A $5 Million Art Fraud

A suit filed in Quebec Superior Court claims that Phi Centre's former president defrauded it—and its founder Phoebe Greenberg—of some $5 million
November 23, 2017 BY Leah Sandals

The Centre Phi on rue St-Pierre in Montreal. Photo: Jeangagnon via Wikimedia Commons.

Since its founding in 2012, the Phi Centre in Montreal has done a lot of great things: hosted a talk by Michel Gondry, organized virtual reality programming in partnership with the New York Times, and snagged the exhibition “Bjork Digital,” just to name a few. Yet there has also been upset behind the scenes. And this fall, that trouble has come to the surface in a suit filed in Quebec Superior Court.

As reported by La Presse and the Montreal Gazette, the legal suit claims that Phi Centre’s former president Penny Mancuso defrauded the institution—and its founder Phoebe Greenberg—of some $5 million. It’s a sum quite remarkable for fraud allegations in Canadian art circles.

Greenberg, who started out as an actor and is heir to a family fortune, might be best known for founding the DHC/ART Foundation, which is a few steps from the Phi Centre and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary of bringing leading contemporary art to the city. Highlights of the DHC’s past decade including a landmark North American show by Brits Jake and Dinos Chapman, the first Canadian survey of Ryoji Ikeda, and a solo show of American Jenny Holzer. (The Phi Centre, founded more as “a multidisciplinary arts and culture organization…at the intersection of art, film, music, design and technology” has, along with Greenberg, declined further comment on the court filing.)

Penny Mancuso, for her part, also spent parts of her early career in acting, with roles in the films Affliction (1997), Mambo Italiano (2003) and Oceans of Hope (2001). At Phi Centre, one of her responsibilities was representing its Phi Films arm during projects like Canada at Cannes. Phi Films’ notable productions melding art and cinema include Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room (2015) and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), both of which showed at Sundance.

According to the Gazette, Greenberg covered the majority of the costs of opening and operating the [Phi Centre] venue. Mancuso was paid $409,000 per year, according to the claim cited by La Presse, on top of which Greenberg gave her an extra $200,000 per year to purchase clothing and beauty products, and paid for Mancuso’s children’s enrolment in private schools.

Last year, Phi Centre financial director Michel Bérubé noticed irregularities while going through the books. Of particular concern was $500,000 Mancuso had spent on clothing over the previous 13 months using Phi Centre credit cards. Mancuso was let go in April, with Greenberg initially agreeing to pay her three years of salary as compensation, beginning with an initial payment of $407,000. That all changed when it was discovered Mancuso had diverted $5.2 million from the Phi Centre between 2014 and 2017, via credit card payments to herself or her husband, Bayard Whittall, and his company, Two Monster Exotics. Greenberg is seeking repayment of the $407,000 already paid to Mancuso as part of her departure package, plus the $5.2 million taken from the Phi Centre.

Mancuso’s LinkedIn profile, which still mentions her past position at Phi, describes her as “currently exploring opportunities.” The Facebook page for her husband Bayard Whittall’s business Two Monsters Exotics, which specializes in captive breeding of boas, is no longer available, and calls to its Miami phone number have gone unanswered.

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Puma accused of defacing Indian heritage for shoe commercial

Puma in a statement said it was unaware that the building had heritage value, and has promised to restore the facades to their original condition.

NEW DELHI (AFP).- Global sportswear giant Puma was accused Tuesday of irreversibly damaging 17th-century architecture in Delhi's historic quarter as part of an advertising stunt to promote a new line of shoes. The facades of several buildings in Old Delhi have been spraypainted with large colourful murals for the shoe campaign that Puma said "captures the grit of Indian streets" on its website. But the stunt -- dubbed "Suede Gully" after the shoe material and the Hindi word for street -- had infuriated conservationists who accused Puma of defacing the centuries-old quarter built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

"It's a heritage area. You can't just go and paint what you like," Swapna Liddle from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage told AFP. "Permanent damage has been done to the carved sandstone, limestone plaster and Lahori bricks. "Those who made and approved this advertisement, those who stood by while this was done, are all responsible for this insensitive treatment."

