A New York art collector seeks information on the return of his Andy Warhol painting, which he claims was stolen by his attorney, who he is now suing for $10 million.
In a lawsuit filed April 17 in the New York Supreme Court, Stuart Pivar, co-founder of the New York Academy of Art and longtime friend of Warhol, accused attorney Mitchell Cantor of absconding. with his painting and professional negligence and malpractice. Pivar claims to have sold Cantor’s painting, a 1977 portrait of Pivar, for $100,000, although he appraised it at $5 million. The pair had entered into a buyout agreement last September that allowed Pivar to buy the artwork for $150,000, but Cantor did not honor that option, according to the lawsuit.
Pivar says he sold the work to Cantor, his legal representative since 2019, because he needed the money fast. “Something happened, I needed $100,000 right away to buy something – it was probably a $10 million thing, which I was buying for a fraction,” he says, adding that he didn’t remember what it was. He attempted to redeem the painting in March, but Cantor told him it was “long gone,” according to the lawsuit.
“The question is, how does a guy like me come to do such a stupid thing as borrow $100,000 from his own lawyer, who he already knows is, how should I say, irregular , and the worst happens? Pivar said. “The answer is I’ve done this stuff a hundred times, but in this particular case, it’s also high on the list of stupid, misguided things I’ve ever done.”
Cantor, whose company Concordia Fine Art is also named as a defendant in Pivar’s lawsuit, said in an emailed statement: “Mr. Pivar is known for making outlandish claims, inventing causes of action, and completely ignoring the facts. He did not respond to questions about the location of the painting.
This is not the first time that Pivar has accused one of his lawyers of stealing works of art. In 2019, he filed a $200 million lawsuit against his attorney John McFadden, claiming McFadden tricked him into selling a Constantin Brancusi sculpture for just $100,000. The pair had signed a contract stipulating that the statue would be sold either to Christie’s or to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where McFadden claimed he was a trustee, but Pivar argues that McFadden tricked him and kept the work for himself . According The Philadelphia InvestigatorMcFadden maintained that Pivar needed the cash fast and couldn’t find another buyer in part because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epsteinthat Pivar described in a Mother Jones interview as “my best mate for decades”.
Pivar tells The arts journal that he “ceased to know [Epstein] in 1990” and that he is struggling to sell art because he sued Sotheby’s for $2 billion in 2020. “I was told that Sotheby’s would not sell anything from my collection, including the properties that I bought at Sotheby’s for 50 years, and my offers would not be accepted at any Sotheby’s sale,” says Pivar. “No reason was given for this historically unique saying.” A spokesperson for the auction house said the lawsuit was dismissed by the court.
In 2021, Pivar for follow-up the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for its refusal to authenticate a painting which it claims to have found and identified as a work of Vincent van Gogh. A federal judge in New York dismissed the case in March 2022.
The art collector offers a reward of ‘compensation and excess of gratitude’ for the safe return of his Warhol portrait.
