The Library
Below is a list of books and journals that the Center for Art Law compiles in our quest to keep track of the art law publications and relevant scholarship.
If you are working on a new title, or your book is already out, and you would like to have it included in the Repository, please send us information about it (Title, Author/Editor(s), Date of Publication; ISBN, short summary, link to your publisher/distributor).
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Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures
In Priceless, Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable career for the first time, offering a real-life international thriller to rival The Thomas Crown Affair.
Rising from humble roots as the son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a twenty-year career that was nothing short of extraordinary. He went undercover, usually unarmed, to catch art thieves, scammers, and black market traders in Paris and Philadelphia, Rio and Santa Fe, Miami and Madrid.
In this page-turning memoir, Wittman fascinates with the stories behind his recoveries of priceless art and antiquities: The golden armor of an ancient Peruvian warrior king. The Rodin sculpture that inspired the Impressionist movement. The headdress Geronimo wore at his final Pow-Wow. The rare Civil War battle flag carried into battle by one of the nation’s first African-American regiments.
The breadth of Wittman’s exploits is unmatched: He traveled the world to rescue paintings by Rockwell and Rembrandt, Pissarro, Monet and Picasso, often working undercover overseas at the whim of foreign governments. Closer to home, he recovered an original copy of the Bill of Rights and cracked the scam that rocked the PBS series Antiques Roadshow.
By the FBI’s accounting, Wittman saved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art and antiquities. He says the statistic isn’t important. After all, who’s to say what is worth more –a Rembrandt self-portrait or an American flag carried into battle? They’re both priceless.
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The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art
In the annals of art theft, no case has matched—for sheer criminal panache—the heist at Ireland’s Russborough House in 1986.
The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder —including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two Rubenses, and a Vermeer— remained at large for years. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end it was the paintings that brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did, his pursuers were waiting.
The movie-perfect sting that broke Cahill uncovered an astonishing maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way police view art theft. As if that were not enough, the recovery of the Vermeer—by then worth $200 million—led to a remarkable discovery about the way Vermeer achieved his photographic perspective.
The Irish Game places the great theft in Ireland’s long sad history of violence and follows the thread that led, as a direct result of Cahill’s desperate adventures with the Russborough art, to his assassination by the IRA. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the instincts of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twists and turns of this celebrated case, linking it with two other world-famous thefts—of Vermeer’s “The Concert” and other famous paintings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. Sharply observed, fully explored, The Irish Game is a masterpiece in the literature of true crime.
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The Man who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, THE LAST VERMEER, STARRING GUY PEARCE: A revelatory biography of the world’s most famous forger—a talented Mr. Ripley armed with a paintbrush—and a deliciously detailed story of deceit in the art world.
It’s a story that made Dutch painter Han van Meegeren famous worldwide when it broke at the end of World War II: A lifetime of disappointment drove him to forge Vermeers, one of which he sold to Hermann Goering in mockery of the Nazis. And it’s a story that’s been believed ever since. Too bad it isn’t true.
In this gripping work of true crime, Jonathan Lopez has drawn on never-before-seen documents from dozens of archives for this long-overdue unvarnishing of the master forger Han van Meegeren’s legend. Neither unappreciated artist nor antifascist hero, Van Meegeren emerges as an ingenious, dyed-in-the-wool crook. Lopez explores a network of illicit commerce that operated across Europe: Not only was Van Meegeren a key player in that high-stakes game of art fraud in the 1920s and ’30s, landing fakes with famous collectors such as Andrew Mellon, but he and his associates later cashed in on the Nazi occupation.
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Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa
On August 21, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s most celebrated painting vanished from the Louvre. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art.
The sensational disappearing act captured the world’s imagination. Crowds stood in line to view the empty space on the museum wall. Thousands more waited, as concerned as if Mona Lisa were a missing person, for news of the lost painting. Almost a century later, questions still linger: Who really pinched Mona Lisa, and why? Part love story, part mystery, Vanished Smile reopens the puzzling case that transformed a Renaissance portrait into the most enduring icon of all time.
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The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.
Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.
Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
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Books Reviews
The Mendelsohn Case: Implications for Future Restitution
Case Review: Bennigson v. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Case Review: The Modigliani Forgery Epidemic Strikes Again?
Perelman’s Art Damage Case Continued to Burn Through Court Last Week
Case Review Update: Thaler v. Perlmutter (2025)
Case Review: Hayden v. Koons (2025)
Case Review: Ravensburger v. Italian Ministry of Culture (LG Stuttgart, Judgment of 14.03.2024 – 17 O…
Case Review: Getty v. Italy (2024)
Case Review: Farmer-Paellmann v Smithsonian Inst.
Case Review: Kerson v. Vermont Law School, Inc.
Matters of Baldessari: Estate of the Artist Finds Itself on Both Sides of Litigation
Case Review: Hermès International v. Rothschild
“Shhhhhh”: Kat Von D and Tattoo Fan Art – Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg (2021)
Case Review: RF and Bulatov v. Tsvetkova and other charges against an artist
Appropriation or Art? Court Orders Richard Prince to Pay Damages in Highly Anticipated Copyright Lawsuit
AI and Artists’ IP: Exploring Copyright Infringement Allegations in Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd.
