Art, Taxes, and the Law

“Until the tax laws are changed, valuation of works of art will continue to present difficulty, in both a legal and aesthetic sense.”On May 23, 1965, sculptor David Smith died in an automobile accident in Vermont. Smith's will revealed that his two teen-age daughters were sole heirs to his estate, which included a small amount of cash and 425 welded metal abstract sculptures. For federal estate tax purposes it was imperative that the executors (Robert Motherwell, the artist, Clement Greenberg, the art critic, and an attorney), value the estate as of the date of death.For an independent opinion, the executors requested Mr. Stephen Weil, Administrator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, to evaluate the 425 sculptures. Weil's considerations in arriving at a figure included the relative value of each work to every other work included in the inventory as a whole, and the past sales history of Smith's sculptures (the number of sculptures in the estate was greater than five times the number of pie...