Five years ago this month, the Guerrilla Girls severed ties with Phaidon Press in protest of owner Leon Black’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, writing “In 2018, the Guerrilla Girls contracted with Phaidon Press to publish our dream book of all our work from 1985 to today: conceptualized, designed and written by us. In 2019, the world learned about Black’s extensive and shady dealings with shady pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, before and after Epstein’s conviction for sex trafficking young girls. We decided we could not work with Phaidon” [see earlier post
here].
The group also called for Black to step down as chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, including phone booth ads across the street from the museum. When his term ended on July 1st, 2021, Black did not seek re-election.
Phaidon is a multi-national publisher of books on art, architecture, design, fashion, photography, and popular culture, based out of London and New York City, with additional offices in Paris and Berlin.
Phaidon has over 1500 titles in print and has sold almost fifty million books worldwide. Founded in Vienna in 1923, the company was sold to Black in 2012.
It was recently revealed that Black had contributed a page to the infamous Epstein 50th birthday greeting album (compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 and featuring the now-notorious Trump signature as pubic hair drawing). Black’s contribution was a handwritten poem that contained the lines "Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically/With this net of fish, Jeff’s now The Old Man and The Sea". The poem is signed"Love and kisses, Leon".
He reportedly paid $158 million to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for advice on taxes and estate planning. Epstein also helped him amass an enormous art collection, including The Scream by Edvard Munch, for which he paid $119.9 million.
In March 2021, Guzel Ganieva claimed in a series of tweets that "I was sexually harassed and abused by [Black] for years and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement under duress”. Black maintained that the relationship was consensual but paid out nine million dollars for the agreement. Ganieva further alleged that he had introduced her to Epstein and tried to force her to have sex with him.
In 2023, a
lawsuit was filed against Black alleging that he violently raped a 16-year-old girl with autism and Down syndrome in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse the year prior, while asking her "what made her 'Jeffrey special girl.”
Yesterday, British artist and Turner Prize winner* Tai Shani [above, centre] announced that she too has withdrawn a forthcoming monograph with Phaidon. The 49 year old artist posted to her twenty-five thousand Instagram followers:
“I have decided to withdraw my monograph from publication with Phaidon. The recently unsealed Epstein files contain numerous horrific allegations against Leon Black, the owner of Phaidon since 2012.
Behind these allegations, whose specifics many of us have read with horror, behind the geopolitical implications, the many unsurprising ties to the art world, behind the gossip, behind the observations about global networks of power, behind the spectacle of violence are human beings, victims: young women, children, often from precarious backgrounds, real lives exploited and destroyed. Even in this
age of increasing impunity and breathtaking ruthlessness, their suffering, their lives matter and must be acknowledged."
And then added in the comments: "I’m trying to meet this moment with some kind of moral consistency."
*The 2019 shortlisted artists (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Shani) were jointly awarded the prize as a collective, following their request to be considered as a single group "in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity”.
