Previous Posts: November 2012

Britain's oldest purpose built art gallery is to be turned into something approaching a Sevillian church when it stages an exhibition of works by the 17th-century Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has announced details of a show that will also include a work thought lost; and a re-attribution to Murillo of a work that has been rescued from the gallery's stores.

The show examines Murillo in his later years and specifically his relationship with his patron and friend Don Justino de Neve, the canon of Seville Cathedral – "the Saatchi and Damien Hirst of their time", said the gallery's chief curator, Xavier Bray.

The one thing that struck me, however, and this comment was also made by Laura Gray from Cardiff School of Art, was the distinct lack of males in the room. Out of a 30-strong audience, only three men were in attendance; all of whom had specific roles to play during the event. Why had this happened? Are the new breeds of Art Historians mostly female and if so, is this going to cause an oestrogen fuelled riot or an all-out party, at some point in the not-too-distant future?! Or, do the male Art Historians like to keep themselves to themselves in fear of their safety?

Can´t believe AHN will not rant about NPG new acquisition [a portrait of Amy Winehouse]! Even I am bothered and I am not even English! It is just a bad, bad, bad picture! Painful! Really bad!

Sarah Howgate, Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, said: "Dumas’s liquid handling of paint carries tremendous emotive power.

"Detail bleeds into and out of her work, directing and dispersing the gaze of the viewer. The rich, translucent blues of this portrait allude to Amy Winehouse’s musical influences as much as to the melancholy details of her career."

A one-day symposium focusing on new developments in Nazi-looted art disputes takes place today 27 November at the Peace Palace in the Hague (“Fair and just solutions? Alternatives to litigation in Nazi looted art disputes: status quo and new developments”).

Issues to be discussed include whether a “fair and just” solution depends on acquiring disputed works in good faith and if a time limit should apply to ownership claims. “Another, rather basic, question is in what sense Nazi-looted art claims differ from other claims regarding spoliated art. If there is a fundamental difference, what is its essence?” says a press statement. 

The debate will include an interview session with the chairs of five European advisory committees (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK).

[...] the MFA [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston], eager to raise revenues, is also renting out many of its most prized works of European and American art to for-profit enterprises. A total of 26 paintings, including the marquee “Dance at Bougival” and “Madame Roulin,” have been sent to exhibitions in Italy organized by a private company called Linea d’Ombra, for a large, undisclosed fee.

The combined loans and rentals have resulted in what Malcolm Rogers, the MFA’s director, readily admits is a “traffic jam” of missing masterpieces.

“We admit there is some crowding [on the list of masterpieces sent away],” Rogers said in an interview with the Globe. “Everything has come together at once.”

‘As an art history professor, it seems perfectly reasonable to expect that certain canonical masterpieces are on display in the museum,’ said Jonathan Unglaub of Brandeis University.

The practice of charging fees for lending works is not new, but it remains controversial. The Italian shows currently showing works from the MFA, in the cities of Vicenza and Verona, are titled “Raphael to Picasso” and “From Botticelli to Matisse.”

British galleries have started to do this on some scale.  16thc Venetian paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland, including the Dianas, went to America to Atlanta, Minneapolis and Houston from October 2010 to August 2011.  That was for a fee. 

And further back, all the Courtauld Impressionists and Post-Impressionists toured for fees. This was at least from the late 1980s to raise funds for their move to Somerset House.

I would have thought English Heritage are getting fees for the collection from Kenwood currently touring America,

On the other side it’s difficult to tell if and how much British galleries pay to borrow material.  One of the few cases that have come to light is that of the National Gallery paying a fee to a local church in Spain to borrow its El Greco.

Honestly, I do not see any problem in museums loaning works of art.

In fact, the idea of the museum as something "beyond" and "above" mundane matters as "money" is as démodé as the French Revolution!

[...] the Reina Sofia paid 3.5 million euros to the Picasso Museum from Paris for exposing its works in Madrid for three months while the [Picasso] Museum was closed for renovation (later, the same paintings grossed a significant amount of money on their journey through United Arab Emirates, Canada, United States, Finland, Russia and Australia).

