Artist In A Bizarre $5 Million Lawsuit For Canvasing As Teenager

A celebrated artist whose works sell for as much as $25million must go to court to prove that he didn't create a painting, in a bizarre lawsuit.

Peter Doig, 57, whose surreal landscapes have made him a hot property in the art world, is being sued by former Canadian corrections officer Robert Fletcher, 62, who says he bought a painting from him as a teen.

Doig denies Fletcher's claim that he sold the painting for $100 in 1976 while imprisoned for possession of LSD - and now the painter has to prove it, The New York Times reported.

Fletcher claims that he befriended Doig while working at a prison farm in Thunder Bay Correctional Center, Ontario in 1975, and later became the young man's parole officer.

He says that the following year Doig - then calling himself Doige - sold him a painting of a desert landscape for $100, and that he bought the working hoping that it might keep the kid out of crime.

That painting then hung on his wall until about five years ago, when a friend said that the artist was now famous.

Fletcher claims that he watched an interview with Doig on YouTube and was struck by how the artist's speech and mannerisms reminded of the boy he'd met 35 years before.

The painting also has several hallmarks of the art that would make Doig famous, including a log poking out from a lake and white lichen on tree bark, says Fletcher.

And it is indeed signed 'Pete Doige 76.'

He sent it to a gallery in Chicago that was similarly convinced.

But when an image of the canvas was sent to Doig, the painter denied it was his: 'I said, "Nice painting,"' he told the NYT. '"Not by me."'

That, says Fletcher, torpedoed a sale of the work that would have netted him millions of dollars - and now he's out to get that money, plus confirmation that the artwork is Doig's.

'Every artist has destroyed work,' William F. Zieske, Fletcher's lawyer and art dealer, said. 'We can’t really get into (Doig's) mind and say why he looked at this painting and said, "I am not going to own that." I don’t think anyone can.'

Eerie: Doig's 1990 landscape 'Swamped,' (pictured) sold for up to $25.9million

Fletcher's lawyers say the lack of paperwork on Doig at Thunder Bay was due to him being a minor and that his records were probably lost or expunged.

Doig, who is Scottish, did spend some of his teenage years in Canada and has admitted to taking LSD during that time.

However, he denies picking up a brush before 1979 and says he was never even near Thunder Bay. 'If I had painted that painting when I was 16, I would admit it,' he said in court papers.

More compellingly, his lawyers have found another man, Peter Edward Doige, who had served time in Thunder Bay and painted. He died in 2012.

'I believe that Mr. Fletcher is mistaken and that he actually met my brother, Peter, who I believe did this painting,' said Marilyn Doige Bovard, the man's sister, in a court declaration.

She says that the painting shows the Arizona desert that their mom moved to after a divorce, and where Doige had spent some time. She claims to remember a specific cactus seen in the painting.

Doige also went to Lakehead University, which Fletcher had named in his own story, and which Doig says he never attended.

The artist had asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out based on this and other evidence - but in April judge Gary Feinerman of United States District Court said it would have to go to trial.

'The presence of the Lakehead and the Seafarers records for Doige, but not for Doig, certainly favors Doig,' Feinerman said in his decision.

'There is no doubt about that. But it’s not strong enough evidence, given all of the evidence in the record... (to prove that Doig) was not the person at Thunder Bay who was the author of the painting.'

That puts Doig in the bizarre position of proving he didn't make an artwork - something that has shocked the art world.

'To have to disprove that you created a work seems somehow wrong and not fair,' said Amy M. Adler, a professor at New York University Law School.

If Fletcher wins, he will probably still struggle to sell the art on, given Doig's well-publicized denial. But it will create a precedent that would mean potentially huge fall-out for other artists.

Nicholas M. O’Donnell, a Boston art lawyer, told The New York Times: 'It would put all artists in the cross hairs.'