Previous Posts: articles 2018

V. few it seems, but - if we give Leonardo the benefit of the doubt - Matisse, Cezanne, Hokusai and Edward Lear do.

Regarding a recent article named "Destination: China", I would just like to make some remarks. As a specialist at one the larger auction houses in Sweden, I have among my colleagues (both national and international) heard of many incidents which indicates that the market share figures regarding Chinese sales should be regarded with some caution. 

Many times, fines pieces of ceramics are sold at auctions for record prices, but they are never paid nor collected. In cases where depositions had been requested beforehand, credit card numbers turned out to be fake or not valid. My guess is that these purchases are gambles that didn't work out at the other end, and it is easier to disappear than to settle overpriced debts.

Auction houses, and I assume dealers alike, generally like to keep these failures to themselves, but it is the original results that show in the statistics. This does, to my opinion, skew the image somewhat. The new chinese market has still to mature.

I can't believe that no one has wanted to take care of this house. Shameful. You should buy it Bendor. No one could do it justice more than you.

It is unusual for an ACE chair to depart after one term. Both previous incumbents, Sir Christopher Frayling and Sir Gerry Robinson, were invited to extend their contracts. Internally, Forgan's departure has come as a surprise, since she was widely expected to see through a restructuring of ACE, which has already begun and, under the last government funding agreement, obliges the body to cut its running costs by 50% by the end of March 2015.

When the coalition was formed in 2010, there was speculation in some quarters that Forgan, who has been perceived as left-of-centre politically and who was appointed under the Labour administration, might not survive under the new regime. However, relations between Forgan and Hunt have been, openly at least, warm.

But Hunt has received criticism from the right for being too accommodating of Forgan, and for failing to create a cultural identity for the new government, distinct from the values and people of the old guard. One senior figure in the arts world, who preferred not to be named, said: "This move is totally political. It is nothing more or less than political."

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, said: "I am deeply disappointed that Liz Forgan is not being renewed as chair of the Arts Council. She has led the council with real verve and conviction through a period in which cuts to arts spending could have resulted in the loss of major parts of our cultural landscape."

...because he lost the case, Lord Coleridge has to pay 90% of most of its costs, estimated at £1m. Hearing the verdict was like listening to a morality tale. There was much to learn from it.

Essentially, if a work of art or an antique is of personal or financial importance, it pays to get a second opinion if you don't much care for the first one. The job of an expert is to use acquired skills and natural gifts to narrow the gap between opinion and fact. The better the expert, the more narrow the gap—but it never disappears entirely. Experience teaches collectors, dealers and art historians that mistakes are unavoidable. Learning from them is often more beneficial and less expensive than going to court.   

As it happens, the chain was bought at Christie's in 2008 by Christopher Moran, who has built on enormous Tudor-style house alongside the Thames. Perhaps he will not mind having a collar that now is widely considered to be Tudor style, rather than the real thing.

...Judge Pelling rejected the idea that S.J. Phillips would have revealed the price to Sotheby's, whom they would consider rivals in the market. He went on to conclude that, in general terms, contacting retail dealers with regard to value was unrealistic.

I have just seen your piece on the Coleridge Collar. SJP did not sell the collar to Arthur Gilbert for £300,000. The figure given in court by Lord Coleridge's expert witness was inaccurate. The precise figure of 300,300 was taken from an inventory in the V & A which should never have been made public. In any case the figure is a US dollar conversion of the price paid by Sir Arthur at the prevailing exchange rate. The price paid to the Richards's family solicitors, from whom the Gilbert collar originally came, was considerably less, though not paid by SJP, and very close to Sotheby's estimate of the less good Coleridge Collar.

The collector Diamantis Diamantides, who owns the shipping firm, Marmaras Navigation, is one of the biggest buyers of Greek art. He bought Still Life Before the Acropolis [by Constantin Parthenis] from Sotheby’s, London, in 2006 and set a record price for the artist when he paid £670,100 for The Virgin and Child in the same saleroom in 2007. Both works are believed to have been consigned by the same two people, although Sotheby’s declined to disclose who they were. 

Doubts were soon raised over the authenticity of the works. Diamantides eventually lodged a complaint against the auction house and Constantine Frangos, the London-based senior director of Greek art at Sotheby’s, in February 2010, saying that they fraudulently induced him to buy forgeries. A spokesman for Sotheby’s denies this vigorously, saying: “It stands to reason that an auction house that sells billions of dollars of art a year, and relies on its reputation to secure consignments and purchasers, would not put its business at risk by knowingly selling forged works.” The spokesman adds: “We are reviewing further evidence that has been submitted concerning the authenticity of the works.” A decision on the case is expected shortly.

Rumours of widespread forgery began in 2008 when Bonhams rejected a work, Lady in White, by Dimitrios Galanis (1880-1966) and said “further research” on the work was needed. The sheer volume of works coming on to the market also raised suspicions, especially as the country has relatively few well known modern artists.

