Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

Distributing the Art of a Dead Thief (and matters of attribution)

The death of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, born Melvyn Kohn, is rife with questions of law and art. Mr. Kohn, it was discovered, was a fraud, neither once married to French nobility, educated at Groton or Harvard, nor living on Fifth Avenue. 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LJKYXFsoKu8/SKJIGoQ3qLI/AAAAAAAAAKY/k0mcAnfNLAk/s200/Gorchov,Ron,+Study+1+in+Blue+and+Orange.jpg" border="0" alt="" />

And while his small apartment on East 72^nd Street was full of art, he appears to have stolen most of it. The New York County Public Administrator’s Office, which handles the estates of people who die without wills, put the art up for auction through Christie’s and another auction house. But it was only after the buyer of one of the pieces looked into it’s provenance that he discovered it had been stolen. Experts at Christie’s soon discovered several other of the pieces had been stolen.

Mr. Kohn apparently really did own a few of his pieces; the receipts were found in his apartment. But there are still 105 pieces unaccounted for. If no one comes forward to claim them, they will be auctioned and the proceeds will go to Mr. Kohn’s heirs, several of whom seem to have turned up.

So what has the FBI done? Just what any fifteen year old would in 2008: posted a website containing images of all the contested works, hoping their true owners will turn up.

Needless to say, however, return of the works to their rightful owners will be no easy task. The FBI agent in charge of the case described the conversations with potential leads as discussions of “prehistoric history.” And then, of course, there’s that old bugaboo: authenticity. The agent said of a drawing listed in the collection as a Corot: “Well, you know what they say about Corot, don’t you? He did 500 pictures and there are 2,0000 of them in the United States.”

I’m sure this isn’t one of the paintings that ended up in Kohn’s collection: