Connoisseurs, Curators and Other Frauds

 Once again in the papers this week, both here and in Europe, there have been lengthy accounts of the supposed discovery of a Van Gogh, “Sunset at Montmajour,” painted during the artist’s residency in Arles. And once again this is a painting, discovered in an attic, of course, that had been described as a fake—and by no less than a French ambassador to Sweden. The Danish owner at the time, the Norwegian steel producer Nicolai Christian Mustad then supposedly banished the work to an attic, where it remained until after the industrialist’s death in 1970. Isn’t it wonderful to know that there were collectors a century ago just as concerned with the name of the artist, as opposed to the effect of the work, as there are today. Certainly, as Jerry Saltz has been screaming lately, no one buys a Jeff Koons for the beauty (can one even speak of a Koons in such terms?) of the object, but for the importance of the name and the trophy price. With the Van Gogh there are the breathless claims that this adds not only a new piece to the Van Gogh catalogue, but fills a major lacuna in the understanding of the greatest period in his development. And it may even be worth more than $50 million. Supposedly the painting was brought to the Van Gogh Museum by a new owner in 1991, but was declared a fake; then in 2011 museum officials supposedly had a change of heart and decided to examine the work again and declared it a real Van Gogh, after scientific analysis of the pigments. They claimed it to be an experimental work with which Van Gogh was not satisfied, but that it had belonged after his death to his brother Theo. Nowhere was there any real discussion of whether the picture was any better than any Van Gogh imitation in a flea market on the Seine.

All of this should be quite amusing for those without $50 million to spare, but it points up the real problem with this authentication. It is totally subjective, even when pigments, canvas, and so on are consistent with the practice of the artist being examined. Absent an accession catalogue prepared as the artist is working, there is no real guarantee that any work is authentic even with a signature and a certificate of authenticity (maybe a fingerprint on the work would be acceptable, but this is extremely rare). And certainly as the ongoing Knoedler case demonstrates all too well, the reputation of the gallery purveying a work is sadly no guarantee. (The perpetrator of this fraud, Glafira Rosales, has just pleaded guilty to the charges brought against her in Federal Court. But Knoedler has already been destroyed, and its former president, Anne Freedman, has seen her reputation shattered. In fact, she has filed a libel suit against one dealer who faulted her for failing to vet the works Rosales provided to her; but she had showed them to a number of major curators and even the former head of the National Gallery, who seem to have approved them.)  

While connoisseurship was the rage for several generations through the first decades of the last century, it has been replaced now by “curatorship” as the operative educational/collection mode. Connoisseurs were supposedly able, by their training and their “eye,” to determine the authenticity of the work. Like graphologists (another pseudo-science), they were thought to have attained a superior ability to recognize characteristics of an artist’s style and apply that to contested works. The addition of computers to the equation was supposed to validate this, but of course the computers can recognize only was has been input—not unlike the great valuators of the past century.

Modern curators are taught--in what is truly a development as specious as connoisseurship--how to come up with ideas for exhibitions—concepts to unite the disparate. The work is always secondary to the idea. In both cases, however, the operative mode is money, the validation of the work by its placement within the right collection or exhibition venue or the fee paid for the valuation or exhibition. And it is money, of course, which has forced most so-called experts at attribution to stop providing evaluations; even if there is a written agreement that the opinion given is not subject to litigation, the circumstances are; no expert can ever really be sure that a judgment will not be subjected to the law courts. After repeated lawsuits, for instance, the Warhol authentication board had to stop issuing rulings; the litigation was eating up its funds. And Twombly foundation members have been accused of exaggerating the value of the genuine holdings in the artist’s estate in order to increase their own management fees. For curators, the problem is including works from certain collections or creating exhibitions, like a current solo revival at a major uptown museum in New York, that can cover exhibition costs. They also need to generate art loan agreements and donations from the right collectors or trustees for the entire process. This includes all those corporate sponsorships, really just advertisement by another name, what PBS calls ever so smugly “underwriting.”