Photo by David Alexander Arnold

Salander-O’Reilly’s 71st Street gallery before a judge ordered it padlocked and put on a 24-hour guard.

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London Old Master dealer Clovis Whitfield, Lawrence Salander’s collaborator on the ambitious “Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture,” had pulled the plug on the show and ordered the removal of the works just hours before the opening. The remarkable sidewalk scene was captured on film by a Bloomberg News photographer, who was punched by Salander’s enraged son.

“There was too much uncertainty around, and we didn’t feel secure in proceeding,” explains Whitfield, referring to the numerous lawsuits filed against Salander by former clients, landlords and creditors, including Sotheby’s. The plaintiffs are charging the charismatic and blunt-spoken dealer with acts ranging from stealing consigned paintings to creating an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Whitfield isn’t involved in any of the legal actions against Salander-O’Reilly, but, he says, “I had to look after the welfare of my pictures, my consignors’ pictures, my lenders’ pictures, and so with great regret, I decided to pull out.”

Just 10 days before, Whitfield, amiably accompanied by Salander, had welcomed this reporter into the gallery’s ornate neo–Renaissance town house, at 22 East 71st Street, to preview the exhibition, which would have been the 580th in the business’s 31-year history. The display included a roomful of loaned Caravaggios, one of which Whitfield had bought on behalf of a private client for $110,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2001, when it was attributed to the “circle of Caravaggio.” It is now purported to be a version the artist made of his favorite picture, The Lute Player.

At the same time that the show was unraveling, tense negotiations over a court-approved agreement were under way between attorneys representing Salander and two of his major creditors: hedge fund executive Roy Lennox and Renaissance Art Investments (RAI), headed by Donald Schupak, chairman of Triumph Apparel Corporation (formerly Danskin). Lennox, a senior managing director at the $14 billion Caxton Associates, claims that Salander owes him more than $4 million from art investments he’d made through the dealer. As for RAI, which Schupak had formed with his son Andrew, it had partnered with Old Master Properties, LLC, to acquire the gallery’s inventory of Renaissance art, in a deal that required some $40 million in bank loans. Lennox would not comment, on advice from his attorney, and efforts to reach Schupak were unsuccessful.

New York State Supreme Court judge Richard Lowe III had authorized the removal of some 650 works from Salander’s celebrated holdings, as well as his world-class library of rare art volumes, as a way to settle the claims brought against the gallerist by Lennox and RAI. The library itself has been under a dark cloud since this fall, when New York–based book dealer Ursus, the source of many of Salander’s Old Master tomes, filed and then withdrew a lawsuit against the dealer claiming unpaid bills of $315,000. “I don’t want to throw away good money and valuable time over nothing,” Ursus founder Peter Krause says of dropping his suit, “because I’m convinced there’s nothing left to get except aggravation.”

Lennox was granted six pictures plus the library, with the remainder going to RAI, which immediately moved approximately 70 works to an art storage facility in Manhattan. During court proceedings on October 19, however, it became evident that more creditors would be entering the fray. In addition, RAI’s attorney, Barry Slotnick, alleged that Salander had spirited away an unknown number of the inventoried pictures, a charge that Art & Auction could not confirm. Judge Lowe ordered that the gallery’s locks be changed and that all comings and goings be monitored by his court to secure the safety of the financial records and the remaining art. He subsequently authorized the evacuation of several works uninvolved in the case, including Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid, which was on loan from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.