A correspondent from Russia wrote in distress over the e-mail to tell me that she has detected a misattribution in an American Museum. Leaving aside that I could give her one (and more than one) in EVERY American museum and every other museum world wide, she wants to know what to do about it. They seem to be unwilling to acknowledge their mistake or at anyrate unwilling to take her word for it. Or maybe they do know anyway and cannot be bothered to tell her. She e-mails for advice - should she go to law.
I answered more or less as follows.
Dear Ms. S.
First a true moral story: Soho downtown Manhattan a few years ago. A gallery, has a painting by Marc Chagall in the window on an easel. And old man with white hair and a stick is walking along the pavement (sidewalk). He stops in front of the painting and looks at it for a long time. He then goes into the gallery. He is in fact quite well dressed, smart overcoat, polished shoes. He asks whether the painting in the window is for sale. Yes indeed. Could he examine it more closely? Yes Sir of course. Would Sir like a seat (he is not young). He is seated in front of another easel and the painting brought to him. He is told details of publication, provenance, and finally the price. He says nothing but nods gently and looks intensely at the canvas.
Suddenly before anyone can react, he gives a wild shout and strikes the canvas several times with stick, shredding it. He yells that it is a fake, a fraud a pastiche. He is restrained, the police are called and he is taken away. An hour later the owner of the gallery receives a call from the police. What should they do? He is of course entitled to sue the man for malicious damage to valuable property, in which case they will hold him of course, while the gallery prepares charges. It is a civil matter, no one was hurt, so of course if the gallery will not sue, the police will release him. The policeman adds politely that he thinks it only fair to add that the man's name, and they have checked it out carefully, is Marc Chagall.
Note that the only real moral is that this is a civil matter not criminal. The sale of a fake Chagall by the gallery would have been a criminal act, but here a gallery might not wish to go to court against the artist. It is not criminal to be mistaken about the attribution of a work of art, or indeed to label the paintings in your home Leonardo, Raphael, Picasso etc. It is not even illegal to sell them with the names attached as long as no representation of authenticity (and concomitant price) is involved.
Several points arise from your e-mail - first you only have the word of the curator's mother. Maybe they will happily admit error. It is also possible, and to my mind MOST LIKELY that someone, ignorant and simple (maybe the same mother) either picked up the wrong photograph or wrongly labelled the painting at some time. In other words that there is another painting by K. there, but it carries the name of a photo-realist painter. Go find it. Or they were sold it as a K. and are now genuinely unwilling for some reason to admit the possibility of error. Maybe the previous owner got the labels muddled.
Law is useless as the example above shows. They have committed no crime until they sell it and if they claim good faith, that the artist sold it to them as his, or his former agent did, that it is in a former style that he now wishes to repudiate etc (you can have fun inventing the defence). You may lose or win only damages limited to damage, ie how much is a K. worth more than a photo-realist painting by an unknown artist. By the time you had finished all the arguments about relative values of works of art, you might not get as much as a lawyers fee. In England they tend to award 1p damages, which means yes you won now pay your lawyers. You shouldn't be bothering the courts with this sort of thing.
But you feel so very strongly about it. You are crusading for the artist and the integrity of his work. Fine, good, if that is what you want, this is what you do:
1. You suggest most politely that you think there may be some mistake, this cannot be the photo of the second K.
2. If they insist you say you have been in contact with the artist who does not remember painting such a picture.
3. If you still remain on good terms, you crave permission to examine all their paintings to see if there is anything else relating to K, and maybe a lost or unattributed or misattributed work. (You want to do this anyway). But have a care, if they accept that you know more than they do, you will a) end up cataloguing their collection as a favour, and b) your chances of buying anything off them cheaply are gone. They will assume that you know more and are trying to cheat them and go to some one else, who , maybe relying on your expertise will reckon they can always give a bit more than you offered. Being a dealer is not so easy.
4. If you find it, in the collection, they may be very grateful (as above). They may also deny it, call you a fool, and throw you out for making a fool of them. Try not to make them feel small.. We all make mistakes and if ever they catch you out they will be merciless.
5. If you fail to find it you keep the photo-realist stuff and mark it fake (in your opinion) in the file.
That much is easy in principle, relying only on knowledge, experience, psychology, & common sense. Now you have to make certain long term decisions. Are you going to devote your life to become the world expert on K, maybe with his followers, pupils, friends? The field of Russian Paintings is getting rather crowded however. Are you going to write the monograph, the catalogue raisonné of his work, maybe collecting a PhD on the way? Will anyone publish it or care (remember I have never seen a photo of his work)? Certainly the catalogue raisonné route is the correct academic one and in the book you will mention the fake photo-realistic painting, but you might feel that buried in a University Library the exposure might not be great. On the other hand by the time it comes out as a monograph the Z Museum in USA may have a new curator who agrees with you.
