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Could a Mysterious Keith Haring Sculpture Reheat New York’s Nastiest Divorce?

Art dealer David Mugrabi and wife Libbie’s 2018 divorce—with its allegations of extramarital skinny dipping and battles over shared art—was the stuff of tabloid dreams. Though they eventually settled, a new complaint from an allegedly aggrieved art buyer is revisiting all that scorched earth.

On July 10, 2018, Libbie Mugrabi was having lunch at Le Bilboquet, the pricey Upper East Side bistro where everybody gets the Cajun chicken, with her sister, Mia Rowe, and a friend named Lauren Amar. Mugrabi had just returned from a spell at her family’s Hamptons home. The trip was not exactly all suntanning and hitting the links at the Maidstone Club. On the morning after a Fourth of July weekend dinner party at the 7,000-square-foot Water Mill residence, she has said, she walked into the family room to find her then husband, David Mugrabi—who with his family owns more Andy Warhol paintings than anyone alive—naked with another woman, both partially draped with a towel, his head resting on her breasts. The pair had been skinny dipping, the woman later told the New York Post, which covered the ensuing divorce with something like gleeful duty.

After Libbie discovered the nude duo, the other woman proceeded to stay in the Hamptons manse for another four days. The woman, who was not named, told Libbie “nothing happened,” adding, “I have no interest in your husband.” Eventually, Libbie tried to cut a deal for her own freedom, telling David she would walk away from their marriage if he agreed to a $10 million settlement. He had other ideas. As soon as Libbie left the Hamptons to get back to the city, she has alleged, David hired movers to pack up the priciest works—by the likes of George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kaws—from the Water Mill mansion. A housekeeper called Libbie to tip her off to the caravan of art handlers taking down masterpieces one by one, and reached her while she was sitting down at Le Bilboquet. The divorce was real, she thought, and her husband was trying to hide hundreds of millions of goodies.

Distraught, she ran back to the East 85th penthouse the family was staying in while their regular abode on East 82nd was going through a $57 million renovation. According to later testimony from Amar, Libbie started grabbing whatever valuables she could—jewelry, a Basquiat plate—before her sister recommended that she take Keith Haring’s Untitled (Three Dancing Figures) (1989), a foot-tall, 25-pound enamel-on-aluminum sculpture.

Suddenly, David arrived back at the apartment, shocked at the scene. Amar testified that Libbie yelled out to her friends, “Don’t go! He’s going to kill me.”

Per the testimony, David then lunged at his still-wife, grabbed the Haring, and wrestled with it for a few moments before shoving Libbie down on the ground in their penthouse.

“You're taking my things!” David reportedly yelled.

Eventually, he pushed his wife out the door, Amar said, adding that David called the three women “lowlifes” and “gold diggers” once they were in the hallway.

The couple’s divorce was finally settled last year after being reopened, but the fate of the Haring remained a mystery. Now it appears to have recently reemerged and is shaking up the tenuous truce between the formerly warring Mugrabis. There is a lawsuit—filed last month in New York Supreme Court, but only reported now in True Colors—against David and his family’s holding company, High Fashion Concepts LLC. In the suit, a dealer tells a tale of how he snapped up what sure sounds like the Haring statue from Libbie and consigned it to Phillips for a high estimate of $300,000. The work was in the printed catalog, and several bidders had placed pre-offers that would be run through Phillips specialists on the phone banks. (High Fashion Concepts has not yet responded to the lawsuit; neither David nor Libbie Mugrabi responded to multiple requests for comment when True Colors reached out this week.)

But then, the suit alleges, the Mugrabis used their clout on Park Avenue—decades of selling, buying, and guaranteeing works for Phillips—to get the house to pull the work. All they had to tell them was that the work had been stolen.

“On the eve of the Phillips sale, counsel for [High Fashion Concepts], an entity that is co-owned by Defendant David Mugrabi, telephoned a sales director at Phillips claiming that the Work had been stolen from HFC,” the suit alleges.

“Phillips awaits to hear the resolution of this matter between the two parties involved,” said a spokesperson for the auction house when I reached out this week.

