An art collector is suing David Geffen for the return of a valuable Giacometti sculpture that the collector says was sold without his knowledge by his art adviser as part of an elaborate fraud.
In the court papers filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, Justin Sun, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency entrepreneur and art collector, said the Giacometti sculpture, titled “Le Nez,” for which he had paid $78.4 million, was stolen from him and sold by the former adviser, named in the court filing as Xiong Zihan Sydney.
Ms. Xiong had helped Mr. Sun purchase the Giacometti at auction in 2021 and had suggested in interviews that the sculpture would become part of a collection to be owned by the APENFT Foundation, a platform she has said Mr. Sun was establishing to help bridge the gap between the art world and metaverse.
But lawyers for Mr. Sun said in court papers that he remained the owner of the work and that Ms. Xiong had forged his signature on documents related to the deal.
As part of the scheme, the court papers assert, the adviser appeared to have fabricated the existence of a lawyer who was purportedly overseeing the deal and then sent emails posing as the lawyer.
Ms. Xiong could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Geffen’s lawyer, Tibor L. Nagy, released a statement in which he characterized Mr. Sun’s claims in the lawsuit as “bizarre and baseless” and suggested Mr. Sun simply wanted to undo the deal.
“We call that seller’s remorse,” the statement said.
In the lawsuit, Mr. Sun’s lawyers said that two art dealers and their lawyer working with Mr. Geffen, a leading art collector and philanthropist, should have asked questions about “obvious red flags” concerning the legitimacy of the sale before proceeding. They described one of those “flags” as the fact that the supposed lawyer was communicating through a personal gmail account rather than a more professional address.
“Defendants either must restitute it or pay very substantial damages to Plaintiff,” lawyers for Mr. Sun said of the sculpture, according to the suit.
Mr. Sun drew wide public attention in the art world last year when he paid $6.2 million for a work consisting of a fresh banana stuck to a wall with duct tape. He subsequently ate the banana. (The banana was the center of a 2019 conceptual artwork, “Comedian,” by the noted artist prankster Maurizio Cattelan. It comes with a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions for owners to replace the banana — if they wish — on the wall whenever it rots.)
Mr. Sun’s lawyers said that their client had in 2023 “expressed an interest” in finding a buyer who would pay more than $80 million for the bronze, steel, and iron Giacometti sculpture that depicts a suspended, caged head with a gaping jaw and an elongated nose. But the court papers say he never gave his adviser the authority to negotiate a deal, only to make inquiries.
The suit says that, nonetheless, the adviser negotiated a deal with Mr. Geffen’s representatives for less than what Mr. Sun was seeking. Under the deal, according to the court papers, Mr. Geffen turned over two artworks — together worth, according to the court papers, $55 million — plus another $10.5 million in cash, in exchange for the Giacometti.
“Plaintiff never would have agreed to such a transaction had he been told about it — Plaintiff had expressed interest only in selling Le Nez for a profit over what he paid and in an all-cash (or equivalent) deal,” his lawyers said in the court papers.
But in his statement, Mr. Nagy, the lawyer for Mr. Geffen, suggested that Mr. Sun had been cognizant of the deal. “Mr. Sun received two paintings and $10.5 million for the sculpture he sold,” the statement said. “After trying and failing to sell the paintings, he now wants to retrade the deal.”
In Mr. Sun’s lawsuit, his lawyers said that he did not realize that the sculpture had been sold until many months after Mr. Geffen bought it. The suit says the art adviser used the cash turned over in the Geffen deal to suggest to Mr. Sun that she had found a collector interested in the sculpture who had put down a $10 million deposit. They say in the filing that she then forwarded that sum to Mr. Sun and kept the remaining $500,000 for herself.
Mr. Sun’s lawsuit says he only uncovered the scheme last December when he went back to the adviser and questioned her about the lack of progress on that deal. The lawyers said they then reached out to Mr. Geffen’s representatives, but were told he was not returning the work.
Zachary Small contributed reporting.
