Days before a Louise Nevelson sculpture was scheduled to hit the auction block at Sotheby’s in May 2022, one of the most powerful figures in the late artist’s market, Arne Glimcher, declared it inauthentic. Now the consigner is suing Pace Gallery claiming the reversal was about control.
In 1993, Glimcher—founder of the gallery and Louise Nevelson’s primary dealer and close confidant during her lifetime—appraised a stacked-wood wall sculpture attributed to the artist. Nearly 30 years later, after the same work was consigned to Sotheby’s by the estate of collector Hardie Beloff, Glimcher told the auction house that the sculpture, while made from authentic Nevelson boxes, was assembled by her son, Mike. In response, the Beloff estate filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in April of last year, accusing Pace of tanking the sale to protect its control over Nevelson’s market.
The core of the Beloff estate’s lawsuit is Glimcher’s call to Sotheby’s. According to the complaint, Glimcher told the auction house just before the sculture was set to hit the block that he was “beginning the preparation of the catalogue raisonné, and I can guarantee you that this will not be in [it].” The 1961 work was given a $500,000 to $700,000 estimate for the Sotheby’s Spring Contemporary Art Day Sale, the complaint says. But after the consignment was confirmed, Maria Nevelson, the artist’s granddaughter and founder of the Nevelson foundation, who had advised the Beloff estate, called Glimcher to see if the sculpture could be included in a spring exhibition in Venice. In the complaint, the estate argues that after Glimcher heard from Maria Nevelson about the proposed sale, he “immediately, without any time to research or reflect on the Nevelson Wall Sculpture” warned her that it wouldn’t sell and that he would “tell any auction house to back off.”
Luke Nikas, Pace’s attorney, told ARTnews that the gallery carefully considered the whether the work was truly assembled by Louise Nevelson before making its final judgement. The gallery does not dispute the complaint’s description of Glimcher’s call to Sotheby’s.
But the question of the sculpture’s authenticity is complicated. According to an appraisal document attached to the complaint, Glimcher personally appraised the work in 1993 as part of a larger valuation for the Nevelson estate. In the document, Glimcher assigned it a market value of $85,000 and described it—along with others in the group—as a sculpture “of mediocre quality.” In the same appraisal, he labeled four other works as “incomplete,” claiming that they were merely same-size boxes stacked for storage. One of those four, the complaint alleges, was later purchased by Pace and publicly exhibited as a Louise Nevelson work in 2019, when Pace described it in exhibition materials as “striking” with “an absorbing visual complexity marked by fluctuating depths, straight lines and curves, overlaps and vacancies … likened to the faceting of Cubism.”
The Beloff estate argues in their complaint that the sudden change in Glimcher’s assessment of the 1961 sculpture was part of a broader effort to cement his influence over the Nevelson market and protect Pace’s position as the artist’s longtime representative. The Beloff estate also claims that a Pace staff member told the estate there was no known catalogue raisonné in development.
Nikas refuted that claim, telling ARTnews that the gallery has been compiling documents for use in a catalogue raisoneé for decades and, for approximately 20 years, has been evaluating works as part of that preparation process. Glimcher told Sotheby’s during the call in 2022 that the gallery was working on a catalogue raisoneé.
A transparency of the contested Wall Sculpture given to Hardie Beloff by Mike Nevelson after Beloff purchased the work in 1996.
The legal fight comes as Nevelson’s legacy is being actively celebrated. Earlier this year, Pace mounted the solo exhibition, “Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance,” curated by Glimcher himself. The show focused on Nevelson’s later works from the 1970s and ’80s, a period in which she embraced diagonals, bolder compositions, and “muscular geometries.” Major institutional shows are also underway or upcoming at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Whitney Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, and Pace’s Seoul outpost.
The ten years after Nevelson’s death in 1988 were marked by estate turmoil. One year after Nevelson’s death, her longtime assistant, Diana MacKown, and her only son, Mike Nevelson, became embroiled in a bitter legal and personal battle. According to the New York Times, MacKown claimed ownership of three dozen works that she said were gifts from the artist; Mike Nevelson argued they belonged to Sculptotek, a corporation he set up to manage his mother’s affairs. The conflict drew attention from figures like Jasper Johns and Edward Albee, who publicly supported MacKown.
During that same period, according to a recent Nevelson biography, the IRS ruled that Sculptotek was a “sham” corporation and demanded more than $1 million in back taxes and penalties. Glimcher’s 1993 appraisal was one of two made for the IRS at the time. While the case dragged on, Nevelson’s estate was unable to sell work, effectively freezing her market. The biography further states that, when the dispute with the IRS was finally resolved in 1996, Mike Nevelson refused to deal directly with Glimcher and instead appointed former Pace vice president Jeffrey Hoffeld to oversee sales.
