Sale of Calder Sculpture Worth Millions of Dollars Sets Off Legal Battle

Two battling lawsuits that stem from the sale of an Alexander Calder sculpture are being waged in New York, with an art adviser alleging that the transaction was illegal and a prominent dealer claiming that she is attempting to keep him from doing business.

The legal action, first reported on Friday by the Daily Beast, began in January, when Lea Lee, the adviser, filed suit against French dealer and self-described “art detective” Elisabeth Royer-Grimblat, New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem, and others.

Lee is the granddaughter of the architect Oscar Nitzschké, whom she described as a “close friend” of Calder. Prior to her death in 2017, her mother had owned the Calder work in question, which Nahem’s gallery exhibited at its Art Basel booth in Switzerland in 2018.

The parties disagree on how Nahem obtained the work. (The work’s title changes over the many documents submitted: Lee labeled it Mobile de Bretagne, while the defendants sometimes called it La Roche jaune, or The Yellow Rock, and dated it to around 1950.) Lee said she was unaware that the work was removed from her mother’s estate, which her sisters, Rose and Julie Groen, both defendants in that lawsuit, had been “feasting on,” according to Lee.

Writing in the present tense in an affidavit, Lee claimed that Royer-Grimblat “smuggles” the work out of her mother’s estate in 2017, and that when she raised concerns about the work in 2021, the sisters and Royer-Grimblat “commenced a slander campaign against me, aimed at destroying my professional reputation as an art advisor that seriously and negatively impacted my business both in New York and elsewhere.”

In her own affidavit, Royer-Grimblat denied these allegations, submitting to the court a receipt dated March 9, 2015—before the death of Frédérique Nitszchké-Groen, Lee’s mother—that appears to state that Royer-Grimblat paid $2 million for the work. On November 20, 2017, Royer-Grimblat appears to have sold the work for the same price to Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, whose invoice now titled the work Mobile de Bretagne. The Groen sisters also denied Lee’s allegations.

Across the various documents submitted during the suit, the price for the work appears to fluctuate. Lee stated that Nahem was selling the work for $4.5 million, then alleged that he had undervalued the sculpture, submitting an email exchange with a Sotheby’s representative who pegged the piece’s value at $8 million, if it were to be sold privately.

In June, a judge said there was enough evidence that Royer-Grimblat had purchased the work prior to Nitszchké-Groen’s death and dismissed the case. But Lee appealed the judgment, and the case remains ongoing.

Meanwhile, this week, Nahem filed his own lawsuit against Lee. While the contents of the lawsuit have not yet been made available in the New York court’s online system, the Daily Beast reported that the suit surrounds Lee’s interactions with Nahem in the years since 2017.

Nahem’s lawsuit reportedly claims that Lee “began to stalk Mr. Nahem at art fairs and art auctions where he was surrounded by his staff, his spouse, his colleagues and, most damagingly, the Gallery’s clients,” and that she has filed a criminal complaint against him in France, where she is allegedly trying to keep him from entering the country.

In her lawsuit, Lee said she attempted to tell Nahem that the work was still part of her mother’s estate in 2018 after receiving the “shock of my life” upon seeing it at Art Basel. She claimed she tried to touch the work because she felt such an affinity for it, and was told by someone in the booth not to do so, which left her “feeling the broken heart of being scolded for standing too close to a wonderful piece of art that was always part of my childhood and represented everything that I treasured so much about the private and wildly creative world my grandmother and Calder had built together,” according to the suit.

The Daily Beast reported that in his lawsuit, Nahem said that when he received communication from Lee, Royer-Grimblat told him that Lee was “lying and unstable,” and so he declined to give the work over to her.

Lee and Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art did not respond to requests for comment.