Heirs of Alexander Calder, the American modernist who invented the moving sculpture known as the mobile, lost a $20 million fraud lawsuit against the estate of his longtime dealer, Klaus Perls.
Many claims in the case amounted to “an incoherent stew of irrelevance and innuendo,” and the evidence failed to show Perls wrongfully sold Calder works without the heirs’ knowledge, Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich said in a decision made public Dec. 24 in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan.
