Robert De Niro Art Dealer - Leigh Morse - Found Guilty of Fraud

Written by Oliver Reynolds Tuesday, 19 July 2011 22:43

New York, NY - Leigh Morse, the former director of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries and once an art dealer for actor Robert De Niro, was convicted in a scheme that prosecutors said defrauded the estates of artists including painter Stuart Davis. Morse, 55, was found guilty today by a New York jury of one count of scheming to defraud. She was found not guilty of a grand larceny count alleging the theft of $65,000 from De Niro, who testified at the trial in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan. The jury of eight men and four women reached a decision in its fifth day of deliberations. Morse, in a brief statement, said she was "deeply sorry" for the pain her clients had endured but maintained that she was unaware of any fraud.

Prosecutors said Morse withheld information about sales to the owners of artworks so they wouldn’t demand payment and that she pocketed the $65,000 proceeds from the 2007 sale of two paintings by De Niro’s late father that the actor inherited, without the actor’s knowledge.

“Because the art industry is largely unregulated, it is particularly important to hold accountable those who fraudulently handle works of art entrusted to them,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement after the verdict.

Former art gallery director Leigh Morse escaped a lengthy prison term at her sentencing in a Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday but will owe $1.65 million in restitution for defrauding her clients. Morse will serve an intermittent sentence, spending weekends in confinement for four months, and be on probation for five years.


The punishment capped a trial that saw actor Robert DeNiro testify against her. Morse, 55, was found guilty in April of selling more than 80 works of art from four estates for approximately $5 million without informing the owners.

Assistant District Attorney Micki Hendricks, backed by representatives from the victimized estates who spoke at the hearing, sought one to three years in prison and $9 million in penalties.  "In a nutshell, she categorically refuses to accept any responsibility or accountability or express remorse," Hendricks said in court.

Robert De Niro, Sr. attended Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Being a self-proclaimed perfectionist, De Niro painted and repainted his canvases again and again. He would do hundreds of studies before he decided to paint the subject. In 1945, De Niro was included in the Fall exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery on 57th Street in New York. Reviews of the exhibition praised the work of De Niro as well as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. He had his first solo exhibition at Art of This Century the following year.


De Niro had a series of solo exhibitions in the 1950's at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York, which exhibited the work of Willem de Kooning and other early abstract expressionist artists. By the mid- 1950's, De Niro was regularly included in important group exhibitions such as the Whitney Annual, the Stable Annual, and the Jewish Museum.


From 1961-1964, De Niro traveled to France to paint in Paris and in the surrounding countryside. Collector Joseph Hirshhorn purchased a number of the artist's paintings and works on paper during this period through De Niro's gallerist, Virginia Zabriskie which are now in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. In 1968, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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