Investor Who Funded Gallery’s Warhol Purchases Now Wants to Know More

The New York Post picks up on the story of Nira Levine, an Oregon retiree who had spent $847,000 with John and Kristine Woodward, gallerists on the Lower East Side, over a period of a dozen years. Levine bought a set of Warhol prints that she later learned were fakes. Now she wants to know more about the Woodward’s business:

She purchased the pieces with her own funds or co-owned them with the Woodwards, her suit says. The Woodwards then resold the art through their gallery and split the proceeds 50-50 with Levine.

But when Levine learned in 2014 that the couple allegedly overcharged her for etchings, she grew suspicious.

So Levine asked Kristine Woodward for sales receipts related to 90 still lifes from Warhol’s “Spacefruit” series that the gallery supposedly bought for $180,000 in 2008. Levine had paid the Woodwards $90,000 for her 50 percent interest in the collection.

In a 2014 email Kristine Woodward admits that “there is no invoice” because her husband, a prominent dealer who was curator at the recently-shuttered Four Seasons Restaurant, acquired them from Warhol’s printer, who died in 2001.

Gallery sold Warhol prints with doctored documents: lawsuit  (New York Post)