“Sotheby’s respects and maintains the confidentiality of its consignors and consumers, and doesn’t touch upon issues that aren’t of public document,” the assertion stated, including: “This specific work was recognized to the market, and was traded a number of occasions previous to the public sale in 1994.”
The Chagall hung for years on the wall of the bed room that Ms. Clegg shared along with her husband, Alfred John Clegg, earlier than going into storage when she moved to a smaller house. That’s the place it was, she stated, when Sotheby’s urged in early 2020 that if she have been excited by promoting objects, her Chagall, amongst others, may do effectively. The work was subsequently shipped to the Comité Marc Chagall, a panel of consultants that was based in 1988 and which makes choices on the authenticity of works attributed to the artist.
In late 2020, the panel launched its findings relating to her work. In a letter to Ms. Clegg, Meret Meyer, one in all Chagall’s granddaughters and a member of the panel, reported that it had unanimously discovered the work to be inauthentic, including that it’s an amalgam of a number of different works together with “Le couple au bouquet,” from about 1952, and “Les amoureux au cheval” from 1961.
Ms. Clegg’s portray included “recurrent iconographic parts of Chagall’s work,” together with a bouquet, lovers, a horse profile, a rooster profile, a village silhouette and a crescent moon, the committee wrote, however these lacked “actual presence,” in accordance with a translation supplied by Ms. Clegg’s lawyer. The letter went on to say that Chagall’s heirs have been requesting the “judicial seizure” of the portray “in order that the work could also be destroyed.”
In France, courts have acknowledged the authority of skilled panels to destroy works decided to be counterfeit.
