MANHATTAN — A Pennsylvania art collector filed a lawsuit this week against the owners of a shuttered Upper East Side gallery, accusing the couple of disappearing with $15 million worth of art from his collection.
Collector George Ball first enlisted married Manhattan art dealers R. Scott Cook and Soussan A.E. Cook as art advisors and dealers in the mid-1990s, according to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan’s federal court last week.
The Cooks, who owned the Cook Fine Art gallery on Madison Avenue near East 81st Street, housed and managed Ball’s multimillion-dollar collection for more than a decade without incident, the suit said. The Cooks kept the artwork at the gallery and in a unit at the New Yorker Storage Co. on the Upper West Side.
However, Ball became concerned last month when the Cooks allegedly failed to forward the proceeds from several works sold through Christie’s auction house in London, according to the complaint.
The couple claimed to have sold nine pieces on Ball’s behalf — including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee — for approximately $5.3 million. But when Ball’s attorney pressed the couple's lawyer for payment, he was told that the money “[had] been spent” and that the art-dealing duo had left the country, the suit claimed.
Upon investigation, Ball’s lawyers say they found no record of his artworks having been sold at Christie’s during June 2011, when the Cooks claimed to have completed the sales.
“The only possible conclusion from all of the above is that the Plaintiff has been defrauded by Defendants who have stolen his artworks and/or the proceeds thereof,” the lawsuit states.
Ball is now suing for the worth of the missing pieces — estimated at $15 million — and an additional $15 million in punitive damages, legal fees and the return of whatever pieces still remain.
Messages left for attorneys on both sides were not returned as of Tuesday evening.
The phone number listed for Cook Fine Art’s Madison Avenue location was no longer in service, and the complaint noted that location had closed two years ago.
