March began poorly for Christie’s, with the auction house suing one of its biggest clients, the Mugrabi family, for $32.1m in outstanding debts for the purchase of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s The Field Next to the Other Road (1981), which was sold by Tony Shafrazi during the May sales in New York in 2015.
The case was settled after meetings between Jose Mugrabi, Jen Zatorski, Christie’s president of art departments, and Brett Gorvy, the global head of post-war and contemporary art. “Your current debt position at Christie’s has raised concerns that will likely restrict Christie’s from being able to enter into transactions with you,” read an email from Zatorski to Mugrabi. “This situation arose because a client of ours, on whose behalf we bid, has yet to pay us,” Mugrabi reportedly told the art adviser Josh Baer.
Christie’s may have been sending a message to other tardy collectors in the face of a cooling market; its new chief executive, Patricia Barbizet, is thought to be more fiscally minded than her predecessors Steven Murphy and Ed Dolman.
The month hit another sour note for Christie’s when federal agents seized two Indian sculptures on suspicion that they had been stolen. A tenth-century sandstone stele of Rishabhanatha and an eighth-century sandstone panel of Revanta were valued together at $450,000 and due to be sold during Asia Week.
The New York Times reports that the works are linked to Subhash Kapoor, a former dealer who is currently awaiting trial in India for trafficking illicit antiquities. A Christie’s spokeswoman told the paper that the auction house is co-operating with the authorities and that evidence suggesting the works were stolen had not been publicly available.