Court: Bankrupt art galleries can't try to pay debts by selling off artwork they had on consignment

UPDATE: Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly reports lead plaintiff Eve Plumb is the actress who played Jan Brady on the Brady Bunch.

The Supreme Judicial Court said today that current state law protects artists whose art gets tangled up in the bankruptcy of the studios that were trying to sell the works.

In a memo to a US Bankruptcy Court judge handling the Chapter 7 bankruptcy of a Cape gallery, the state's highest court said that in 2006, the state legislature passed an amendment to the state consignment law explicitly to protect artist from losing their work in cases like this, following the bankruptcy of two large galleries in Boston.

The judge asked for the court's opinion because a trustee assigned to the federal bankruptcy case had argued that because the artists had not delivered detailed written descriptions of their work to the gallery along with the art, as the law says they "shall," they had no protection from having their artwork sold off to satisfy the gallery's debts.

The court begged to differ, saying the act of handing the art over was enough to initiate a consignment agreement, because the law elsewhere defines consignment as an artist handing over art to a gallery and the gallery trying to sell it "[n]otwithstanding ... any other
language herein." Therefore, the court concluded, the description part is not an absolute requirement of consignment, and so the artists should get their art back.