London club claims Banksy street art unlawfully removed to America

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A work by the street artist Banksy is at the centre of a legal row after the club whose wall it was painted on claimed it had been unlawfully removed and put on sale in the US.

The painting from 2007 on the wall of the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in east London shows an exhausted workman in dungarees resting on a tin of paint and holding a paint roller, next to a giant flower that has grown out of the street’s double-yellow lines.

Banksy — whose most valuable work sold for £18.6mn at auction in 2021 — has become known for his wall paintings that often contain social or political commentary.

Now the work, “Yellow Lines Flower Painter”, which is currently in Colorado, is at the centre of a lawsuit that pits the club’s trustees against its long-term events programmer, Warren Dent, and other defendants, according to research by the Financial Times and the London Centric newsletter.

According to the club’s former accountant at the firm Capital & Co, in 2019 Dent bought the work in 2019 for £20,000 with the agreement of club secretary Stephen Smorthit.

Dent then commissioned art restorer Chris Bull — whose company Fine Art Restoration is also a defendant in the case — to remove the work, which had been graffitied, and bring it back to a reasonable state.

Bull told the FT he then loaned the work to his father’s art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, after a meeting with Dent and “three members of the club”, for an exhibition in March 2024.

When being shipped, the piece was given an insurance value of about $750,000, Bull added. The work is still in the US.

But a lawsuit filed in May this year by three trustees of the club claims that they did not give Dent permission to buy the work in 2019, and that the work has now wrongfully been put up for sale in the US.

The three trustees — Alan Milliner, Paul Le Masurier and Kerry Smorthit, who is the daughter of club secretary Stephen — are suing for the return of the piece. They say Dent could not sell the work as he does not own it.

Neither Dent nor the trustees responded to a request for comment. Capital & Co declined to comment. Chris Bull, whose company intends to contest the claim, said: “We’re only named because we’re in possession of the work and we’re up for giving it up if we’re asked to.”

Banksy’s office, Pest Control, also declined to comment.

Valuing the artist’s works is notoriously difficult. While the £18.6mn sale was for a painting that was partly shredded by its frame, transactions of his wall works are rarer, and much harder to value.

Pest Control does not issue certificates of authenticity for wall works, and major auction houses and galleries tend to avoid selling pieces without such certificates, which limits their price.

In 2024, a Banksy work depicting a fleet of helicopters, some adorned with large pink bows, failed to sell at auction. The piece, which had been removed from an office building in London’s Shoreditch, had an estimate of about £500,000 but no certificate of authenticity.

While Banksy objects to his works being removed from walls, his former manager Steve Lazarides has changed his mind. Lazarides, who is now a photographer, said: “You can’t put something out in the public domain and then get upset when something happens to it . . . That’s part of the game.”