After a court battle that lasted almost two years, a former studio assistant to Jasper Johns was sentenced on 23 April at the Federal District Court in Manhattan for selling works of art that he had stolen from the artist. James Meyer will serve 18 months in prison and has been ordered to pay $13.4m in restitution for 37 out of the 83 works he took from Johns’s Connecticut studio between 2006 and 2012. Prosecutors charged that Meyer stole many of the pieces from a studio file drawer and created fictional inventory numbers for the works before offloading them to an unnamed Manhattan gallery. Forty-one works have now been returned; the remainder are still being located, according to federal investigators.