Beloff bought the work in 1996 from Mike Nevelson in his capacity as the Nevelson Estate, it has said. Two years later, in 1998, Mike Nevelson gave Beloff a document certifying the sculpture as “a work of art by Louise Nevelson and was included in the Estate of Louise Nevelson following her death, April 17th, 1988,” according to the complaint. The sculpture stayed on his wall in Pennsylvania for the next two decades. Beloff died in January 2022, and a number of his artworks went to Sotheby’s and were sold to benefit charities, including a Georg Baselitz sculpture that sold for over $11.2 million, setting a new worldwide auction record for a sculpture by the artist, and the Nevelson work.
As for the Nevelson estate, in 2005, nearly two decades after her death, Mike sold off the estate’s remaining inventory via sealed bid to three galleries: Pace (then called PaceWildenstein), Gio Marconi Gallery, and Galerie Gmurzynska. It was only after that sale that a market for her work could be reformed. Her auction record of $1.4 million was set in 2021 at Christies.
The current lawsuit hinges on how much influence Glimcher should still wield over Nevelson’s posthumous reputation.
Representing an estate boils down to two goals: selling inventory and preserving legacy. Estates and galleries typically agree on clear standards for works that fall into gray areas of attribution, which is common after an artist dies. As one dealer with experience managing estates told ARTnews, “The most important element is consistency. You can’t be moving the goalposts.”
The Beloff estate claims that’s exactly what happened. The complaint alleges that when the work was listed by Sotheby’s, Glimcher reversed a decades-old appraisal without offering new evidence—and did so with enough authority convince Sotheby’s to pull the lot.
In February, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed most of the Beloff estate’s claims, including one that alleged that by killing the Sotheby’s sale Pace effectively made the work unsellable to other parties that might have been interested, calling that claim too speculative. But one key claim remains: that Pace improperly interfered with the Beloff estate’s consignment agreement with Sotheby’s by saying the work wouldn’t appear in the catalogue raisonné.
That part of the case now moves forward, with the Beloff estate seeking over $1 million in damages. In a motion to compel the production of documents filed in April of this year, the plaintiffs also accused Pace of stonewalling discovery by limiting document production to materials related only to the purported catalogue raisonné. They are seeking much, much broader records, including all communications between the gallery and Hoffeld and Mike Nevelson, to support their claim that Glimcher’s comments were a bad-faith effort to derail the sale.
“This meritless case rests on allegations of a disgruntled collector, who is attempting to bully Pace Gallery into authenticating an artwork that was not completed by Louise Nevelson,” Nikas told ARTnews in an email.. “The Court has already dismissed every claim but one, and we have documents to prove it is false.”
Richard L. Bazelon, one of the plaintiffs and co-executors of the Beloff estate, declined to comment. “I generally do not comment on litigation in which I am involved,” he wrote in an email to ARTnews. “The operative facts in the case in Plaintiff’s view are set forth in the Complaint.”
Auction houses like Sotheby’s often face difficult decisions when authenticity is disputed—especially when concerns come from someone with deep authority. “At that point, the auction house is essentially a neutral stakeholder,” Mari-Claudia Jiménez, an attorney and former head of business development at Sotheby’s, told ARTnews. “They could easily return the work to the client and say, ‘We aren’t going to sell this. Take it back and have a nice day.’”
In the US, according to art lawyer Judd Grossman, who is not involved in the case, the appraisal of an artwork is considered separate from its authentication. “Our courts have made clear that an appraisal is an opinion of value, not of authenticity,” Grossman told ARTnews.
And as New York-based advisor David Shapiro, a certified member of the Appraisers Association of America put it, “An appraiser’s job is to reflect what’s happening in the market. If we think a work wouldn’t be perceived as authentic, that must factor into the value. And if new information emerges, an appraiser can change their mind—so long as it’s disclosed.”
But what happens when the gatekeeper to an artist’s legacy is also their biggest dealer? That’s the question this lawsuit refuses to let die.
Attorney Thomas C. Danziger who, while uninvolved with the case, has years of legal experience around authenticity issues in art transactions, told ARTnews that he has seen an expert’s opinions regarding authenticity change over time: “Sometimes more information comes to light, and sometimes people just reconsider opinions given at an earlier date.” He added that, “Unfortunately, whatever the merits of the claims in the Pace case, litigation like this does have a chilling effect on experts’ willingness to stick their necks out and give their opinions. And that’s not good for the art market.”
The sculpture remains in storage in Philadelphia. A trial date has not yet been set.
