Transactions, financing and regulatory advice for collectors, galleries, art-market businesses, family offices and lenders across Switzerland, the UK, the EU and the United States.
Art law is contract, property, finance and compliance law applied to objects that move and may be in a different country from their owner, their buyer or their lender. The questions are the ones this practice answers elsewhere: who owns the work and may dispose of it; what the purchase contract promises about title, attribution and condition, and what it leaves to the buyer's own diligence; when payment, delivery and risk change hands; how a lender takes security over a work that will sit in a warehouse abroad; and what cultural-property and customs law require before the work crosses a border or enters customs storage. We advise collectors, galleries, dealers, art-market businesses, family offices and lenders on those questions and draft the documents that answer them.
An illustrative sequence shows how the questions connect. An American collector buys a painting from a London dealer. English law governs the sale: the Sale of Goods Act 1979 implies a condition that the seller has the right to sell (section 12) and, where the parties make the description a term of the contract, that the work corresponds with it (section 13); the Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies instead where the buyer is an individual acting wholly or mainly outside any trade or business, with most of its goods provisions switched off for a second-hand lot sold at a public auction that individuals can attend in person; an attribution binds the seller as a term where the contract makes it one or, in a consumer sale, as pre-contract information, and otherwise as an opinion that must be honestly and reasonably held; and outside a consumer sale risk passes with property, which for an identified work can be at signature unless the contract provides otherwise. The painting then travels to a duty-free warehouse in Geneva. The warehouse is Swiss customs territory in which no import duty or import VAT falls due until the work is released into free circulation, but Swiss cultural-property law treats the storage of cultural property in customs warehouses as an import under the Cultural Property Transfer Act (Article 19(3)), and the Ordinance, revised with effect from 1 January 2026, requires a written notification of the storage to the customs office (Article 26). Two years later the collector borrows against the work from a New York lender. The loan may be governed by New York law; from the Swiss standpoint, whether the lender's security binds third parties and how it is enforced is decided by the law of the place where the work is located (Article 100 of the Swiss Private International Law Act), and under Swiss law a pledge of a movable is not constituted while the pledgor keeps exclusive control of it (Article 884(3) of the Civil Code). The custody and release arrangements therefore carry the security. A later sale, an exhibition loan or a shipment to New York changes the customs status, the documents required and the risk allocation once more.
Michael Isak holds a Master's degree from Sotheby's Institute of Art, where he focused on art law. He is a co-founder of NOMARTS, a non-profit association that organises exhibitions and commissions and advises companies, families and foundations on building collections; the association is independent of the practice. The practice applies to art the method it applies to financial transactions: the contract, the security and the compliance file are read against the law of each place the work passes through, and the open points are written down before the work moves.
Four stages: acquisition, ownership, financing, movement. Diligence narrows risk; it does not by itself establish title. Jurisdictions: Switzerland, England and Wales, EU, United States.