May sue French auction house claiming rights over the items sold.
Ever since Paris-based auction house Artcurial sold items related to Le Corbusier, the French architect famous for planning Chandigarh in the fifties, the Union Territory administration has been fighting to retrieve his artefacts.
Artcurial sold over 100 artefacts of Corbusier for around 1.2 million euros. Chandigarh authorities, in a notice served to the director of Artcurial, had claimed that the artefacts were their property and warned against the February 16 auction in Paris.
Copies of the notice were also sent to Indian embassy in Paris, French embassy in New Delhi and director of Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris.
“As soon as we came to know about the auction of Le Corbusier’s
works in France, we informed the auction house about our stand. We had asked them to verify the origin of the items going under the hammer,” an official said.
Having failed to stall the auction, they have been exploring the possibility of legal action against the auction house. “We have already formed a committee, headed by the chief architect of the city, to look into the matter. We will certainly take legal action if we discover that the auctioned material was Chandigarh’s property. If we find any replication of the original masterpieces, we will ask their authorities to initiate a probe,” a Chandigarh government official said.
The authorities have expressed surprise in the notice saying it was not known how these items have reached Artcurial. “We had never handed over these items to anybody. There can be a situation that this material was either stolen or replicas,” the notice stated.
The items auctioned in Paris were reportedly never displayed in Chandigarh. They were probably in the Union Territory’s stores from where they could have been stolen, the official said.
“We cannot deny the possibility of smuggling them to France. In the past too, many Corbusier artifacts were auctioned in France right under the nose of the authorities,” an officer said.
Chandigarh has a museum built in memory of Corbusier and showcases original works of the architect and his team.
A similar controversy had arisen in 2009 when French art dealer Eric Touchaleaum reportedly took away artefacts from Chandigarh for an auction. Touchaleaum scouted the city quietly for over five years, built contacts with junk dealers and junior staff in the administration and made a huge pile of discarded chairs and tables, besides other things that had a touch of the French architect.
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