Saturday, July 14, 2007

Fisk Trial Delayed

The Fisk-O'Keeffe trial, which was supposed to begin next week, has been postponed until Sept. 18. Jonathan Marx summarizes the current state of play in The Nashville Tennessean:

"[The Court] has already ruled that Fisk cannot sell Georgia O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York or Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3, both of which were donated to the school by painter O'Keeffe in 1949 as part of the Stieglitz Collection. ...

"The trial will address the claim of the O'Keeffe Museum ... that Fisk University has violated the conditions of O'Keeffe's gift to the school — and therefore the entire Stieglitz Collection should go back to the museum.

"'As a matter of general law, when a gift with conditions is breached, one of the remedies is that the gift gets returned to the giver,' said Saul Cohen, president of the board of the O'Keeffe Museum. 'That's a standard remedy: reversion. Another possibility is damages.'"

My most recent post on this matter is here.