Diversity-Fraud: Accent Delight v. Sotheby’s
Case Review: Reif, et al. v. The Art Institute of Chicago (2023)
Case Review: Thaler v. Perlmutter (2023)
Case Review: The Barnes Foundation can now loan art (2023)
Case Review: Free Holdings v. McCoy and Sotheby’s (2023)
Protection of Cultural Icons: Implications of the Galleria dell’Accademia v. Edizioni Conde Nast Decision
Case Review: Yuga Labs, Inc. v. Ripps, et al., 2:22-cv-04355 (C.D. Cal. April 21, 2023)
Copyright Registration for AI Generated Works: Zarya of the Dawn and the Dawn of a New…
Langford and the Pandora Papers: The Flaws Uncovered in the Art World
Case Review: Roberts v. Richard Beavers Gallery et al (2022) – on Artistic Tradition and Copyright…
Case Review: The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi
Degrees of Transformation: Andy Warhol’s 102 minutes of fame before the Supreme Court
Case Review: US v. Philbrick (2022)
Case Review: Art Works, Inc. v. Diana Al-Hadid
Appropriation Art on Trial: Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court in Warhol v. Goldsmith
Case Review: Cassirer et. al. v. Thyssen Bornemisza Collection Foundation (2022)
Legacy and Lawsuits: An Overview of the Robert Indiana Estate Court Battles
A Case of Forgeries at the Herbert Hoover
Case Review: Republic of Turkey v. Christie’s Inc. (2021)
Case Review: Lanier v. Harvard (2021)
Subhash Kapoor: A Decade in Review
Case Review: German Advisory Commission’s Recommendation in Rieger v. City of Cologne (2021)
Case Review: Distorted Image, Secret Dealings, and New York Artists Authorship Act (2020-2021)
A Blow to Pop Art: Case Review of Warhol v. Goldsmith (2021)
Case Review: Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp (2021)
Oklahoma to France and Back Again? A Case of Split-Custody of Nazi-Looted Art
Case Review: Rock’n’Roll, Museums, and Copyright Law (2020)
Making a Case for the CASE Act
Case Review: A Last Laugh from Frans Hals (UK)
Case Review: Abbott Labs v. Feinberg (2020)
Case Review: René Gimpel’s Heirs Fight for Restitution by French Museums (2020)
Case Review: U.S. v. Righter (FL/CA, 2020)
Book Review: “A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law” (2018)
Case Review: Meaders v. Helwaser (2020)
Case Review: Barnet et al v. Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Hellenic Republic (2020)
Remembering Modigliani: Italy’s Ongoing Battle against Forgery
Case Review: Is There HOPE for the Estate of Robert Indiana?
Case Review: Allen v. Cooper (2020)
Case Review: Republic of Turkey v. Christie’s
Case Review of the 5Pointz Appeal: Castillo et al. v. G&M Realty L.P. (2020)
Case Review: The Mayor Gallery v. Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné
Two for the Price of One: Recent US Legal Developments in Nazi-Looted Art
Case Review: Takeaways from Mary Boone’s Day in Court
Case Review: Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation
Case Review: de Csepel v. Republic of Hungary
Case Review: Warhol v. Goldsmith
Case Review: Droit de suite… not so sweet
Case Review: Sotheby’s v. Greece
May Flash: Basqui-what?
Around the Block Ruling in 5Pointz
Blockage Discounts and Artists’ Estates: The De Kooning Post-Mortem
Rights: Investigating and Prosecuting Kleptocracy in Malaysia
The Making of the Moral Rights Case: The Factual and Legal Background of the 5Pointz Trial
Case Review: Maestracci v. Helly Nahmad Gallery Inc. (2014)
Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow: Covenants Not to Compete Between Auction Houses
Suing Cargo Largo, Pak Mail and UPS in Florida for Art Theft
Case Preview: Andy Warhol Foundation v. Bugarin
Case Review: Christie’s v. Jombihis
Case Review: Rauschenberg Estate Saga of Trust and Fees Explained, Again
Case Review: Galin v. Kunitake Hamada (2015), or Legal Storm over “Ice Storm”
Case Review: Foster v. Svenson (2015)
Case Review: Rybolovlev v. Bouvier
Case Review: Red Rothko Suit, a.k.a. Hoffman v. L&M Arts (TX)
Rockwell-not Case Review: Knispel v. Gallery 63 Antiques
Case Review: David Toren v. Federal Republic of Germany and Free State of Bavaria – Task…
Rauschenberg Estate Saga of Trust and Fees Explained
Case Review: Crile v. Commission of Internal Revenue
Case Review: United States v. Twenty-Nine Pre-Columbian and Colonial Artifacts, From Peru
Case Review: Karlsson v. Mangan
Case Review: US v. Mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer (8th Cir.)
Case Review: Frank Kolodny v. James Meyer, Fred Dorfman, and Dorfman Projects LLC (May 2014)
Case Review: Schoeps v. Free State of Bavaria (June. 2014)
Case Review: Scher v. Stendhal Gallery, Inc., et al.