Puma in a statement said it was unaware that the building had heritage value, and has promised to restore the facades to their original condition. "The owner wasn’t aware that his property is protected as a heritage property and hence we were not made aware," a spokesperson said on Tuesday.

In an advertising video for the Puma campaign, Indian rappers and hip-hop dancers perform at graffiti-covered locations including trains in the financial capital Mumbai.

Rules to protect Delhi's neglected heritage sites from destruction are widely ignored, conservationists say. Laws specifically forbidding advertising on historic buildings is rarely enforced by Delhi's cash-strapped authorities, who struggle to uphold measures designed to conserve the city's crumbling icons.

The owner of one Delhi building spraypainted for the Puma campaign had defended the decision as his only to make. "This is a private property and the graffiti is making the area look more beautiful. The area is looking better now, it is more lively," Arun Khandelwal told the Indian Express.

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Thief steals Botero statue from France's most guarded street

A thief strolled out of a Paris gallery with the £500,000 bronze statue 'Maternity' (pictured) under his arm

PARIS (AFP).- French police are hunting a daring art thief who stole a bronze statue worth nearly half a million euros from a gallery within yards of the presidential palace in Paris. The thief simply walked into the gallery and helped himself to the statue of a mother and child by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. He then coolly walked unchallenged down one of the most closely guarded streets in France, home to the British and Japanese embassies as well as French President Emmanuel Macron's official residence, the Elysee palace.

Security around the Elysee has been heightened as a part of France's state of emergency after the country was hit by a series of terror attacks over last two years. The gallery is also almost opposite the interior ministry, which is in charge of security and the police.

According security camera footage, the bearded thief caressed the 10-kilo (22-pound) statue of typically fleshy Botero figures, then looked around him before taking the statue from its plinth and discreetly making an exit. No alarms were set off. Staff at the Bartoux gallery only realised it was gone when the gallery closed on Saturday evening, police said.

Botero, 85, is Latin America's best known living artist, and is renowned for his slightly surreal and often comic fat figures, which have made his paintings hugely popular across the globe.

The stolen sculpture, which is worth at least 425,000 euros ($491,000), is one of eight made by the artist, all of different sizes. Botero, who divides his time between Paris and Italy, could not be contacted. "It's really a nightmare, we hope to get it back" staff at the gallery told French media.

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The tricky process of returning Nazi-looted art

A visitor reads informations during a preview of the exhibition "Gurlitt: Status Report, Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences" ("Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt") on November 1, 2017 at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, western Germany, where the exhibition runs from November 3, 2017 to March 11, 2018. A spectacular art collection hoarded by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Nazi-era dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, will be shown for the first time since World War II in parallel exhibitions in Switzerland and Germany. The works in the two exhibitions, in Bern and the German city of Bonn, are just a fraction of the more than 1,500 pieces discovered in 2012 in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt. PATRIK STOLLARZ / AFP. by Robin Gremmel

PARIS (AFP).- The Nazis stole thousands of artworks from Jewish families during World War II and the restitution of these pieces has been a slow process involving legal battles, complex searches and some stunning finds. Ahead of a court ruling on the return of a painting by impressionist master Camille Pissarro this week, here is some background.

The art plundered by the Nazi regime was intended to be resold, given to senior officials or displayed in the Fuehrermuseum (Leader's Museum) that Adolf Hitler planned for his hometown of Linz but was never built. Just before the end of the war, the United States dispatched to Europe teams of experts -- museum directors, curators and educators -- to find, protect and rescue cultural treasures. Known as the Monuments Men, they were honoured in a 2014 George Clooney film of the same name. These work and restitution programmes enabled the return of most of the looted works to their owners soon after the end of the war. But out of 650,000 stolen pieces, about 100,000 had not been returned by 2009, according to figures released at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in the Czech Republic that year.

Secret records Works seized by the Nazis in France were stored at the Jeu de Paume site in Paris, originally tennis courts, ahead of their shipment to Germany. Thanks to the secret notes of Rose Valland, an art historian there, about 45,000 were recovered and three-quarters of these returned, according to a report to the French Senate in 2013. Of the remaining "orphaned" pieces, some were sold and more than 2,000 were accorded the special status of "MNR", standing for "Musees Nationaux Recuperation" (Recuperation - National Museums) meaning they are provisionally entrusted to museums. The works were exhibited from 1950 to 1954, but then, "for 40 years, nothing happened", said the 2000 Matteoli report on the looting of French Jews. The report noted "the total abandon of all searches for the owners of these works".

