President Trump triggered a global financial crisis in April 2025, when he issued Executive Order 14257 ‘Regulating Imports With a Reciprocal Tariff To Rectify Trade Practices That Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits’. The Order imposes a 10% baseline tariff on import of goods into the US from most countries including the UK. Higher percentages were initially imposed on scores of ‘worst offender’ countries that had trade surpluses with the US (including China 54%, Switzerland 31%, India 26%, Japan 24%, and the EU 20%). Reacting to the resulting global crisis, Trump postponed the tariffs of higher rated countries (except China) to 8 July 2025.
Governments of tariff-hit countries are currently in ‘crisis mode’ deciding whether to retaliate, by imposing reciprocal tariffs on US goods imported into their own countries; or to accept tariffs they are unable to change. However, the Order reserves the power to increase tariff rates on any country that does retaliate, which China immediately did and had its initial 54% increased to 145% – but not on smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices entering the US from China (which are vital to the trading of a number of US tech companies, notably Apple).
Artworks and other cultural objects may also be imported tariff-free, but currently exemption is legally unclear. Art lawyers, including some based in the US, have so far been unable to agree on the legal effect of the Order on US imports of art. Unless and until there is authoritative clarification by or on behalf of the President, bewilderment and turbulence continues to destabilise the art ecosystem.
For nearly 250 years, the US has usually allowed tariff-free import of art. A 1789 law that imposed a 5% tax on all imported articles, including art, was raised the next year to 10% on ‘pictures and prints’ and ‘painters’ colors’. An 1841 law exempted from import tax ‘all painting and statuary produced by American artists residing abroad’, plus ‘items ordered from abroad for use by any college, academy, school or seminary of learning in the United States … busts of marble, bronze, alabaster, or plaster of Paris, casts, paintings, drawings, engravings’.
In the 1880s the National Free Art League successfully campaigned to exempt ‘all works of art’ from import tax because ‘the current 10 percent duty discouraged foreign artists from exhibiting their work in the United Sates, denying American artists the chance of proving to sceptical American collectors that home-grown talent was comparable to the best contemporary productions abroad … and that art tariffs also inhibited the importation of engravings of the old and modern masters that US artists required as examples to stimulate their own professional growth’. A 1913 law allowed ‘original’ (not mass-produced reproductions of) art to be imported tax-free.
The 1922 Tariff Act allowed sculpture tariff-free entry if ‘an original work of art, with no practical purpose, made by a professional sculptor’, and was the focus of a celebrated lawsuit. In 1926 Constantin Brâncuşi’s bronze sculpture, Bird In Space, 1923, arrived at New York City from France. US Customs demanded payment of import duty of 40% of the market value of its bronze material as ‘merely a manufacture of metal’: $230 (about $4,000 today). Following refusal to pay, the work was impounded. Brâncuşi sued US Customs claiming that his work was in law an ‘original sculpture’ exempt from import tax.
In 1928, following lengthy legal discussions, a US Customs Court ruled that Brâncuşi’s sculpture was entitled to free entry as a work of art. ‘There has been developing a so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than to imitate natural objects,’ the Court ruled. ‘Whether or not we are in sympathy with these newer ideas and the schools which represent them, we think the fact of their existence and their influence upon the art world as recognized by the courts must be considered’. This seminal trial, and especially its enlightened decision, has been cited by art lawyers worldwide for nearly a century as an epochal legal precedent – of which the US has always been justly proud.
In the 1990s, in a clarification of earlier laws, Congress enacted the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS), Chapter 97 of which currently exempts from import tariffs ‘paintings, drawings, pastels, original engravings, print and lithographs, original sculptures, objects of archaeological, ethnographic or historical interest and antiques of an age exceeding 100 years’. In 2019, however, during President Trump’s first term of office, he issued an Executive Order requiring 25% tax to be paid on import from the UK and Germany of ‘printed books, brochures, leaflets, printed matter in single sheets, lithographs on paper or paperboard created in the last 20 years, and pictures, designs, and photographs printed in the last 20 years’. These tariffs were revoked by President Biden’s Executive Order during his term of office from 2021, returning the country to its customarily attractive destination as global art market leader.
In 2024, global art sales by value were $57.5 billion, of which 43% ($24.7 billion) were sold in the US, mostly in New York City. These numbers demonstrate the US’s continuing dominance of the global art market, a status that has undoubtedly been strongly influenced by its generally longstanding exemption of art from import taxes. It remains to be seen whether this prominence will continue, or be weakened by imposition of tariffs on art imports. Avoidance of such potential damage may influence President Trump to exempt art from his recent deluge of global import tariffs, or perhaps to clarify that they are already exempt.
Presidential Executive Orders are made under powers delegated by Congress under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEP). Trump initially declared an emergency in relation to Canada and Mexico, which he later expanded to include most of the rest of the world because of trade imbalances (notably not Russia, Belarus and North Korea). IEEP, however, does not delegate authority to restrict imports or impose tariffs on so-called ‘informational materials’ that specifically include ‘artworks’. This statutory derogation of Presidential power chimes with the current statutory exemption of artworks from import tariffs under HTS. Not all art lawyers, including some in the US, agree that HTS and IEEP together exempt imported artworks.
Authoritative clarification of this currently uncertain complex legal tariff situation is needed, ideally before 8 July 2025. Another art tariff lawsuit against the US government, nearly a century after Brâncuşi’s, would doubtless be legally entertaining, but is wholly avoidable.
© Henry Lydiate 2025