If you showed up at Maastricht for TEFAF, you were confronted with what might have seemed like a familiar Calder sculpture in the entryway. Janey Waney had been on loan to Gramercy Park for three years before being spirited to the Netherlands on quick marketing stop before joining a museum show.

Christophe van der Weghe, the New York dealer, organized the Calder’s installation here, although he declined to provide any details about its owner. But, this being the gossipy art world, other dealers familiar with Calder’s work said it belongs to David and Leslie Rogath, collectors from Greenwich, Conn., who had displayed “Janey Waney” in their garden before lending it to Gramercy Park. It is now for sale, several said, for about $20 million.

After the fair ends on March 23, “Janey Waney,” along with 16 other Calder sculptures, is heading to the garden of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where it will be included in a major exhibition of Calder’s monumental sculptures that opens there on June 21st.

The sculpture was originally commissioned by the N.K. Winston Corporation for the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, Long Island. At the time, Jane Holzer, the collector and star of many of Warhol’s films, was married to Leonard Holzer, the mall’s developer. Calder named “Janey Waney” after Ms. Holzer, because she had seen a maquette of the sculpture in his studio and suggested he make it a large outdoor work.

via After Stay in Gramercy Park, Calder Sculpture Pops Up in Maastricht – NYTimes.com.

Courthouse News Service reports on the suit filed in Federal court against the Calder Foundation over the foundation’s refusal to issue an inventory number for the work Eight Black Leaves which was bought by dealer Gerald Cramer 65 years ago but the foundation says is a fragment and the owner says is not. The suit is reminiscent of another Calder dispute (decision below) that arose a few years ago and was decided in the foundation’s favor:

Calder sold the sculpture to Gerald Cramer in 1948 as a “fully integrated work” and Cramer displayed it in his gallery in Geneva, according to the 40-page lawsuit, which contains another 136 pages of exhibits.

Cramer’s son, plaintiff Patrick Cramer, “a prominent art dealer in his own right,” claims he contacted Christie’s in April 2012 to sell Eight Black Leaves. He estimates it’s worth $1.2 million. […]

“This unsupported assertion was only made after the foundation learned that the estate of Gerald Cramer sought to obtain an inventory number in order to sell the work. […]

The Calder Foundation was once responsible for “cataloguing all the works produced by the artist Alexander Calder and making his works available for public inspection in order to facilitate art education and research,” according to the complaint.

Whatever the merits of the case, it shows the continuing pressure within the art market over the issue of authenticity.

Courthouse News Service

Thome v. ALEXANDER & LOUISA, 70 AD 3d 88 – NY_ Appellate Div., 1st Dept

The judge didn’t like the Calder heirs’ lawsuit:

Many of the claims in the case amounted to “an incoherent stew of irrelevance and innuendo,” and the evidence failed to show Perls wrongfully sold Calder works without the heirs’ knowledge, Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich said in a decision made public Dec. 24 in New York state court in Manhattan.

“All these allegations are so patently inadequate that the court can only conclude that they were brought solely for the purpose of harassment or embarrassment,” Kornreich said in the ruling, which dismissed the case.

Calder’s Heirs Lose Suit Against Art Dealer (Bloomberg)