Beaverbrook kin seek only Turner and Freud paintings, brief says
Last Updated: Monday, December 4, 2006 | 1:07 PM AT
CBC News
The British charitable foundation embroiled in a bitter dispute over 133 works of art with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery says it will take back only two paintings if it wins in arbitration.
The Beaverbrook U.K. Foundation and the Fredericton gallery have spent the last month in an arbitration hearing in Fredericton, laying out arguments to claim ownership of the paintings and sculptures, worth tens of millions of dollars.
The gallery says the artworks were outright gifts from newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, who opened the gallery in the late 1950s and spent the next several decades assembling its collection. The foundation has said the works were merely on loan, and wants them back.
The foundation will be laying out its closing arguments in the dispute all this week. In documents filed at the arbitration hearing, the foundation says it's willing to live with the terms of an agreement it offered the gallery three years ago.
The ownership dispute began when the foundation, which is controlled by Lord Beaverbrook's descendants, made an offer to the gallery. The foundation wanted to reclaim and sell two paintings: British landscape artist J.W. Turner's Fountain of Indolence and Lucian Freud's Hotel Bedroom, worth an estimated $30 million.
In return, it would pay $5 million to the gallery, and promise not to take back any more of the 133 paintings it owned for at least 10 years.
Gallery officials say the offer prompted them to look into the ownership of all the paintings. They say they discovered the paintings weren't on loan as the foundation claimed, but were owned by the gallery.
The arbitration hearing has heard conflicting evidence about who may be right. If the foundation wins, it would have the legal right to remove all 133 paintings.
But in the final paragraph of a 350-page closing brief, the foundation says it would take only the Turner and the Freud paintings, and allow the others to remain in the gallery for at least a decade as it offered three years ago.
The document doesn't mention if the foundation will still donate $5 million to the gallery.
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