The complaint pits two old-school art-dealing families against each other. The patriarch of the Mugrabi family, Jose Mugrabi, emigrated from Jerusalem to Bogota, and then moved to New York when his sons—David, as well as Alberto “Tico” Mugrabi, who settled down with the former Colby Jordan after a star-studded 2016 wedding—were preteens, hoping to import his last-year’s-looks business of selling old fabric to the States. That failed, but Papa Mugrabi soon struck gold buying and reselling art, especially when his eye drew him toward undervalued works by Andy Warhol, ones that he could buy for a few thousand and then resell for millions.

The plaintiff is Aiden Fine Arts Inc., the company of Ely Sakhai, who emigrated to the U.S. from Iran as a child, becoming a jewelry-rocking, pot-bellied, Long Island–dwelling, big-pocketed supporter of Chabad, as well as a fairly successful art dealer running a company he called the Art Collection, later called Exclusive Art, that operated out of a Broadway storefront near Union Square. And then, in 2004, the feds showed up. Turns out Sakhai was also running a scheme, which he later pleaded guilty to, of having forgers copy middle-market works by Impressionist masters. He was eventually nabbed when he consigned a real Gauguin, Vase de Fleurs (Lilas), to Sotheby’s in the exact same sales season that a Japanese client who had bought his fake of the same painting consigned it to Christie’s. Hate it when that happens. Sakhai avoided jail time and had to fork over $12.5 million to former clients he conned. (His son, Andre Sakhai, is an art collector who got ensnared in that whole Inigo Philbrick debacle some years back.)

In the new suit, Sakhai’s company makes it known that it purchased “an artwork by a famed American artist (not described here, but known to the parties)” from Libbie for “a six-figure sum” later said to be $165,000. The suit also states that the work was never listed on the Art Loss Register, and was located in Libbie’s Manhattan apartment when the deal went down.

According to the text of the suit, under the sale agreement, the former Mrs. David Mugrabi “is the sole and absolute owner of the Work,” and she “has the authority to sell and transfer good and marketable title to the Work.” Referring to Sakhai’s company and David, the suit also notes that “at no point until the events giving rise to this lawsuit did Plaintiff know or have reason to know of Defendants’ claims concerning the Work.”

But he would have known about such “events” if he had read the Post or Daily Mail. A photo of the work he bought from Libbie was published in multiple reports after the scorned ex-wife brought it into a Manhattan courtroom as evidence while testifying in regard to the events of the July day when a Bilboquet lunch got cut memorably short.

Furthermore, the suit states that the work was consigned about one year after its September 2020 purchase, meaning it would be slotted into the bellwether November New York sales. The suit also says that the lot was given a high estimate of more than double what Sakhai’s company had paid, or around $330,000. Withdrawn lots no longer appear on the Phillips website after they are pulled by the house or consignor, but they still exist in the original PDFs of the catalog. A cross-reference search of all the works pulled from the Phillips sales in November 2021 turned up just one work with a high estimate close to double what he paid—Haring’s Untitled (Three Dancing Figures), the exact work that the dueling Mugrabis gripped in a half-million game of tug-of-war, estimated to sell for between $200,00 and $300,000.

According to the suit, filed in New York Supreme Court on February 25, the work is currently being held in Phillips storage, with its fate very much up in the air.

The Rundown Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…This week Christie’s announced that it would be selling Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), one of the five portraits of Marilyn Monroe that all happen to have been pierced by a bullet. Soon after the works were made, the performance artist Dorothy Podber walked into the Factory, pulled out a pistol, and shot four of them lined up in a row. It didn’t hurt their value, though. They were repaired, and are now considered the most iconic and desirable works Warhol ever made. And when the Shot Marilyn from the collection of late Swiss dealer Doris Ammann hits the block in May, it will carry the highest presale estimate ever slapped on an artwork: $200 million. That guess could be conservative. At its unveiling this week, Christie’s rainmaker Alex Rotter said that the Warhol is “poised to become the most expensive painting of all time,” unseating Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which was purchased by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism for $450 million in 2017. My sources say the same, indicating that the some $200 million that Ken Griffin paid S.I. Newhouse’s family for Shot Orange Marilyn in a 2018 private transaction was apparently a steal. (Disclosure: Said family owns this magazine’s parent company.) And if some prognosticators are to be believed, things could go stratospheric. As the thinking goes, there’s a handful of mega-billionaire collectors who think this is their last chance to get a Shot Marilyn, and will pay anything for it. If two or three go head-to-head in the bidding, anything could happen. One source even floated a scenario that once upon a time seemed utterly impossible: It might be time for the world’s first billion-dollar artwork.

