Back off my Basquiat!
A Manhattan man claims he is the rightful owner of a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing that raked in $627,000 at a Christie’s auction.
Francesco Pellizzi, 73, says his mother paid $8,800 for the 27-by-20-inch work in December 1988, and gave it to him as a Christmas present.
The Upper East Sider reported the artwork stolen when he realized it was missing from the file drawer where he kept it, according to his lawyer, Peter Stern in 2000, said his lawyer, Peter Stern.
Pellizzi didn’t know the fate of the piece until he cracked open a Christie’s catalogue this year and saw it among the lots ready to be sold off, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed last month.
Thaddeus Stauber, a lawyer for Vorbach, called Pellizzi’s claim “belated” and said he expects it to be dismissed.
He contacted Christie’s, but eventually agreed to let the current owners, Chicago lawyer David Ruttenberg and art dealer Jennifer Vorbach, sell the art and allow Christie’s to hold the funds until the ownership dispute could be decided, according to court papers.
Pellizzi, Ruttenberg and Vorbach were unable to settle their differences on their own, so Pellizzi is asking a judge to step in and award him $520,000 of the proceeds — the amount of the winning bid.
“It changed hands a number of times, but Vorbach and Ruttenberg are not able to trace it back to anyone who obtained it from Mr. Pellizzi,” Stern said.
The Basquiat in dispute, which portrays a weird, wobbly stick figure, “has a very long history of life outside the United States where the laws are different,” Ruttenberg told The Post.
The attorney paid six figures for the piece in 2012, which Vorbach located in a Swiss gallery, he said.
They’d researched the ownership of the art going back about a decade, and found it had gone through owners in Europe and China before they came upon it.
“If it’s being sold around Europe, you’re not doing a very good job of looking for your artwork,” Ruttenberg quipped. “We bought it as an innocent buyer.”
He declined to name the exact purchase price but said it was less than what the work fetched at auction.
Pellizzi “has no proof of ownership. We’ve never seen any proof his mother gave it to him,” said Ruttenberg.
“That’s what courts are for,” he said of the dispute.