August 7, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Art on the Cheap (Scandal of paintings sold for a mere pittance)
- Sotheby's checks pricing (Auction house appoints panel to oversee lawsuits)
- Clues disproved O'Keeffe's ownership of 'Canyon Suite' paintings
- Museums OK ethics guidelines for exhibits of private art
- New fire threatening several park buildings, including the headquarters and a museum containing thousands of artifacts.
Art on the Cheap
Scandal of paintings sold for a mere pittance
Sunday, August 6, 2000 By Dalya Alberge
LONDON - Works of art worth tens of millions of pounds today have been sold off quietly by museums over the past 50 years for a few pounds. British art institutions such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Exeter City Museum have disposed of pictures by masters such as Van Dyck and Henri Fantin-Latour. They were sold without public notice, dismissed as too unimportant to keep.
Among the most serious cases is a painting by the 19th-century master, John William Waterhouse. In 1965, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro sold it for £200 ($300) to a private collector; today it is worth more than £5 million ($7.5 million).
"Most of the works were sold off as they were deemed to be artistically worthless", Christopher Wright, a leading Old Masters scholar, said. He discovered evidence of the sales while preparing a nationwide study of British art for Yale University Press. "They have been sold off without public notice," he said. "Many of the museums didn't dare make it public. They've all been proved wrong."
Mr Wright expressed disbelief at the '50s decision of the Exeter museum to "rape" its collection of 160 works - "there is no other word to describe the destruction of an entire museum collection". The auctions, which involved selling works for as little as £5 ($7.50), included Waterhouse's "Consulting the Oracle," four paintings by Fantin-Latour and one by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Caroline Worthington, fine art curator at Exeter, said that the sale took place at Christie's in 1954, "when High Victorian art was deeply unfashionable . . . We would like them back, most definitely." "We're talking household names", Mr Wright said, adding that many were bought by the heavyweight dealers Agnews and Colnaghi, who clearly appreciated the importance of the artists, even if the museums did not.
Tamsin Daniel, Truro's curator of art and exhibitions, said that the museum had needed money for storage and a lift. She conceded that the loss was painful. The Waterhouse went to a private collector bidding at Christie's. The £200 ($300) it cost him, she said, was "a bit different to what Andrew Lloyd Webber paid recently for a Waterhouse": £6.6 million ($9.9 million).
Leeds City Art Gallery and Museum, Mr Wright was told by an insider, actually disguised the provenance of works when selling them through an auction house. "They were described as property of Madame X," he said. "The sales were clandestine. They didn't say Leeds was de-accessioning. They were all Victorian pictures purchased from the Royal Academy.They got rid of dozens." Nigel Walsh, curator of exhibitions, expressed surprise at the news, denying that the gallery had sold anything. Nor did Evelyn Silber, its director, know anything about it until contacted by The Times. She later discovered that 37 paintings (nearly all Victorian) had been sold in 1939 under the then director, Philip Hendey, who went on to head the National Gallery in London. The Fitzwilliam in Cambridge sold more than 200 works in the 1950s. Although they were marked "property of the Fitzwilliam" in the catalogs, they were mixed up with hundreds of other lots, Mr Wright said. "They put them through the salerooms in dribs and drabs."
Mr Wright said that the Fortune-teller with Soldiers "was sold off as a copy, but it has since been published as the real thing worth millions".
Craig Hartley, a Fitzwilliam curator, said: "In retrospect, this seems a horrific thing to have done."
Among other institutions to have sold off paintings, Mr Wright said, were the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; the Cooper Art Gallery in Barnsley; the Holbourne Museum of Art in Bath; and the Birmingham City Art Gallery.
(Fox News)
Sotheby's checks pricing
Auction house appoints panel to oversee lawsuits
By Andria Cheng / Bloomberg News
NEW YORK -- Sotheby's Holdings Inc., the world's No. 2 auction house, said it will appoint an independent committee to oversee issues related to the civil and criminal lawsuits against the company over price-fixing charges. Chairman Michael Sovern said at Sotheby's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday that the company is trying to find "reasonable and prudent" ways to resolve the issue. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the company on charges that it colluded with Christie's International Plc, the No. 1 auction house, to fix commissions charged to buyers and sellers. "The lawsuit has been detrimental and distracting to the company," said Ronald Baron, chairman and chief executive of Baron Capital Group Inc., Sotheby's largest shareholder. In March, Sotheby's said it wouldn't pay a first-quarter dividend, the first time it hasn't done so, partly on concern the U.S. government's antitrust probe could affect its financial condition. The New York-based company said today it has no immediate plans to resume payment of dividends. The antitrust issues forced the auction house's former Chairman A. Alfred Taubman, a commercial real-estate mogul from Bloomfield Hills, and Chief Executive Diana Brooks to resign in February. The European Commission and other countries also are investigating the case. A federal judge last week granted a request by government prosecutors to delay pretrial questioning in the civil suit against the two auction houses. Together, London-based Christie's and Sotheby's control more than 90 percent of the $5-billion-a-year art auction market. Sotheby's shares today rose 25 cents to $19.13 in New York Stock Exchange trading. The shares have fallen 36 percent so far this year. The company, whose first-quarter loss widened in part because of increased expenses for its new Internet auction business, also said the venture will continue to depress its earnings this year and said it expects the business to break even in 2002. The Internet business includes both Sotheby's own Web site, which was started in January, and a joint site run with No. 1 Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc., which was started in November. It had combined sales of $31 million in the first half of this year, President William Ruprecht said. The company spent $42 million last year to start the online business, he said. Sotheby's will report its second-quarter earnings today after the market closes.
