Closure
The gallery's president resigned in October 2009, amid rumours of problems with fakes involving paintings supplied to the gallery by a Long Island art dealer. A statement issued on Wednesday 28 November 2009 stated that the gallery was closing. The gallery sold its premises at 19 East 70th Street for $31 million in February 2011. It still has a valuable library of letters, photographs, and other records, going back to 1863. Parts of its inventory will be sold at auction in November 2012.
The day before the gallery closed in November 2011, Belgian hedge-fund manager Pierre Lagrange sued the gallery in relation to an untitled work attributed to Jackson Pollock that he purchased for $17 million in 2007, on the understanding that it would be included in a supplement to the catalogue raisonné, but it was later claimed that no such supplement was planned; tests later showed that some of the paint used was not available until some years after Pollock's death. Other lawsuits followed: a South Carolina couple - Domenico De Sole, a former Gucci executive and chairman of Tom Ford International, and his wife, Eleanore - claimed that the gallery sold them a forged Mark Rothko, "Untitled 1956", for $8.3 million in 2004; and Wall Street executive John D. Howard claimed for a fake Willem de Kooning painting that be bought for $4 million in 2007.
In 2003, Goldman Sachs executive Jack Levy had bought an untitled Jackson Pollock painting for $2 million, but when the International Foundation for Art Research did not authenticate the work, Levy asked for and received his money back.
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