One of the art world’s most bizarre cases has been quietly playing out this month in district court judge Gary Feinerman’s courtroom, located in the Dirksen Federal Building in the Loop.
According to expert testimony heard in court last week, if Doig owned up to this one, it would go for $6 to $8 million.
Bartlow agreed that the painting did look like the work of Peter Doig (mostly because of some similar shapes), and Fletcher thought pictures he saw of the famous artist resembled the Doige he’d known. Speculating that Doig might not want the world to know that he’d been in prison, Bartlow contacted him offering to sell him the painting. The response he received came from Gordon VeneKlasen, the artist’s dealer at New York’s Michael Werner Gallery: a vehement denial, and a threat of legal action against any further attempt to attribute the work to Doig.
On Friday the defense produced the sister and the former common-law wife of a man named Pete Doige, a Canadian who died in 2012. He had done some painting, they each said, and also had told them he’d served time in prison. Peter Doig denies that he was in prison during the period in question, and his mom testified that in 1976 he was living at home in Toronto.