…Matt Dillon was spotted at the Thomas Bayrle opening at Gladstone Gallery on Thursday, catching up with the artist and Gladstone partner Gavin Brown. Little-known fact: Dillon was once roommates with the legendary Los Angeles dealer Patrick Painter.

…One of the more jaw-dropping art books to hit the marketplace soon is Amor Mundi, a comprehensive look at the collection of Dallas philanthropist Marguerite Steed Hoffman, to be published next month by Ridinghouse. In addition to featuring texts by more than 30 curators and artists and extensive interviews with the collector, the book serves as a catalog of a collection that’s long been one of the more storied art holdings in Texas. Among the masterpieces revealed in the pages are Robert Gober’s Two Doors (1989); Peter Doig’s Briey (Concrete Cabin) (1994–1996); and Philip Guston’s Studio Landscape (1975), as well as newer work by the likes of Rashid Johnson, Jordan Wolfson, and Florian Krewer.

…Curator Alison Gingeras has delivered a dispatch for True Colors from Warsaw, Poland, where the arts community is coming together to shelter and feed refugees from Ukraine. The Nowy Teatr is usually a hipster-besotted avant garde showcase for independent dance, film, and stage productions. In the last month it’s been transformed into a makeshift welcome center where grassroots organizers can help arrivals with paperwork and ID issues. And while the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is currently scheduled to host a group show of artists on women’s rights—including work by Barbara Kruger, Andrea Bowers, and many Polish artists—it instead has opened its doors to refugees. “They are located next to the central train station where tens of thousands are pouring into the city daily, and have converted a large part of the space into a daycare for refugee children while their parents are out looking for work or lodging,” Gingeras said. “Artists are taking in refugees into their apartments to live. Museum people coordinating transportation from the border, driving medical supplies to the border.” She added that most of the efforts are being led by ordinary citizens, rather than government organizations.

Scene Report: Fin de Siècle Dimes Square On a March evening nearly 300 years after James De Lancey planted a grove of apple trees on an island-based English settlement in the New World, the artist and former skateboarder Tony Cox locked up the secret gallery he houses in his apartment on a street named for the old orchard. He walked a block down a street in turn named for a canal that once drained a fetid pond, and looked up at the first luxury hotel in the history of the neighborhood. It’s called Nine Orchard, and it opens this summer in the former Jarmulowsky Bank Building, the historic tower across from Dimes with the fancy cupola on top. For the locals, it’s a clear, ahem, vibe shift, and perhaps not in a fun way. A century after Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank failed, emptying the pockets of the Lower East Side, the building is set to host hordes of brunchgoers at its half dozen bars and boites. “They literally just turned the lights on, and it’s already over,” Cox said, half sad and half bemused, the hotel’s sparkling sconces looming like a threat.

But the fin du monde attitude has only hardened the scene on the five-block nucleus of downtown known as Dimes Square. The micro-nabe has been immortalized onstage thanks to playwright Matthew Gasda—the production Dimes Square has been a surprise hit, extending its sellout run. Naturally, a splashy feature on the production is running in the Times Styles, on newsstands this weekend. In the last week alone, the beloved Clandestino has been graced by media celebs known locally (Dasha Nekrasova, Alison Roman, Dev Hynes) and globally (Dave Chappelle). The gallery scene is reloading too—in addition to Cox’s fantastic space Club Rhubarb, the stretch of Henry Street a quick hop down from Wu’s Wonton King hosts Situations, Fierman, and Public Access, the gallery run by former Kids star Leo Fitzpatrick. On Thursday night, longtime Henry Street godmother Ellie Rines moves her gallery, 56 Henry, a few blocks closer to the center of the action, in a space about twice as large as the closet-size spaces she’s had in the past.

And while David Zwirner doesn’t have a Lower East Side outpost, the gallery’s online sales portal, Platform, had a dinner Wednesday at Bacaro, the area’s reigning artist hang, to honor a new print by Ebecho Muslimova, sold only on the site, with part of the profits going to the Ukrainian National Women's League of America. When trying to figure out where to dine, Muslimova drew a hard line when picking the spot.

“I live next door, so it couldn’t be easier,” she said. Enjoy it while it lasts.