Only should you learn that the painting is being sold as a K can you make a fuss and try and abort the deal. The big auction houses are usually quite sensitive to these issues and withdraw doubtful paintings but in a private deal you may find the vendor suing YOU for loss of profit and malicious damages. Then it might depend on whether the judge and jury believed you, a scholar from Cochabamba and your witness from Minsk (if you can get him to testify), or a respectable American Gallery owner and Museum Curator etc. You understand I am not saying this is the case, only explaining what may befall.
And have a care: If your museum director has really put his name on the line for this attribution you are in for trouble. Nothing is so numbskulled. blockheaded, pigminded, devious, dishonest and backstabbing as a senior 0academic in full battle cry on behalf of a footnote in an obscure publication. Read the letter pages of the Times Literary Supplement.
I enjoyed the drama of you and the artist 'paling' but you should not be so emotional about it. Remember that the total number of people in the world who will care can be counted on the fingers of one hand. That the total number who care even whether a Leonardo or van Gogh is genuine are dozens not even thousands.
I will finish with three relevant anecdotes. Claude Gelée drew large pencil drawings of all his works which he collected and bound. Formerly in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, the book is now in British Museum. Claude called it liber veritatis and of course he missed some early works. Picasso through out his later life had all works photographed immediately as a sort of running liber veritatis (published by Zervos). If he was shown an early work that had been missed he invariably accepted it if he liked it and refused it if he did not like it, irrespective, as he freely admitted whether he could remember painting it or no.
It may also depend on who's asking. My wife and I visited Budapest in the height of the Cold War. We were well received by the Museum staff, starved of contact with the outside world. We were given a curator as guide, and proudly shown the whole collection including the spare rooms and the stores etc. In the Main Galleries they have a number of excellent paintings and sculptures including a few with very fancy names. For instance a bronze horse is given to Leonardo, an old attribution. It is a very fine piece, it deserves its pride of place but no one knows who made it. No expert now believes it is by da Vinci.
Downstairs in the offices we discovered that they knew perfectly well who did not make their bronze and all the views on it too. We asked the Director why this (and other such works) were still so labelled in the gallery.(1) The good Communist official explained that no one was interested in what the vulgar public thought. Better that busloads of visiting Bulgarians and Azeris should believe that Budapest had a Leonardo. More importantly, when there was a state visit from Moscow (say) it mattered that the president's wife, with Mme Kruschev, being taken round the Museum by the Director should proudly show our Leonardo. We have one too. No Brownie Points for knowing that it was not so definite, and as it is not for sale anyway, the price doesn't matter. But an art historian, serious, down in the basement, there we have to show that we know as much about art as anyone. Washington DC is a bit like that too.
Finally Egon Schiele, Austrian Seccessionist artist had a major patron who was also a pupil. Erich Lederer bought many of his works before the first world war and also took drawing lessons from the master for many years. He became rather proficient in the style of his master. Before he died in the great flu epidemic of 1919 Schiele drawings were becoming popular and it is said that if a client came in and found nothing he wanted Schiele would go into the back studio, take a drawing of Lederer's, sign it and sell it as his own. Lederer survived and as an old man I asked him whether the story was true. But he merely grinned and said it was flattering - but he neither denied nor admitted it. At least to me he could have been glad that some of his drawings would circulate as Schiele for ever, or be embarrassed about it still, or else glad that people should believe his drawing were good enough. I cannot tell and he died a few years ago.
1. Labelling in Museums (or Private Art Galleries or Antique Fairs) would provide an interesting topic for one of these notes. But I have never worked in a Museum and am not really qualified to write it. Any offers? Put too much in people, the public will spend their time reading labels instead of looking at the pictures - that's what catalogues are for. Too little and they don't know what they're looking at. Even simple phrases like 'English School' pose difficulties - Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco is clearly Greek by birth but Venetian School (artistically) but Spanish (where he worked all his life). To call Michiel Sittow, Estonian School (no such thing, but he was born and died there) is as silly as each nation claiming Angelica Kauffman (born in Bregenz - Austria, grew up in Chur - Switzerland, studied in Rome - Italian, she lived much of the rest of her life in England). Take your pick.
You can press the Back button or, if you have not read them read Topic 2 or Topic 3 in this series on the subject of what constitutes a genuine picture.
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