An Upper East Side art collector is suing Princeton University for leaving him high and dry in a $1 million art deal after the school got cold feet and became concerned the pieces were bogus.
Attorney Vincent Fay, 78, agreed to sell 17 works from his collection to the Princeton University Art Museum for $945,000 in November 2018.
The university made an initial payment of $472,500 in December that year, but when it came time to pony up the rest in June 2019, the school wrote Fay a letter expressing “serious concerns regarding the authenticity, provenance and market value of the objects,” and refused to pay the remained $472,500, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court.
Princeton demanded Fay return the initial payment in October and said it was revoking the deal — even though the institution was not in “possession of any evidence that indisputably establishes that any of the Works are not authentic,” Fay’s suit says.
Fay and his wife Margaret Fay have acquired numerous pieces of art over the past 60-plus years, including pieces displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre Museum, the Museo del Barrio, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and other museums in Europe.
Reached by The Post, Fay’s lawyer, John Cahill, declined to name the pieces in question “out of respect for the art.”
“I don’t like to taint it,” he said. “The art will outlive all of us, and it is good to keep it untainted. Princeton hasn’t said why the art isn’t authentic.”
Reached by The post, Fay would only say, “You can bet it’s not 17 Picassos I sold to Princeton.”
He declined to comment further. Princeton University did not respond.
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