It’s the art of the feud.
The Neumann family, whose roughly $1 billion art collection once featured dozens of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, including the $30 million “Flesh and Spirit,” is now squabbling over a damaged, decades-old sculpture by George Herms.
There are at least half a dozen court cases involving Hubert Neumann, 89, and his three daughters, as the clan has spent years sparring over control of the family fortune — which Hubert once allegedly splashed on a “paramour” while refusing to pay for his own grandkids’ education, a daughter contends in court papers.
Patriarch Morton Neumann, a Chicago mail-order cosmetics mogul, launched the family art collection, a trove of hundreds of works from an array of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and more. The art was split between sons Arthur and Hubert after Morton’s 1985 death.
It was Arthur Neumann who befriended Herms, and brought “The Poet” into the fold. Meanwhile, Hubert’s estranged wife, Dolores — who died of liver cancer in September 2016 — had become pals with Basquiat, amassing dozens of the famed artists’ works, at one point worth an estimated $50 million. Basquiat’s “Untitled (Tyranny),” a 1982 64-by-96-inch acrylic and oilstick on canvas, is considered the crown jewel of the bunch.
Hubert now oversees a handful of family trusts which control the Neumann assets. Arthur Neumann, who died in 2003, had no children and left his share of the family art to Hubert’s daughters, Belinda, Kristina and Melissa.
Hubert Neumann unsuccessfully sued Belinda in 2018 to stop her from selling “Flesh and Spirit.” The litigation depressed the price of the piece, Belinda, 54, argued in a subsequent lawsuit.
In the latest legal salvo, Belinda Neumann-Donnelly says her dad’s “ugly venality and thievery” made him pocket her share of a $150,000 insurance payout for the damaged Herms piece, which was allegedly harmed when Hubert agreed in 2011 to loan it out to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, according to the Manhattan Supreme Court litigation.
“The Poet” was jointly owned by the sisters, but when one refused to green light the loan, her father lied to the museum, claiming he was the rightful owner, Belinda claims in legal papers.
Belinda, who is also fighting in Manhattan Surrogate Court to oust Hubert from control of the family trusts, claims her dad “continues to use his father’s money and fraud as tools to control his children and, even more importantly for him, any and all works of art owned by any member of the Neumann family,” according to court papers.
He allegedly deprives his own kids and grandkids of money left to them in family trusts, making it “as difficult as possible for his children to disobey him” when it comes to the art — all while giving his “paramour,” a $1.13 million mortgage to buy a Manhattan apartment, Donnelly-Neumann charges.
The latest accusations are “a drop in the ocean of Hubert Neumann’s fraud and thievery,” said Neumann-Donnelly’s lawyer, Judd Burstein.
“These allegations are untrue and will be easily disproven,” said Hubert Neumann’s lawyer, John Morken. “My client is saddened by the baseless accusations contained in his daughter’s continuing barrage of lawsuits against him.”