Kim
Kyung-hoon / REUTERS
By
Jason McLure, Reuters
An
83-year-old artist known for his block letter "LOVE" design that
became a symbol of the anti-war movement in the 1960s is being sued by a
Monaco-based art dealer for renouncing the authenticity of sculptures once
valued as high as $1 million.
Beginning
in 2008, art buyer Joao Tovar paid $481,625 for 10 sculptures of the word PREM,
a Sanskrit term meaning "love," from a one-time business partner of
renowned pop artist Robert Indiana, Tovar said in the lawsuit filed in superior
court in Rockland, Maine.
Tovar
says he bought the sculptures from longtime Indiana associate John Gilbert
because he believed Indiana had officially licensed their production.
Indiana,
who lives on an island off the Maine coast, renounced the sculptures in a 2009
letter to New York dealer Simon Salama-Caro, saying they had been conceived by
Gilbert in India and made without his permission. The move led auction house
Christie's to remove them from an upcoming sale.
Best
known for his 1964 block letter creation featuring an L-O arranged on top of a
V-E, Indiana's works are part of the permanent collection of major museums
including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Whitney
Museum of Modern Art. The LOVE design, on which the PREM sculptures were based,
was featured on an 8-cent U.S. postage stamp issued on Valentine's Day in 1973.
Indiana's
denial of his approval "rendered the sculptures worth little more than the
materials from which they were made," says the suit, which was filed April
30. Further complicating the matter, Tovar's suit says some of the works he
bought have been sold multiple times, most recently for a total of $1.1
million.
Indiana,
reached by telephone this week, told Reuters he "absolutely" denied
the allegations in the suit but declined further comment.
Tovar
says that he relied upon a 2008 certificate of authenticity provided by Gilbert
that includes Indiana's signature and the words "To Tovar" at the
bottom of the page near Gilbert's signature. Court filings show that Indiana
acknowledged that the signature on the document was his but that it was meant
as a souvenir for Tovar, rather than acknowledgement that the work was his.
On
April 24, Gilbert and Indiana settled a dispute in federal court in New York
over the PREM works after a judge found that Gilbert had attempted to
"force an artist -- here, defendant Robert Indiana -- to acknowledge
creation of a work that the artist did not create and does not like; and then
plaintiff could and would use such acknowledgement in selling such works to the
public as authentic creations by the artist."
The
judge in that case also found that Indiana had made an agreement with Gilbert
in 2007 under which Indiana would use Sanskrit characters to design a PREM
sculpture that Gilbert could produce and sell. That agreement did not cover the
design of a PREM sculpture using the Latin alphabet - like the work purchased
by Tovar -- because Indiana felt such a design "looked like a refrigerator,"
according to court documents.