NEW YORK, NY.- Fingerprints on a Donald Judd sculpture that caused “permanent” and “irreversible” damage, according to a lawsuit, have already resulted in an insurance payout of $680,000.

The untitled 1991 work, part of the artist’s Menziken series of boxes, features a transparent green acrylic sheet inside an aluminum and plexiglass container. It was consigned to two galleries, which are being sued by the Judd Foundation for an additional $270,000 in damages plus lawyers’ fees.

“Donald Judd was famous for his exacting fabrication standards and for the ongoing physical integrity of his works of art,” the complaint noted. It added that “any fingerprints on the anodized aluminum surface must be removed quickly or over time the oils in the fingerprints can react with the surface and leave permanent, disfiguring, irreversible marks.”

Judd, who died in 1994, often described his sculptures in philosophical terms, writing that Menziken boxes were “an attempt to make a definitive second surface.”

“The inside is radically different from the outside,” he wrote. “Whilst the outside is definite and rigorous, the inside is indefinite.”

The Judd Foundation, a steward of the artist’s legacy, declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was filed last week in Manhattan Supreme Court. Neither gallery named in the complaint, Tina Kim Gallery in New York and Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, responded to requests for comment.

The galleries are jointly run by a pair of siblings, Tina and Charles Kim, who received a consignment from the Judd Foundation in March 2015 to sell the sculpture at that year’s Frieze New York art fair. A sale never materialized and the consignment was extended on two occasions as the price for the work increased to $850,000, from $750,000, based on the strength of the artist’s market.




When the galleries returned the sculpture in 2018, a Judd Foundation conservator noticed the disfigurements. “The parties agreed that the damage was almost certainly irreversible, and the work was therefore no longer salable,” the lawsuit claimed.

Caring for Judd pieces can be a meticulous process. According to the lawsuit, the consignment agreement required written consent from the Judd Foundation before any cleaning or conservation of the Menziken sculpture.

The Museum of Modern Art, which displayed dozens of Judd sculptures in a 2020 show, did not reply to a request for comment about how it protected the artwork from visitors. In 2020, another consignor filed a $1.7 million lawsuit against a New York gallery, accusing it of chipping the paint off an expensive Judd sculpture.

How the fingerprints got on the Menziken sculpture remains a mystery.

The first documentation of the marks appeared in a condition report from July 2017, according to the lawsuit, when the artwork was being stored inside a New York warehouse. The Judd Foundation said the galleries had noted fingerprints in three condition reports but did not inform the foundation.

Lawsuits against galleries for damaged artworks are rare, according to legal experts, because consignors typically sue the insurance companies instead. Luke Nikas, a lawyer unaffiliated with the case, said the Judd Foundation’s lawsuit, which argues that the galleries are liable for the balance of the work’s retail value, exemplified the importance of clear contract terms.

“If you are a foundation where the artist isn’t making more works, every dollar matters,” Nikas said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.