Earlier this month, the real estate company 320 E 82nd Owner, LLC filed a petition seeking to compel socialite art collector Libbie Mugrabi and the auction house Phillips to turn over an untitled 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting in the latter’s possession in order to satisfy a $2.3 million judgment.
New York County Supreme Court judge Linda M. Capitti pushed the petition forward last week, approving an order on October 14 preventing the sale or transfer of the Basquiat and compelling Mugrabi and Phillips to appear in court on November 17 to show cause for why the Basquiat—as well as Mugrabi’s 100 percent membership interest in Moo Moo Enterprises, Inc., which holds the work—should not be turned over to satisfy the debt. Mugrabi has yet to respond to the petition or the judge’s order.
The $2.3 million judgment stems from rent Mugrabi failed to pay to 320 E 82nd Owner, LLC while living at the Park Mansion, a Beaux-Arts building in Yorkville, between 2019 and 2020. Mugrabi was ordered by a Manhattan court in 2023 to pay $1.8 million in back rent and attorney’s fees. After an inquest in June, a judge agreed to add 9 percent statutory interest, bringing the total to $2.3 million.
The Basquiat painting has been in Phillips’s possession since at least October 2024, when it was consigned to the house for a sale in London. However, the auction house pulled the painting from the sale after a lien dispute surfaced.
According to Mugrabi’s own complaint in a related case, financiers Ian Peck and Terence Doran, the directors of the art-lending firm Art Capital Group, LLC and of a related entity, Empire Chesapeake Holdings, LLC, claimed an interest in the work tied to a $3 million loan arrangement. Mugrabi has disputed that the lien was ever valid, claiming that the Basquiat was pledged as collateral in an October 2023 term sheet, but was substituted with the 1964 Andy Warhol work Jackie the following month. Mugrabi also said the $3 million loan was never completed.
In July, a judge granted Mugrabi partial summary judgment in that dispute, finding that Peck and Doran had no right to maintain their lien on the Basquiat because the loan was never funded and any owed fees were covered by their sale of the Warhol. Peck and Doran have appealed that ruling.
Mugrabi has claimed that the painting is worth more than $30 million. In the petition filed by Goetz Platzer LLP, on behalf of 320 East 82nd Owner, LLC, the value of the painting is pegged at $4 million–$6 million.
The petition is the latest in a long line of legal headaches for Mugrabi since her acrimonious divorce from billionaire art collector David Mugrabi in 2018. In addition to the Art Capital Group and 320 E 82nd Owner disputes, both ongoing, Mugrabi was ordered in September to sell her mansion in Bridgehampton, New York, after failing to make payments toward a $3.5 million mortgage. The property sold at the court-ordered auction for $5.86 million, far short of the $25 million she said it was worth, and Mugrabi has said she is moving to Florida.
In seeking the freeze of the Basquiat on an emergency basis, the landlord’s attorneys pointed to a September 25 New York Post article in which, they said, Mugrabi made clear she was leaving New York “presumably with all of her possessions.” This, the attorneys claimed, raised the risk that the Basquiat could be removed from the court’s reach.
Phillips did not respond to a request for comment. Mugrabi could not be reached for comment, as it was not clear who currently represents the socialite after she reportedly fired her attorney, Claude Castro of Castro Law Group, last month.