Art Dealer

Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for a Rhode Island art dealer are quibbling over his sentencing. The Providence Journal reports both sides disagree on the number of victims in the case and whether Rocco P. DeSimone of Johnston committed perjury during his trial. Prosecutors say in court filings they want an “enhanced’ sentence for DeSimone. The court records, however, do not specify the prison term they’re seeking. DeSimone’s lawyers argue there are eight victims, not 18 as the prosecution alleges.

Two paintings that resurfaced 31 years after being stolen during a violent home invasion in Massachusetts will be auctioned in New York City next month. "In the Sun" by American impressionist painter Childe Hassam will be sold at Sotheby's on May 17 as part of its American Art sale for an estimated $1.5 million to $2.5 million, the auction house said Thursday. The richly colored canvas, created in 1888, depicts a woman in a flower garden near Paris shielding her face from the sun with a fan. The other work, "The Shore of Lake Geneva" by French artist Gustave Courbet, will...

NEW YORK — A New York City art dealer who catered to celebrities has admitted bilking nearly $100 million from his star-studded clientele through bogus art investment opportunities and sales of pieces he did not own. Lawrence B. Salander, 60, pleaded guilty yesterday to grand larceny and scheming to defraud in a case that swept up tennis star John McEnroe and the estate of actor Robert De Niro’s father as victims. Salander has been promised a prison term that is at most six to 18 years.

ST. LOUIS - A St. Louis museum can keep hold of a 3,200-year-old mummy's mask, a federal judge has ruled, saying the US government failed to prove that the Egyptian relic was ever stolen. Prosecutors said the funeral mask of Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer went missing from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo about 40 years ago and that it should be returned to its country of origin. The St. Louis Art Museum said it researched the provenance of the mask and legitimately purchased it in 1998 from a New York art dealer.

A New York art dealer has been charged in a $4 million fraud for selling works by Picasso, Matisse and others without informing the owner or giving him the proceeds. The charges in a criminal complaint in Manhattan accuse Robert Scott Cook of selling 16 works of art without the owner/collector's knowledge. The artwork included watercolors, drawings, photographs, and other works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Lawyers in court papers filed in a civil case against him say Cook is likely living abroad because he travels frequently around...

SACRAMENTO — Paul Thiebaud, a prominent art dealer who owned galleries in San Francisco and New York, has died. He was 49. Mr. Thiebaud died of colon cancer Saturday at a Sacramento hospital, according to Kelly Purcell, director of his gallery. The son of Wayne Thiebaud, an acclaimed Sacramento artist, Mr. Thiebaud started his career at Christie’s auction house in New York, then became a partner with San Francisco dealer Charles Campbell in 1990 at a gallery featuring the work of Bay area artists.

NEW YORK - Robert Miller - an art dealer whose Manhattan gallery represented an eclectic list of prominent US painters, sculptors, and photographers, notably Robert Mapplethorpe - died June 22 in Miami. He was 72 and lived in El Portal, Fla. The cause was complications of an infection, a spokeswoman for the Robert Miller Gallery said. Mr. Miller, a painter turned dealer, learned his trade at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in the 1960s and, with his wife, the former Betsy Wittenborn, founded the Robert Miller Gallery on Fifth Avenue in 1977.

PROVIDENCE - A former art dealer from Rhode Island who escaped from federal prison and made a stop in Connecticut will soon appear in federal court. Rocco DeSimone faces new charges for escaping from a minimum-security prison camp in Fairton, N.J., on March 15. He surrendered four days later to federal authorities in Providence. He was scheduled to appear today in US District Court in Providence, where a judge will decide whether DeSimone should be sent back to New Jersey.

SALINAS, Calif. - A former Harvard Medical School professor and a Boston art dealer who reported that thieves broke into their rental home in the ritzy coastal enclave of Pebble Beach, and made off with millions of dollars worth of art, were named as suspects in the case yesterday. The Monterey County sheriff’s commander, Mike Richards, said Dr. Ralph Hennaugh, formerly of Harvard University, and art dealer Benjamin Amadio may be involved in a “criminal enterprise,’’ and that authorities were investigating “other scenarios.’’ “This...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Whether it's impressionist paintings by Monet, athletic headgear or medical tubing, federal investigators say Rocco DeSimone can turn it into a scam worth millions of dollars. On the eve of his release from prison - a stay interrupted by a brief escape and manhunt - the 55-year-old art dealer faces a new indictment, this time accusing him of duping an inventor and others by saying he had access to deep-pocketed business connections. He pleaded not guilty yesterday to mail fraud and money laundering charges during a hearing in US...

