The Million-Dollar Kandinsky That Isn’t In a College Dorm Room

A family dispute has spilled out from the Surrogate’s Court into the tabloids as the executor of a wealthy woman’s estate accuses her niece and nephew of taking works of art that belong to her mother—Faith Dorian-Wright’s—estate.

The complaint gets a little hysterical when it tries to suggest that Mackenzie Wright might have a $1m Kandinsky painting in her dorm room at New York’s FIT. (The niece’s attorney says the painting is in storage.)

A much more valuable Hawaiian bowl brought back from the Pacific by Captain Cook was reportedly give to Wright’s brother. It now resides in storage at Christie’s.

The whole story comes from dogged research by DNAinfo:

The aunt, Ingrid Wright, said in a court filing in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court last week that her niece, Mackenzie Wright, wrongfully took a pricey painting by the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky from her dead grandma’s Lenox Hill apartment.

“[Mackenzie] is a 20-year-old college student attending Fashion Institute of Technology, who on information and belief lives in a dormitory there,” Ingrid’s lawyer, Allan Kirstein, said in the filing. “It is a real possibility that she has squirreled away the Kandinsky in her dorm room.”

The filing says that the Kandinsky painting, called “The Black Line,” belongs to the estate of Faith Dorian-Wright, who died Sept. 18, 2016. It demands that Mackenzie return it to Ingrid, the estate’s executor.

My Niece Has My $1M Kandinsky Painting in Her FIT Dorm Room, Aunt Fears (DNAinfo New York)