
First Amendment ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Foreign Sovereigns ,
International Litigation ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Petition for Writ of Certiorari ,
Poland ,
Restitution ,
Retaliatory Arrests ,
SCOTUS
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today published in the Federal Register notice of proposed regulations related to the implementation of amendments to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)...more
9/24/2021
/ Anti-Money Laundering ,
Art Collections ,
Art Dealers ,
Art Sales ,
Bank Secrecy Act ,
Financial Institutions ,
FinCEN ,
Fine Art ,
NDAA ,
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Rulemaking Process
Last week, on behalf of our client Alexander Khochinsky, an art dealer, we filed a petition to rehear en banc the June 18, 2021 decision by a three-judge panel affirming the dismissal of the lawsuit against Poland for lack of...more
In connection with the late-2020 amendment to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to include “dealers in antiquities” as a result of its inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Treasury Department’s Financial...more
3/24/2021
/ Anti-Money Laundering ,
Art ,
Art Auctions ,
Art Collections ,
Art Dealers ,
Art Sales ,
Bank Secrecy Act ,
FinCEN ,
Fine Art ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
NDAA ,
Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)
(WASHINGTON-October 22, 2020) The heirs to the Jewish art dealers who were forced to sell the medieval devotional art collection known as the Welfenschatz (in English, the Guelph Treasure) to agents of Hermann Goering in 1935...more
10/23/2020
/ Art Collections ,
Comity ,
Expropriation ,
Fine Art ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Germany ,
Heritage & Culture ,
Jurisdiction ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Petition for Writ of Certiorari ,
Restitution ,
Sovereign Immunity ,
Takings Clause
Robin Pogrebin at the New York Times has written an excellent piece on the news that the Brooklyn Museum intends to sell several works from its collection to raise money. The museum explicitly relies on the pandemic-inspired...more
9/24/2020
/ Art ,
Art Auctions ,
Art Collections ,
Art Dealers ,
Art Sales ,
Artists ,
Cultural Artifacts ,
Fine Art ,
Historic Preservation ,
Museums ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday affirmed the 2019 judgment that allowed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum in Madrid to retain Camille Pissarro’s Rue St. Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie (Rue...more
8/20/2020
/ Adverse Possession ,
Appellate Courts ,
Art ,
Art Collections ,
Cultural Artifacts ,
Fine Art ,
Foreign Relations ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Germany ,
International Litigation ,
Museums ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Personal Property ,
Restitution ,
Spain ,
Standard of Review
A recent report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (headlined by Chairman Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Ranking Member Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware) has drawn widespread attention...more
8/13/2020
/ Anti-Money Laundering ,
Art ,
Art Auctions ,
Art Collections ,
Art Dealers ,
Art Sales ,
Bank Secrecy Act ,
Cultural Artifacts ,
Customer Due Diligence (CDD) ,
Financial Regulatory Reform ,
FinCEN ,
Fine Art ,
Know Your Customers ,
Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ,
Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) ,
Uniform Commercial Code (UCC)
(WASHINGTON-July 2, 2020) The United States Supreme Court today agreed to hear the appeal by Germany and the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SPK) seeking to dismiss the restitution claim by the heirs to the so-called...more
7/2/2020
/ Comity ,
Fine Art ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Germany ,
International Litigation ,
Jurisdiction ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Restitution ,
Stolen Goods ,
War Crimes
On behalf of my clients seeking restitution of the Guelph Treasure, or Welfenschatz, we filed today our supplemental brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in response to the Brief of the United States as Amicus Curiae that the...more
Late Tuesday evening—the day after Memorial Day no less—the United States Office of the Solicitor General filed a brief amicus curiae in our clients’ pending case against the Federal Republic of Germany and the Stiftung...more
6/3/2020
/ FCEJCA ,
Fine Art ,
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) ,
Germany ,
International Litigation ,
Jurisdiction ,
Nazi Looted Art ,
Paintings Sculptures and Engravings ,
Restitution ,
Stolen Goods ,
War Crimes
Since online auctioneer Paddle 8 filed for bankruptcy protection in March, creditors of the company have begun filing their notices of claim in the bankruptcy case. One thing on which the creditors all seem to agree is that...more
Since analyzing the likely consequence of gallery and auctioneer insolvencies last month, we have been keeping an eye on how the economic crisis borne of the COVID19 pandemic is affecting the art world. Essentially every...more
News broke last week that auction house Christie’s had agreed to pay a $16.7 million fine to the Manhattan District Attorney for failing to collect sales tax between 2013 and 2017. This was surprising in many ways, but a...more
There has been some renewed interest in the case a decade or so ago involving a claim by the heir of Oskar Reichel’s family to a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Two Nudes (Lovers) by Oskar Kokoschka. In response...more