After seven days of testimony and a week’s breather from a trial as surreal as the artwork at its center, international art star Peter Doig has won a resounding victory.
According to expert testimony during the trial, if Doig said he had painted the work then it could be sold for somewhere in the range of $6 million to $8 million. Last year a larger Doig work went for $25.9 million.
The painting Fletcher bought is an eerily realistic, delicately detailed southwestern scene: an expanse of dry brown earth with sky, mountains, red rocks, and green saguaro. It looks more like a Dali´ than a Doig, whose work is typically looser, starker, flatter, more abstract, and darkly expressive.
In both instances, Nagy was able to produce much more convincing sources: actual photos of a human and a lion Doig had projected onto his canvas. To top it off, Nagy demonstrated that he could get a match between the disputed painting and the Mona Lisa or a Magritte.
The defense also produced the sister and the onetime live-in girlfriend of a man named Peter Doige, who died in 2012. They said he painted, attended college in Thunder Bay in the 1970s, had an alcohol problem, and told each of them he’d done time in prison. They both said the painting looked like his work, and the sister, Marilyn Bovard, wept. Another defense witness, Ernie Adams, testified that he was the Correctional Centre art teacher in 1976, and that he recognized the desert painting. It was made by one of his inmate students, a young man named Pete Doige, and not the Peter Doig who was present in the courtroom.