Britain's White Cube gallery, known as an early champion of provocative British artists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, launched its Hong Kong branch on Thursday, becoming the latest Western gallery to open an Asian outpost in pursuit of China's booming art market. White Cube unveiled a 6,000-square-foot (557-square-meter) space in a new building in Hong Kong's central business district. With its first branch outside Britain, White Cube follows other British as well as French and American galleries that have set up shop in Hong Kong in recent years.

A New York art dealer has been charged in a $4 million fraud for selling works by Picasso, Matisse and others without informing the owner or giving him the proceeds. The charges in a criminal complaint in Manhattan accuse Robert Scott Cook of selling 16 works of art without the owner/collector's knowledge. The artwork included watercolors, drawings, photographs, and other works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Lawyers in court papers filed in a civil case against him say Cook is likely living abroad...

Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for a Rhode Island art dealer are quibbling over his sentencing. The Providence Journal reports both sides disagree on the number of victims in the case and whether Rocco P. DeSimone of Johnston committed perjury during his trial. Prosecutors say in court filings they want an “enhanced’ sentence for DeSimone. The court records, however, do not specify the prison term they’re seeking. DeSimone’s lawyers argue there are eight victims, not 18 as the prosecution alleges.

NEW YORK - Robert Miller - an art dealer whose Manhattan gallery represented an eclectic list of prominent US painters, sculptors, and photographers, notably Robert Mapplethorpe - died June 22 in Miami. He was 72 and lived in El Portal, Fla. The cause was complications of an infection, a spokeswoman for the Robert Miller Gallery said. Mr. Miller, a painter turned dealer, learned his trade at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in the 1960s and, with his wife, the former Betsy Wittenborn, founded the Robert Miller Gallery on Fifth Avenue in 1977.

PROVIDENCE— As his trial drew to a close, a former Rhode Island art dealer said yesterday that witnesses lied to the jury in alleging that he duped them in what prosecutors call a $6 million con. Rocco DeSimone said his former business partners and investors who testified against him have falsely portrayed him as a con man who systematically defrauded them by lying about access to deep-pocketed business connections. Witnesses have testified that DeSimone solicited investments in inventions by falsely claiming that brand-name...

A wonderful deadpan joke defines the documentary “Views on Vermeer.’’ What could be more incongruous than a moving picture about painting’s supreme master of stillness? So often art onscreen is treated with ponderous, if not phony, reverence. Vermeer is a particularly tempting target for such treatment, with the special, almost-mystical place he holds in the art firmament. Fewer than three dozen of his paintings survive. Those paintings exalt the ordinary, taking a simple interior and investing it with a quality that can verge on the sacred: stillness as transcendence.

PROVIDENCE— As his trial drew to a close, a former Rhode Island art dealer said yesterday that witnesses lied to the jury in alleging that he duped them in what prosecutors call a $6 million con. Rocco DeSimone said his former business partners and investors who testified against him have falsely portrayed him as a con man who systematically defrauded them by lying about access to deep-pocketed business connections. Witnesses have testified that DeSimone solicited investments in inventions by falsely claiming that brand-name companies had offered to buy them...

Britain's White Cube gallery, known as an early champion of provocative British artists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, launched its Hong Kong branch on Thursday, becoming the latest Western gallery to open an Asian outpost in pursuit of China's booming art market. White Cube unveiled a 6,000-square-foot (557-square-meter) space in a new building in Hong Kong's central business district. With its first branch outside Britain, White Cube follows other British as well as French and American galleries that have set up shop in Hong Kong in recent years.

SACRAMENTO — Paul Thiebaud, a prominent art dealer who owned galleries in San Francisco and New York, has died. He was 49. Mr. Thiebaud died of colon cancer Saturday at a Sacramento hospital, according to Kelly Purcell, director of his gallery. The son of Wayne Thiebaud, an acclaimed Sacramento artist, Mr. Thiebaud started his career at Christie’s auction house in New York, then became a partner with San Francisco dealer Charles Campbell in 1990 at a gallery featuring the work of Bay area artists.

‘The Same River Twice’’ is a philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. Largely set in a pre-European Union Paris and rendered with such painterly depth that the luminous city nearly becomes a character, Ted Mooney’s fourth novel explores issues of mutability against fixity, evolution against stasis, art against artifice, and the vexing allure of an affair against the security of marriage. Mooney launches his dazzling tale in Moscow, where clothing designer Odile Mevel and her partner, Thierry Colin, have been dispatched to...