[CPProt.net] Mandela suing ex-ally in art feud

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

Mandela suing ex-ally in art feud

By ABHIK KUMAR CHANDA 

Monday, April 18, 2005 Page R2

Agence France-Presse, with files from The Guardian
 
 JOHANNESBURG -- Adispute between Nelson Mandela and a former lawyer is
rocking South Africa and the art world as the anti-apartheid icon prepares
to file lawsuits alleging the forgery and unauthorized sale of paintings
recalling his long years in prison.

Mandela's lawyer George Bizos, who represented the world's most famous
political prisoner during his apartheid-era treason trial, said action would
be brought against the elder statesman's former lawyer and friend, Ismail
Ayob, and Ayob's business associate Ross Calder.

"We were thinking of next week but more information is coming in from all
around the world, from art galleries and art buyers, and it may take a
little more time," Bizos said on Friday.

Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail -- most of them at the infamous Robben
Island prison -- was released in 1990 and thereafter decided to collaborate
with "an artist to produce limited-edition paintings, which he signed,"
Bizos said.

The paintings are clever and partially coloured sketches -- depicting a
lighthouse on Robben Island under a purple sky, a view of a verdant patch as
seen from a cell window with brown bars, a church on the island and a prison
dormitory.

It is claimed the paintings were based on rough sketches by Mandela, which
were "enhanced" into colour lithographs. Artist Varenka Paschke,
granddaughter of apartheid-era prime minister P. W. Botha, is said to have
created the final works from which the prints were produced. Publicity
releases said Paschke "tutored" Mandela.

The works have been snapped up overseas by such celebrity buyers as Bill
Clinton, Prince Charles, David Beckham, Samuel Jackson and the Sultan of
Oman. Oprah Winfrey paid $200,000 (U.S.) for a set, according to press
reports.

The venture by South Africa's first black president was aimed at raising
funds for charities bearing his name and espousing various causes, including
fighting AIDS, bringing up orphans and advancing rural education.
"Thereafter he stopped signing the works in the hope that the signed copies
would be exhausted," Bizos said.

But then it emerged from sources around the world, Bizet said, that Calder
and Ayob had "mechanically and photographically reproduced innumerable
copies, which are being sold at exorbitant prices.

"We have no idea what monies have accrued and where they have gone," he
said, adding that the equivalent of $6-million to $8-million (Canadian) have
not been accounted for during Ayob's association with the fundraising
scheme.

Tony Bally Chuene, another lawyer representing Mandela, said preliminary
investigations have found that art galleries in London, Australia and India
are selling suspect works, "while in other countries you have apparently
agents licensed by Calder to sell these works."

The last straw appears to have been the sale of prints to heads of state,
celebrities and industrialists at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, last January. Mandela is said to have been furious.

Ayob on Friday issued a statement calling the charges "vague and
unspecific," adding that the root of the matter apparently lay in whether
the Mandela Trust, which he controls, and the flagship Nelson Mandela
Foundation, hold rights to "intellectual property relating to the person of
Nelson Mandela."

Ayob said his trust "effectively holds such rights," but other lawyers
dispute his assertion.

Prominent Johannesburg art gallery owner Linda Givon said she found the
whole art scheme "distasteful and smacking of outrageous commercialism."

"Mr. Mandela has always been my hero. He is a giant, but the whole art world
knows he is not an artist. I find the whole business insulting to his image.
It's like auctioning his clothes or selling a lock of his hair."

Givon said that Mandela essentially signed paintings done by somebody else,
adding: "It's basically a piece of paper with Mandela's signature."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/