Quote:
Posted by
Bassplayer1
Hi Bill, I remember you a couple of weeks ago talking about 'doxxing' or being 'doxxed' and I'll admit I had to google what that term means as I didn't know! Anyway, this thread has grown into a large resource of wonderful info that I wouldn't know where to begin to find the post/comments about this. However, I DO remember it having something to do with Corey Goode. It's not my intention to bad mouth anyone or start gossiping, but I think you said he'd made a vicious attack about you - was this to do with a Picasso painting I think you've spoken of before? (Sorry my memory is a bit sketchy). I hope I'm not prying but would you care to share that experience with us - or more to the point, would you like the opportunity to get your side of the story off your chest? Once again Bill, thank you for your generosity and insight. xxx
Yes! The Picasso story. OMG. :) I've posted about this before somewhere, but here it all is again. It's actually really interesting.
Many years ago, when I was a child, and we were living in Ghana, my father did a great personal favor for a wealthy art collector who was visiting the country, whose name was
Emile Wolf. He was one of the patrons of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(If you Google ["Metropolitan Museum of Art" + "Emile Wolf"], you'll see him come up in a number of references.)
In return, he gave my father a Picasso charcoal drawing, which he said "would pay for my education someday". Here it is:
http://projectavalon.net/Online_Pica...commentary.jpg
And here's an enlargement of the signature:
"P. Ruiz Picasso". This is how he signed all his early work. (Dr Enrique Mallen — a Picasso expert, see below — dated it to around 1903.)
http://projectavalon.net/P_Ruiz_Picasso_signature.jpg
Eventually, long after my father had died (and I'd completed my education!), I asked permission from my elderly mother to sell it. It was uncataloged (i.e. it was a previously unknown work, which sometimes happens in the art world), so I needed a certificate of authenticity from a respected art authority. I sought out Dr Enrique Mallen, of the
On-line Picasso Project, and paid him $2,000 to examine the drawing. He pronounced it authentic, gave me a fornal certificate of authenticity, and placed it in his catalog.
Armed with that, I sought out an interested art dealer, and the drawing was sold — for something like (from memory) $120,000.
But then the buyer tried to sell it on. The buyer's potential client consulted Maya Widmaier-Picasso (Pablo Picasso's daughter), who said it was a fake. Then all hell broke loose.
The then-owner of the drawing wanted his money back (from the art dealer), and then the art dealer wanted her money back from me. By that time, I no longer had any of the money, as I'd used it to pay off debts. And besides, we'd conducted the sale-and-purchase in agreed good faith, supported by a certificate of authenticity that was actually just as (if not even more) valid than Picasso's daughter's personal opinion.
But the problem here is that in the art world, if a work gets 'burned' (by any authority at all stating it's not genuine) — then from a collector's point of view, it becomes worth far less on the market. It's all about money... it's not about art, at all.
Then they took me to court. The art dealer's lawyer recommended that I should be sued for 'art fraud'. That happened in California, and I was then living in Switzerland. I was served papers in the mail that I (naively) signed for.
I'm really a child in these matters, and so I just called up their lawyer on the phone and told him the truth. Just like he was a friend over a cup of coffee. OMG. He was a nice guy, but of course he was contracted by his client to sue me. He was no 'friend' at all.
The case ground on, and I never understood any of it. I consulted a lawyer in the US, but was told I'd need to pay $25,000 as a down payment. That wasn't going to happen... I never had any of that kind of money. In the end, I asked a friend of a friend who was a paralegal to take a look at what the heck was going on. I paid him a mere $3,000, which I could afford.
He did something, but it wasn't enough. Next thing I knew, without ever having attended the court, I was convicted of fraud
in absentia (and was ordered to repay the proceeds, plus substantial damages). Of course, I never have. That public record still stands, and it's quite easy, by omitting most of the facts, for someone harboring ill-will to make all this look pretty bad if they choose to.
The art dealer was compensated by insurance, of course. So no-one actually lost out.
From time to time this surfaces, and enemies of Avalon gleefully get hold of it and try to shoot me with it. I have a few unpleasant personal experiences of sneering enemies using this to taunt me. I did nothing illegal or unethical, and none of this is anything dreadful in any way. But it's all a little embarrassing, for sure, as I was simply so dumb about how I handled it all.
:)