New impetus Inertia settled over the restitution drive in the context of the Cold War and the complexities of various cases. The process was revived in the 1990s after the declassification of thousands of archives and the publication on the internet of databases such as The Art Loss Register. In December 1998, 44 countries signed the Washington Declaration that committed them to stepping up efforts to return stolen pieces to their prewar owners or heirs. This led to the creation of special commissions and new laws, including the US Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 that lengthened the time limit for lodging a restitution claim.

The Klimt affair In one of the biggest cases involving art stolen by the Nazis, five masterpieces by Gustav Klimt were caught up in a bitter legal battle between a descendant of the Jewish family from which they were taken and Austria's Belvedere Museum. They included two stunning portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, completed with gold leaf. The Vienna museum argued that Bloch-Bauer herself had left it the works. But American heiress Maria Altmann disputed the claim, saying the pieces belonged to her uncle, Adele's husband. Altmann won her battle in 2006 and the pieces were returned. The story was adapted by British filmmaker Simon Curtis into "Woman in Gold" (2015). Austria estimates it has returned about 10,000 works from public collections after passing a restitution law in 1998.

A spectacular find In 2011 a raid on a rubbish-strewn flat in Munich as part of a tax investigation uncovered hundreds of priceless paintings, including works by Picasso and Matisse, that had been stolen by the Nazis. The flat belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, an octogenarian whose father was one of four art dealers charged by the Nazis with selling the art.

An additional 239 works were found at a house he owned in Salzburg, Austria. Gurlitt passed away in 2014 and left his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland. But many of the pieces have been subject to legal challenges across Germany.

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Spain court orders pyschic to pay for Dali exhumation

Spanish national Pilar Abel Martinez, 61, who claimed to be Salvador Dali's daughter, speaks during an interview in Barcelona, on June 26, 2017. LLUIS GENE / AFP.

MADRID.- A Spanish court has dismissed a paternity lawsuit brought by a psychic who claimed to be Salvador Dali's illegitimate daughter and ordered her to pay for the exhumation of the surrealist painter's remains. DNA tests prove that Salvador Dali, who died in 1989 aged 84, was not the biological father of Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old who claims her mother had a covert relationship with the artist, according to a Madrid court ruling dated October 13 published on Monday.

The court also ordered Pilar to pay for the exhumation of Dali's remains in July without specifying how much the operation cost. The arduous task involved removing a slab weighing more than a tonne that covered his tomb at the Dali Theatre-museum in Figueras where the eccentric artist was born in 1904. Forensics experts then removed DNA samples from Dali's skin, fingernails and two long bones.

Contacted by AFP, the Dali Foundation, which promotes the artist's legacy, said it still had not evaluated the total cost of the exhumation. The foundation had blasted a court ruling ordering the exhumation as "unusual and unjustified". Abel can appeal the court's dismissal of the paternity lawsuit. If she had been confirmed as Dali's only child, she would have been entitled to 25 percent of the huge fortune and heritage of one of the most celebrated and prolific painters of the 20th century, according to her lawyer Enrique Blanquez.

Dali, known for his elongated figures and wilting clocks, left his estate, which includes properties and hundreds of paintings, to the Spanish state.

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Exiled Russian artist torches central bank branch in Paris

This file photo taken on January 16, 2017 shows Russian artist Piotr Pavlenski (R) and his wife Oksana Chaliguina posing in Paris. Pyotr Pavlensky, who had has fled Russia for France after being questioned by Russian authorities on allegations of committing a sex crime, and his wife were granted political asylum in France on May 4, 2017. MARTIN BUREAU / AFP.

PARIS (AFP).- Controversial Russian performance artist Piotr Pavlensky, who was granted asylum in France in May, was taken into custody early Monday after setting fire to the outside of a Banque de France branch in central Paris, police said. Firefighters arrived the scene at around 4:00 am (0200 GMT) to put out two fires outside of the building in Bastille square, a spokesman said, adding that the incident was of "criminal origin".