In principle I don't have a problem with this. Although having said that, and I'm surprised no one has already mentioned it; isn't there the issue of the fragility of works of art and the unnecessary stress that constant loaning and lending can place on an artwork (especially if lent to corporate companies who probably wouldn't treat them as carefully)?

I feel more strongly than other contributors.  What does it mean to say that museums aren't 'above money'?  Of course they don't exist in a different plane where budgets are irrelevant, but that doesn't make them commercial enterprises driven to make a quick buck wherever they can.  They exist to preserve art and to display it to the public.  Rentals militate against both of these purposes.  Paintings shipped around the world are inevitably at risk of damage.  Brian Sewell's autobiography has some tragic anecdotes about paintings ruined in transit.  The NG even managed to break its own paintings when taking down an exhibition.  

 Dumbed down commercial blockbusters try to cram through as many people as possible, making it hard for anyone properly to see anything.  There are always major lacuna at major galleries, which have become more like lending libraries (as noted by Haskell & Penny).  Visits to more out-of-the-way collections are often once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and to miss half of their best paintings does a great disservice to people who have travelled to see them.  

There are more doleful examples of paid loans recently - including the NG paying to hire Leonardo's Cecilia Gallerani.  The Art Tribune has a good post on the impact at the Louvre, with pictures of many empty spaces.  The paymasters will see this as an opportunity to cut budgets, forcing perpetual prostitution of the collection to pay running costs.  It is most certainly a Bad Thing.

For all his celebrity, Hirst’s stock in the art market has experienced a stunning deflation. According to data compiled by the firm Artnet, Hirst works acquired during his commercial peak, between 2005 and 2008, have since resold at an average loss of 30 percent. And that probably understates the decline—judging from the dropoff in sales volume, collectors aren’t bringing their big-ticket Hirsts to market. A third of the more than 1,700 Hirst pieces offered at auctions since 2009 have failed to sell at all—they’ve been “burned,” in the terminology of the art world. “He has way underperformed,” says Michael Moses, a retired New York University business professor who maintains a financial index for art. “He has lots and lots of negative returns.”

“Great artists, they always go up to a peak, and then they go down to a very low low,” says collector Alberto Mugrabi. “I feel that Damien is one of the most influential artists of our time.” Hirst may care little about critics, but he knows collectors have great power. Advertising executive Charles Saatchi was an early patron, and in recent years, Mugrabi and his family have played a crucial supporting role. Mugrabi isn’t merely an art lover; he’s called his family “market makers.” His father, Jose, who made a fortune in the Colombian garment business, started collecting Warhols soon after the artist’s death, when his most expensive work commanded six figures. He continued buying them on the cheap through the downturn of the 1990s, and the Mugrabis now own the largest Warhol trove in private hands. They’ve followed a similar strategy with Hirst, amassing more than 100 pieces.

“Collectors have to learn to buy art with their eyes,” Mugrabi says, “not their ears.” An olive-skinned international bon vivant, he’s sitting in his Park Avenue office—a Warhol Blue Jackie sits propped against the wall behind his desk—and showing off a desktop picture on his computer screen: four Hirst sharks, suspended in adjoining tanks. “What’s more amazing than that?” he asks.

When asked what the piece is called, Mugrabi shuffles some papers, racks his brain, but the name won’t come to him. Finally, he yells to his secretary in an adjoining room: “Liz, what’s the name of the shark?” “Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, Justice,” she shouts back.

You can hardly blame Mugrabi for letting it slip his mind. Since he acquired the piece in 2008, he’s rarely seen it. While his family keeps a few pieces around the office—one of the artist’s glass medicine cabinets, a bull’s heart impaled on a knife and encased in a transparent box—most of their Hirsts are stored in warehouses in Newark, N.J., and Switzerland, where the animals are removed from their tanks and refrigerated. Another installation includes 30 sheep, two sides of beef, a string of sausages, an umbrella, and a dead white dove. “Just to install a piece is a lot of money,” Mugrabi says.

Ultimately, Mugrabi is investing to make a profit. He’s trying to sell the shark, for instance, and says he has a good offer. But he’s in a tough spot: Like any major art collector, he has to protect the value of his holdings. That means he must prop up Hirst by paying—perhaps overpaying—at auction. Mugrabi says he thinks the acquisition strategy will pay off, as his father’s Warhol investment did. He brings up recently deceased art critic Robert Hughes, who once interviewed him and called Hirst’s art “a cruddy game for the self-aggrandizement of the rich and the ignorant.”