One wonders at Bonhams having to do further research on the piece!

Discovered in Germany by its present owner, this stunning portrait sheds new light on Galanis’ scarcely recorded German period, making it a rare piece, extremely valuable to scholarly research. In his seminal account on the painter - the first Greek to be accepted among the European avant-garde, art historian M. Mavrommatis holds that “we might never be able to reconstruct this period in his career, unless new evidence comes to light." [...]

A startling example of fine portraiture, the painting on offer is a penetrating study in formal balance, eventually unfolding into abstract rhythmic designs in which contours and colour harmonies are mutually interdependent. The pleated curtain on the upper left is ingeniously echoed in the lower right, its greenness repeated in the tablecloth and leafage, its columnar verticality surviving in the stripes of the vase and its sculptural presence resounding in the art-deco solidity of the flower motifs. Likewise, the warm red of the wall is picked up in the sitter’s shoes and lips, while the round form of the side table is supported by a series of curvilinear themes in both the sofa and the sitter’s body. These magnificent and well-thought harmonies provide the solid framework on which Galanis would mount the focal point of his composition: the striking antithesis of brooding black and brilliant white in the centre of the painting. 

The effect of the picture is heightened immeasurably by the sitter’s commanding presence, confident stare and aristocratic posture. Devoid of any jewellery and wearing a simple, virginal dress, the sitter becomes a symbol of nobility without the glitter of high society. In this picture Galanis’ achievement is one of utter elegance and majesty, phrased by an almost musically articulate series of formal elements that weld the image and its attendant attributes into a compelling entity of idealised, eternal beauty.

• The Chinese art and antiques auction sector was the strongest growing market worldwide with a dramatic rise of 177% in 2010 and a further 64% in 2011.
• The global art market continued to recover in 2011, increasing by 7% to €46.1 billion, an increase of 63% since the market crisis of 2009. The volume of transactions also increased by 5% to 36.8 million.
• The driving forces behind the recovery were strong sales in the Chinese auction market and the rise of fine art sales (over decorative art).
• The Modern and Contemporary sectors combined to account for nearly 70% of the fine art market. Both continued a strong recovery in 2011, leading them to levels in excess of the boom of 2007-2008.
• The art market took nearly a decade to recover from the recession of the 1990s whereas the contraction in 2009 has been relatively short-lived. This is due, in part, to its increasingly global nature.

'This shows we won't give up, even after 41 years.'

Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, 85, the chairwoman of the Galeries Lafayette department store chain, is pursuing a claim that the Wildenstein family, an international dynasty of French art dealers, is concealing information about the stolen work. The canvas, which belonged to the Heilbronn family, vanished in 1941 after a Gestapo raid on a family bank vault.

Last summer, after Ms. Moulin filed a criminal complaint against the Wildensteins, the French authorities ordered a preliminary investigation. An anti-art-trafficking squad is sifting through World War II documents to pick up the trail of the work, “Torrent de la Creuse,” Monet’s 1889 study of the confluence of the Creuse and the Petite Creuse Rivers.

“It’s not a question of the price of the painting,” Ms. Moulin said in an interview here in her art-filled apartment. “It’s a question of a victory against the Germans and. ...” Her voice trailed off.

The Wildensteins, who have been selling art for five generations, have steadfastly denied any knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts. But Daniel Wildenstein, an Impressionist scholar who died in 2001, included it in two of his widely embraced inventories of Monet’s work. In both he listed it as being in a private collection: an anonymous owner in the first reference and an unidentified American owner in 1996.

The suspicions of Ms. Moulin and her family were aroused last year when more than 30 artworks that had been reported missing or stolen were found in a vault at the Wildenstein Institute, a nonprofit research organization the Wildensteins run from a mansion on the Right Bank. The items, most of which had vanished years earlier during the settlement of estates, were recovered in an unrelated investigation. [...]

Guy Wildenstein, the billionaire who leads the family business from New York, declined through his lawyers to comment on Ms. Moulin’s accusations. But he has contended that the institute never hid missing works, saying it simply lacked a full inventory of what was in its vault.

The wrestlers’ existence was known only from a reference in one of the Dutch master’s letters, written aged 33, just four years before his tragic death. On 22 January 1886, he wrote: “This week I painted a large thing with two nude torsos – two wrestlers.” 

There is no other painting of wrestlers. It is this painting that now confirms the still life’s authenticity. They are both on the same canvas. Van Gogh painted the still life over his wrestlers which could not be seen until now.

The still life was acquired in 1974 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, which boasts one of the world’s largest Van Gogh collections. But the painting’s link to Van Gogh had been repeatedly dismissed over the years because it was thought to be “uncharacteristically exuberant”.

In 2003, it was finally “deattributed” on stylistic grounds and unceremoniously relegated to a back room out of public view, listed merely as “artist: anonymous”.