In an earlier article (Topic 2) in this little series I briefly discussed the so-called saleroom code and why it is quite a useful shorthand for the expert to use. It is not so good for the tyro, who I think in USA is called a rookie, because to understand it properly it requires a degree of understanding and art-historical knowledge.
There I wrote: "the mistake lies in the romantic and entirely modern notion that only that thing is genuine, which was made by the genius of an artist all by himself with his own fair hands and his native talent. But this myth totally ignores how and why most works of art came to be made in the first place. Without a sense of history, art (old art anyway) is meaningless." I explained why very few works before the nineteenth century had in fact been made by one person in the hoped for manner.
I also wrote that the phrase attributed to seems to cause endless trouble. What it does NOT mean is that the work is not quite fully by an artist or is somehow to be placed in a derogatory category between a full by and a poor and studio.
The phrase Attributed to should properly refer only to the Art Historian (or dealer or auction house) and to the state of our specialist knowledge, given that the artist is dead and gone. It may be a wonderful work of the very highest quality but either we are just not quite sure who made it or else we are quite sure in our souls as individuals but in fact we cannot find a shred (or enough) of hard evidence. The phrase is a genuine and sincere admission of humility - "I am not quite sure" or "I can't prove it".
Properly EVERY work of art that is not fully documented or signed by an unimpeachable signature should be described as atttributed to and it may be that one day there will be a sort of shorthand code for describing different degrees of certainty within this category.
Sometimes, in the case of very good works we can group a few paintings to the same person on stylistic grounds but we still don't know his name. Thus we get the Master of 1518, The Master of the Strauss Madonna, del Bambino Vispo (the unruly child), of the Female Half Lengths and so on. It makes some people very happy when some document or signed painting appears that allows us to assume (as most now do) that the Master of 1518 was in fact Jan van Doornicke of whom we know almost nothing except that his daughter married Pieter Coecke, who took over his studio. Does that help? Expert opinion now believes that the Master of Flémalle was called Robert Campin and they're slowly changing the labels in museums. At the end of a large conference on the wonderful master it had to be admitted that the evidence was slim. The paintings are just as good however you describe their author, like the man who used to insist that all Shakespeare's plays were written by another man of the same name!
What matters of course is who has done the attributing. How clever is he or she? And who is it being attributed to. A little marble statue in New York is excitedly attributed to Michaelangelo by one academic, a few others follow in the wake, the press roars a hooray and applaud "the discovery". In the sober light of the morning it appears that the attribution had not been accepted 30 years ago when first made by another scholar and was not about to be accepted now. Michaelangelo is too big name to attribute just like that and the big guns come out. Attribute the same statue to Giovanni di Bertoldo and the press, who have never heard of him, would not have been interested. No fame, no lecture tour, no promotion. No promotion anyway.
But the market is a hard and cruel place! Art does not exist only in an academic ivory tower however much some academics might like to claim it for themselves. Nor did it ever do so - artists always had to sell to make a living (or find employers which is the same thing). And three hundred years later when something is for sale you cannot blame the seller, especially if a lot of money is involved, for trying to put as good a gloss on things as possible. This is normal salesmanship.
The market is hard and cruel and not to be manipulated. It suddenly becomes important to distinguish between price and value. The true valueof a work of art, minor or major, is not to be measured in monetary terms and can be left to aesthetes and academics - and to collectors and dealers and directors of museums in another mood - all except auctioneers who value anything. It does make a difference to price whether you can call a fragment Rembrandt (or Bertoldo) and in the real world one has to take an attitude to these things.
On the whole I think that the dealers are more scrupulous than the auction houses, probably and perhaps in part because they cannot so easily hide behind exclusiuon clauses. Big organisations have a wonderful way of hiding their transgressions by blaming another employee and then claiming that the third one down the line was not authorised to give an opinion or alter the terms & conditions etc.
So what do you do when you see an auction catalogue entry or dealers description labelled Sir Peter Paul Rubens in full or else attributed to Theodor van Thulden ? The first will have a very high estimate (price) so probably you will not just idly take the first sentence for granted. If you are a likely buyer you will read all the notes in the accompanying text and for your $1,000,000 you will check all the references given and read them carefully. Or, since you are obviously quite rich, you may employ someone other than the seller to do so to do so for you. Or at least if you are short of time you will ask the seller to go through it all in detail with you - the man who wrote the catalogue must have (ought to have) read the literature cited - he should show it to you if no one else will. READ THE NOTES IN THE TEXT.
In the case of the van Thulden you will note that he is a competant decent follower of Rubens whose work you cannot afford. You will ask who said the painting might be by him, and whether there is a book or learned article about him. If there is, you will wonder why the author of it, who might know a bit about the artist was, or was NOT, asked his opinion (he may be dead or there may not have been enough time). Taking all this into account you will wonder, given the price and your budget, whether it looks enough like a Rubens to serve your admiration of the greater artist. And also whether, given the price and your need not to waste your money (you are not investing for profit but neither do you want to lose to obviously) whether it matters if it turned out NOT to be by van Thulden - after all someone painted it (we are assuming it is of the right period) so it might just have been ANOTHER follower of Rubens. Given that only yesterday you had not heard of van Thulden, would it bother you and why, to be told it was really by Jan Thomas?
What it comes to is that you can safely buy a cheap unsigned painting attributed to a minor artist because you are buying the work with a decent suggestion from a good scholar. There is no premium for being by van Thulden, Jan Thomas or Chenin or Saarburg and if they turn out to be by someone else nothing is lost. But a painting attributed to Peter Paul Rubens might tend to mean that one or two scholars agree and a few others don't or that a very important scholar grudgingly agrees or maybe does not strongly dissent. It MAY be by Rubens, but the element of doubt should be reflected in the price or if you feel brave (or love the painting) you may want to punt - but you should be aware of the risk.
By this token my Jordaens (especially because it is a little atypical, being early) needs all four leading scholars assenting (they do) and I catalogue in full and the Bassano has a note about studio practice - all paintings by Bassano at this period of his life were made in the studio.
It is a very strange fact however, unlike Bassano and Rubens and Jordaens that by some kind of tacit agreement works signed P. Breughel the Younger are usually accepted as if he had really painted them himself, whereas they are equally and clearly and obviously studio productions; and mostly they are copies of his father's (and sometimes of his own) earlier work. Canaletto never had a studio at all.
For an excellent and serious discussion of the important subject of authenticity and why we need it see Prof. Nelson Goodman's various works but especially The Languages of Art Hackett 1976, esp. chapter III, & (with Catherine Elgin) Reconceptions in Philosophy Routledge 1988.
Topic 10 continues the discussion in an e-mail correspondent's problems with a work in a museum, which she believes (for all I know rightly) to be fake or at least wrongly attributed.
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