“In another year, nobody will talk about this man anymore,” Mugrabi says of Hughes. “In 2,000 years, Hirst will still be in people’s vocabulary.”

When I was at Bonhams I was portering a Vertu sale with some Edwardian enamelled porno cufflinks. There were four separate 'close-ups', all very Triple X. 

Of course, a client rang up wanting someone to describe what was happening in each one. 'Wrestling' wouldn't do, and I was in the middle of a public view saying things like 'double penetration' down the phone.

I wonder what they will dare display!

Alas, plenty of other experts are now too scared of lawsuits to authenticate pictures, says Clare McAndrew, the founder of Arts Economics, a consultancy. Early this year the Andy Warhol Foundation dissolved its authentication board after spending $7m to fight a lawsuit from a disgruntled London collector. In September the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Keith Haring Foundation stopped authenticating works by the two late artists. Last year the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation dissolved its authentication committee rather than “jeopardise our health and well-being”, says Jack Cowart, its director. In the past five years insurance policies taken out by art authenticators have more than doubled at Hiscox, an insurer.

Forgers nowadays typically favour 20th-century abstract and expressionist styles. Mimicking Jackson Pollock’s drip-and-splatter paintings is easier than faking old masters such as Rembrandt. Swamped with lawsuits, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation stopped authenticating works in 1996, four decades after Pollock’s death. Lawsuits continued anyway. A court even entertained a suit from a man with a painting signed “Pollack” (he lost).

[...]

Marc Restellini, a Parisian art historian, rejected as fake numerous works while preparing a catalogue raisonné of drawings by Amedeo Modigliani, an Italian artist who left little documentation when he died young in Paris in 1920. Told by phone in 1999 to leave the drawings alone or be killed, Mr Restellini cancelled the project because, as he puts it: “I’m not James Bond.” (Now head of the Pinacothèque de Paris, a private museum, he continues to work on a catalogue of Modigliani paintings, one of which fetched nearly $69m at a Sotheby’s auction two years ago.) Other Modigliani catalogues are incomplete or at least partially discredited—one French author was convicted for forgery.

As a specialist in a Swedish auction house, I may think that the "[…] hardly if ever spotted by auction houses" is a bit unfair. We reject hundreds of fakes a year which are never to reach the auction public. This includes the entire spectrum from completely fraudulent newly-mades to manipulated signatures on otherwise genuine works of art. 

The problem, as hinted in the article, is when a work by a frequently faked or rarely sold artist is consigned for sale and there is none to ask for authenticity anymore. Important committees or senior experts that no longer provide their views leave the field open for scholars with a vague conscious that gladly authenticates almost everything on a photo for a thousand euros. (Not to mention the problems with the increasing field of faking letters of authenticity, or foundations/committees campaigning against each other for the right of the ultimate yea or nay.)

I agree that there has been some rather notable auction sales of high end fakes over the years (in which the auction house's role has been on the dubious side), but in the business of fakes, the cup of wishful thinking has been drunk by everyone…

The most recent edition of the online resource, British artists' suppliers, 1650-1950 has now been selectively updated. It contains new information on Scottish 19th-century suppliers, including Alexander Hill, William Macgill, Robert Nelson, Hugh Paton, Alexander Scott, John Douglas Smith, John Taylor and Taylor & Norie, later Robert Norrie & Son. These amended entries derive from two days spent in Edinburgh, where my research was greatly facilitated by Helen Smailes. The resource also contains updated entries on John Bryce Smith and Percy Young, both important early 20th-century London suppliers, and on John Wragg, the late 18th- century lay figure maker.

Additionally, there is a new illustrated feature, The artist’s porte-crayon, which happens to coincide with a display of some of the National Portrait Gallery’s finest but rarely seen drawings, The Art of Drawing: Portraits from the Collection, 1670-1780, until May 2013.

Next month, the resource, British picture framemakers, 1630-1950, will be launched in an expanded and updated form.