French police and the FBI raided the headquarters of the Michele Vasarely Foundation in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as part of a judicial investigation, an FBI spokesman said. The Michele Vasarely Foundation is dedicated to the work of Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely, considered the father of “op art,” and his son Jean-Pierre. FBI agents removed dozens of paintings from the headquarters located in Old San Juan, and the operation is still ongoing. The search warrant was issued by an examining magistrate of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, and the FBI is intervening as part of an international collaboration agreement.
The exact reasons for the raid are unknown, but the artist’s work has been the subject of a legal dispute between Victor Vasarely’s grandson, Pierre Vasarely, and the creator of the foundation, Michele Taburno-Vasarely. Pierre Vasarely is demanding from Michele Taburno-Vasarely the return of hundreds of works by Victor and Jean-Pierre Vasarely that, according to him, do not belong to him. Pierre Vasarely has been designated as the sole holder of the moral right to his grandfather’s work and has chaired the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France since 2009.
In 1995, an arbitration distributed among Victor Vasarely’s heirs some 400 paintings that had hitherto belonged to the Vasarely Foundation. However, that court decision was overturned years later, and a Paris court ordered in 2013 the return to France of more than 200 works by Victor and Jean-Pierre Vasarely held by Michele Taburno-Vasarely. Although it is unknown whether the raid on the headquarters of the Michele Vasarely Foundation is related to this court dispute, the fact that the warrant was issued by an investigating judge of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office suggests that there may be a connection.