By: Ellen Cans
A family feud has ensued over a rare but damaged decades-old sculpture by George Herms.
The Neumann family is now embattled in a legal dispute over another piece out of their roughly $1 billion art collection. As reported by the NY Post, Hubert Neumann, 89, and his three daughters have been embattled in roughly six cases over the years, arguing among themselves over the family fortune. The family’s original Patriarch, Morton Neumann, who made his fortune as a Chicago mail-order cosmetics mogul, began the family art collection, leaving it for his two sons, Arthur and Hubert, after his own death in 1985.
The collection included hundreds of art works from renowned masters including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Arthur passed away in 2003, with no children of his own, bequeathing his share of the family art to Hubert’s daughters, Belinda, Kristina and Melissa. Hubert currently manages a handful of family trusts controlling the Neumann assets.
In this latest case, Belinda Neumann-Donnelly, 52, says her father’s “ugly venality and thievery” made him take her share of a $150,000 insurance payout for a damaged George Herms piece. “The Poet” was allegedly damaged when Hubert had loaned it out to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011 without her consent. As per the Manhattan Supreme Court litigation, Belinda is also asking the court to oust Hubert from control of the family trusts, as per court papers. Hubert Neumann’s lawyer, John Morken commented to say, “My client is saddened by the baseless accusations contained in his daughter’s continuing barrage of lawsuits against him.”
In another legal battle in January 2019, Belinda, sued her father and two sisters Melissa, 49, and Kristina, 54, in an effort to force the sale of 60 jointly owned Basquiat works worth roughly $50 million asking to split the proceeds, as per the Post. The crown jewel of the collection was a 1982 64-by-96-inch acrylic and oil on canvas Basquiat work, named “Untitled (Tyranny).” In a previous spat, the father sued Belinda unsuccessfully, trying to stop her from selling “Flesh and Spirit”, a 12-foot-by-12-foot Basquiat painting. He claimed in court documents that that she had gained rights to that piece by deviously getting his late-wife to sign over the rights while she was “receiving serious medical treatment” in 2015. The piece ultimately sold at Sotheby’s auction for $30 million. Belinda, an art gallery owner, had again sued her father in a $100 million lawsuit, alleging that his meddling had “scared off potential bidders” and led the piece to sell at a lower price than it should have.
