Artist awarded $2.5m for painting he denies making

To quote from a New York Times report:

The artist Peter Doig, who fought efforts by a former corrections officer and a gallery to attribute a painting to him — even going so far as to sue him when he denied painting it — has won a $2.5 million judgment against those parties and their former lawyer.

Judge Gary Feinerman of the United States District Court for Northern Illinois ruled in the artist’s favor last month in an unusual case where Doig had been accused of disowning a landscape that the corrections officer and the gallery had hoped to sell.

The ruling comes in one of the stranger art authentication cases, one that had pitted Mr. Doig, a well-known artist whose works routinely sell for many millions of dollars, against the former corrections officer, Robert Fletcher, who sued in 2013 on grounds that a painting he owned, an untitled acrylic on canvas of a rocky desert scene, signed “Pete Doige 76,” was an early work by Mr. Doig.

Mr. Fletcher said he had met Mr. Doig in the 1970s at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. He said they met again in the prison where he worked and where he said Mr. Doig made the work, which he later bought for $100.

Mr. Fletcher and Peter Bartlow, a Chicago art dealer who agreed to help sell the painting, argued that Mr. Doig was denying authorship because of a vendetta against Mr. Fletcher.

But Mr. Doig testified that he had never attended Lakehead and had never been incarcerated. Instead, he and his lawyers said the work in question had been painted by another man, Peter Edward Doige, who died in 2012 and had been an inmate at Mr. Fletcher’s prison.