Photos on social media show the 33-year-old dressed in black, standing in front of the shuttered front door flanked by fires burning outside two windows. Pavlensky, a recipient of the Vaclav Havel award for creative dissent, was taken into custody along with his partner Oksana Shalygina for causing "damage by fire", police said. Pavlensky once memorably nailed his scrotum to Red Square to denounce state power. In November 2015, he doused the doors of the FSB -- the successor to the Cold War-era KGB, or secret police -- in petrol and set them on fire.

On Monday, a Banque de France spokesman told AFP the bank's entrance was damaged but the security systems were not affected. "The building is still secure," although the Bastille branch will remain closed until further notice, he added.

Pavlensky gained a reputation for challenging Russian restrictions on political freedoms in radical, often painful performances that have won international acclaim. While best known for his 2013 Red Square performance entitled "Fixation", he also sewed his lips together to protest against the jailing of members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot. He has also wrapped himself in barbed wire and chopped off part of his ear.

After the FSB stunt, Pavlensky was handed a fine of 500,000 rubles ($8,700, 7,400 euros) and released after being found guilty of damaging a cultural site. Pavlensky spent a month last year in a notorious psychiatric hospital undergoing state-ordered tests of his sanity that found him sound of mind.

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Nazi-looted Pissarro painting at centre of legal tussle

Camille La Cueillette des pois, 1887. Gouache, 53,3 x 64,4 cm. Bruce et Robbi Toll – Archives du musée Camille-Pissarro, Pontoise / droits réservés. by Juliette Montesse

PARIS (AFP).- A painting by impressionist master Camille Pissarro that was seized from its French Jewish owner during World War II is at the centre of a court battle beginning Tuesday in Paris after surfacing at an exhibition. "La Cueillette des Pois" (Picking Peas), a gouache from 1887, emerged earlier this year on display at the French capital's Marmottan Museum, more than 70 years after being snatched from art collector Simon Bauer in Nazi-occupied France.

A court will on Tuesday begin examining who are the rightful owners -- Bauer's descendants or an American couple who say they had no idea as to its wartime fate when they bought it at auction in 1995. Bauer, a self-made businessman, was among the thousands of French Jews who were rounded up for deportation in 1944. He narrowly escaped being sent to the Nazi death camps due to a train drivers’ strike. "La Cueillette des Pois" was one of 93 works that were confiscated from him before he was sent to the Drancy internment camp near Paris and sold on by an art dealer.

On his release in 1944, he immediately began looking for his paintings but had only managed to recover a fraction of the works by his death in 1947. His family then took up the hunt, but lost all trace of the Pissarro for half a century before it turned up at the Marmottan, on loan from its current owners for a major retrospective of the artist's work. Bauer's grandson Jean-Jacques Bauer, 87, immediately filed a legal claim to prevent the painting leaving France while beginning a process to try wrest it back from Bruce Toll and his wife Robbi.

In May, a court granted his request to have it impounded in France pending a ruling on its on ownership. 'Free the painting' The Tolls, patrons of Washington and Tel Aviv Holocaust museums who bought the work at Christie's auction house in New York, say they did so in good faith, unaware it was wartime loot. "It is not Mr Toll, who bought this painting at public auction in 1995, who should pay for the crimes of Vichy," the couple's lawyer Ron Soffer told AFP, referring to France's puppet regime under the Nazis. Bauer's descendants will attempt to show that legal precedence is on their side.

They have noted that since 1945 French courts have routinely annulled the sales of other works that were part of Bauer's collection and ordered they be returned to his family. They are pinning their hopes on the application of an April 1945 law which renders void transactions of looted works. The Tolls will attempt to show that the 1945 law does not apply in this case and contest the competence of the court to decide the matter.

If the court does not have jurisdiction in the affair it will have to "free the painting", Soffer said. He added that the outcome would potentially be of "great importance" in the art world as it highlighted "a risk of legal insecurity regarding works which are lent to exhibitions in France.". The Bauers' lawyer Cedric Fischer would not comment on the case ahead of the hearing.

© Agence France-Presse
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