Case Review: Caterbetti v. Bloomgarden, et al
Basquiat sightings, or Case Review: Heriveaux v. Christies, Inc.
Case Review: Bilinski v. the Keith Haring Foundation
Libel by Fiction: Greene v. Paramount Pictures Corporation
Case Review: Photographer v. Artist (2013)
Calder Estate Fraud Claim Dismissed: Judge Finds Allegations “An Incoherent Stew of Irrelevance and Innuendo”
Case Review: Meyer v. Bd. of Regents of the U. of Oklahoma, or How long will…
Case Preview: Lonny Marrow v. Jacob Javits Center, et al.
Lessons on Auction Houses from Sotheby’s and the Case of the Stolen Renoir
Small Win for Artists Fighting Against 5Pointz Demolition, But Will It Be Enough?
Case Review: Janney-Pace v. Metropolitan Fine Arts & Antiques
Wallspace LLC Sues Insurance Company for Damages Sustained During Sandy
A Knoedler Aftershock: Freedman sues for Defamation
Statkun v. Gasser and Grunert: Another VARA Claim on the Table in the Southern District of…
After a Protracted Battle, Los Angeles Takes Final Steps to Lifting Ban on Murals
Right to Privacy v. Freedom of Expression in Case of “Peeping Tom” Photographer
Case Review in Brief: Art Historian Found Liable for Incorrect Authentication (2013)
Is Cariou v. Prince Headed to the Supreme Court?
What’s in a name ‘Borghe$e’?
“What’s in a Name?” Peter Paul Biro v. Condé Nast for Defamation
Five Art Market Lessons from Recent Case Law
Appropriate Standards in Appropriation Art? Cariou v. Prince Decision Garners Relief but Fails to Provide Substantive…
In Sobel v. Eggleston, Limited Edition Is NO Limit to Subsequent Editions
Keith Haring Foundation v. Colored Thumb Corp.
“Pandorin’s Box”: Jenack v. Rabizadeh Threatens Anonymity of Sellers at Auction
Jasper Johns’ “Tantric Detail” Paintings Held Hostage and Subject of Suit
Case Review: Konowaloff v. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Holding: Met Can Keep Cézanne)
Regarding Flower in Murakami v. Boesky
Lagrange v. Knoedler — SETTLED
Case Review: the Seven-Year Saga of Bakalar v. Vavra Comes to an End
Perelman and Gagosian Countersue Over ‘Popeye’
The Velvet Underground v. The Andy Warhol Foundation — DISMISSED
Court of Appeals Reverses Lower Court’s Decision in Legal Battle Between Fashion Powerhouses
New York’s Southern District Court Rules that Artworks Consigned to Galleries May Be Reached By Creditors
CA District Court Finds State Resale Royalty Unconstitutional
The Mask, Egyptian Funerary and Known to Legally Disappear
Footnote: Supreme Court Declines Review of Black Swan Case
Marc Jancou Files $26 Million Suit Against Cady Nowland and Sotheby’s
The Kunstmuseum Basel and Malevich Heirs Settle
Warhol Foundation Urges Protection for Appropriation Art as Experts Debate
Nazi-Era Art Litigation: Orkin v Swiss Confederation
More About the Public Domain: Golan v Holder
Cariou v Prince: a continuing controversy
VLA fils an amicus brief in support of Kelley
Inspiration or Infringement: Gordon v McGinley
No One is Innocent but the Cow, or The Tale of a Callous Son
"Phony And Overvalued Russian Art" Impossible but Caveat Emptor
Supreme Court Nonplussed by Claimant Endeavor to Recover Art in Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum…
Framing Fiduciary Duty in Marchig v. Christie’s
A Pissarro, Stolen and Forfeited
Art Authentication: another foundation comes under scrutiny
Yes Rasta: Richard Prince loses copyright suit
Recent Developments on the Herzog Collection — Nixon Peabody Advises Hungary with Restitution Issues
Parties in Adams Photo Dispute Settle
Dances With Bisons Starring Costner and Detmers — UPDATED 5/15/12
Art Dealers Under Review: The Wildensteins
Westfield v. Federal Republic of Germany — FSIA schields Germany from defending the case on the…
WikiLeaks and Art Law?! Black Swan Affair Gets Wind to its Sail
Spain, Thyssen-Bornemisza Seek Review of Ninth Circuit FSIA Decision
Term of Art: Authenticity
United States and Nicaragua Extend Agreement to Protect Archaeological Heritage of Nicaragua
Will the Supreme Court Take Up Nazi-era Limitations Periods?
YouTube copyright case in Spain — Google cleared
Just Another Art Restitution Case? Think again
Another Odyssey Decisions from FL courts
VARA Applies to Unfinished Works
DOJ Urges 7th Circuit to Shield Iranian Artifacts From Seizure by Terrorism Victims
GLOBAL PIRACY WATCH: AUSTRALIA’S ISP LIABILITY TEST CASE
SHEPARD FAIREY V. ASSOCIATED PRESS (PICTURE’S WORTH SOMETHING)
Keep your Friends Close — Foundations In Dispute Over Artists’ Funds
Photographers of the World Unit (Under US Copyright Law)
