Billionaire Steven Tananbaum Settles With Gagosian, Ending a Bitter Lawsuit Over Three Long-Delayed Jeff Koons Sculptures

One of the art world’s most
conspicuous lawsuits has come to an end. 

Last week, billionaire
hedge-fund manager and Museum of Modern Art trustee Steven
Tananbaum reached a settlement with Gagosian over three
long-delayed Jeff Koons sculptures he purchased between 2013 and
2015. Tananbaum filed the
suit against the gallery in April 2018, alleging that there was no indication that
the works were being made despite the fact that he had paid $6.4
million in down payments.  

The two parties released a joint
statement last Friday, first reported in ARTnews,
announcing that they had “amicably settled the legal action between
them.” Koons and the gallery said that “Mr. Tananbaum is a
passionate collector, and we look forward to our continuing
relationship.” Tananbaum added that he “continues to be a proud
collector of works by Mr. Koons, whom he considers one of the most
important living artists today.” 

The specifics of the settlement
were not disclosed. All claims and counterclaims related to the
suit have been dismissed. 

The settlement is likely to be welcome news for the judge
overseeing the case, who has been encouraging the two sides to
settle for around a year. At a hearing in March 2019, she said: “Next year,
Mr. Tananbaum will go buy more art from Mr. Gagosian. I’m the only
one getting agita.”

Tananbaum purchased an edition
of Koons’s Balloon Venus
(Magenta), an
eight-foot-tall riff on the Venus of Willendorf, for $8 million in
September 2013, expecting it to be finished within two years. In
2015, Koons extended the work’s estimated completion date by two
more years, at which point Tananbaum agreed to buy two more
sculptures. By spring 2018, the collector claimed he had not yet
seen evidence that the three works were in
progress. 

The subsequent lawsuit made
headlines both because of the boldface names involved and the
strong language of the claims. “When the curtain is pulled back, ‘Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark’ cannot help but spring to mind from
defendants’ naked, unadorned avarice and conspiratorial actions in
connection with the sale of factory-manufactured industrial
products called Jeff Koons sculptures,” the collector’s attorney
wrote at the time, referencing Shakespeare’s
Hamlet.

The suit went on to categorize
Gagosian’s actions as a “garden-variety, interest-free, fraudulent
financial routine,” comparing them to both a Ponzi scheme and the
plot of The
Producers.

Gagosian tried twice to have the
suit dismissed, arguing in his
second motion that as a
“highly sophisticated art collector,” Tananbaum should be aware of
Koons’s reputation as “a perfectionist who often takes years” to
complete his work. The gallery claimed the supposed completion
dates of the sculptures were approximate and that such dates are
“often extended by multiple years.”

Less than a month after
Tananbaum filed his claim, Hollywood producer Joel Silver hit
Gagasion with a similar lawsuit, alleging that the gallery failed to deliver
an $8 million Koons sculpture that Silver purchased in 2014. The
producer reached a
settlement with the gallery last year after it was revealed his case was being funded
by Ronald Perelman, another prominent collector who had himself
sued Gagosian numerous times. As part of the settlement, Silver
agreed to buy the sculpture in question after all.

Tananbaum was also the target of
a heated protest
outside of MoMA last fall as activists criticized the institution’s board
member of exploiting the debt crisis in Puerto Rico through his
hedge fund, Golden Tree.

The post Billionaire Steven Tananbaum Settles With Gagosian,
Ending a Bitter Lawsuit Over Three Long-Delayed Jeff Koons
Sculptures appeared first on artnet News.