Clues disproved O'Keeffe's ownership of 'Canyon Suite' paintings
By STEVE PAUL and MIKE McGRAW - The Kansas City Star
The Canyon Suite works were discredited late last year, and now Kansas City paper conservator Mark Stevenson has disclosed more details about the reasons why -- many of the works were made with materials that O'Keeffe never used. "The more one looked at these the less they appeared to be by O'Keeffe," Stevenson said in an interview this week.
R. Crosby Kemper Jr. and his family foundations bought two dozen of the watercolors in 1993 for about $5 million from Santa Fe, N.M., gallery owner Gerald Peters, and Peters later donated four others to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Kemper Museum hired Stevenson, an independent contractor who specializes in preserving and restoring artwork on paper, to study the watercolors after R. Crosby Kemper Jr. was informed last fall that a scholarly research project about to be published had prompted serious questions about their authenticity. The project, known as a "catalogue raisonne," documented more than 2,000 verifiable O'Keeffe works and omitted 250 paintings and sculptures, including the Canyon Suite watercolors.
After the art-world fiasco erupted, Peters repaid the Kemper Museum and took the 28 watercolors back. Last spring, Peters also gave the museum a genuine early O'Keeffe oil painting valued at more than $1 million. Peters has said in recent months that he commissioned his own scientific analysis of the watercolors and, although he was still awaiting the results, he expected that some of the works would prove to be O'Keeffes after all. And Peters continues to question some of the conclusions of the catalog scholars, especially their contention that O'Keeffe only used certain specific papers when she was teaching at a small college in Canyon, Texas, in 1916 to 1918.
"A lot of people in the art community are amazed at their theory," Peters said of the catalog scholars. "How can anybody say what anybody used or didn't use in a school classroom?"
Stevenson spent nearly six weeks last fall studying the 28 watercolors. In the end, he confirmed for R. Crosby Kemper Jr. the validity of the research conducted over more than six years that led to the watercolors' omission from the O'Keeffe catalog.
Judith C. Walsh, a senior paper conservator at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and others involved in the catalog project have released little specific information about the Canyon Suite. It has been known, however, that she found a few of the watercolors were on paper manufactured later than 1916 to 1918, when the paintings were purported to have been made. Stevenson said he confirmed Walsh's finding that nine of the Canyon Suite works were on a cheap "groundwood," or manufactured pulp paper. A couple of the pieces were done on vintage typing paper and two were on a paperboard that came from something like a shirt box.
Although O'Keeffe did use an inexpensive newsprint for some well-known master works and a variety of scratch paper for sketching, she never salvaged papers or used anything but pristine sheets for her formal artworks, Stevenson and the National Gallery researchers found.
"Judy (Walsh) provided the information that O'Keeffe did not salvage paper," Stevenson said. "She always used fresh paper."
Walsh and Barbara Buhler Lynes, author of the two-volume Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne, were unavailable for comment Friday. However, Walsh elaborated on her research into O'Keeffe's materials in a recent essay accompanying an exhibit of the artist's works on paper now at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M.
Walsh said O'Keeffe used "the most unobtrusive paper possible" rather than the sort of textured papers found in several of the Canyon Suite works. In fact, only one of the works was on a kind of paper the artist used in her 80 years of painting, Stevenson said.
That was the Canyon Suite work titled "Tree," which was painted on a thin Japanese gampi paper. Despite its unabsorbent qualities, O'Keeffe used the paper for a couple of early watercolors, dated from 1916. But "Tree," said Stevenson, is hardly her work: "It alludes to a couple of known O'Keeffe images, but in a rather cumbersome way." Stevenson said the researchers also found that one of the watercolors actually had been painted with a water-based finger paint that O'Keeffe was never known to have used.
The Kansas City Star
Museums OK ethics guidelines for exhibits of private art
The guidelines were prompted partly by ethics questions surrounding last year's "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
August 4, 2000
NEW YORK (AP) -- The American Association of Museums has adopted new ethical guidelines on how museums should finance and oversee exhibits of private collections, a move prompted by a furor over financing of last year's "Sensation" exhibit and other art shows.
The guidelines, approved unanimously by the association's board and announced Wednesday, advise against some of the practices used by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its exhibit of works owned by British ad executive Charles Saatchi. The show was controversial because of the shock value of some of the art, including a depiction of the Virgin Mary featuring clumps of elephant dung. But ethical questions also arose because the museum accepted loan of the works from Saatchi and included Christie's auction house among the sponsors. Both Saatchi and Christie's stood to profit from the "Sensation" show of works by young British artists, critics contend, because the public exposure added to the artists' selling power.
The museum said at the time that it was merely doing what many museums do. On Thursday, Brooklyn Museum spokeswoman Sally Williams said, "We didn't know what the guidelines were until this morning, and we haven't had a chance yet to review them."
The new guidelines come at a time when less government funding means museums rely increasingly on donations from art dealers and collectors, corporations and auction houses -- all of whom could have a private commercial interest in public displays of art and artifacts. The guidelines urge avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest when accepting the loan of art for an exhibit. They also say the museum should maintain full authority in deciding which artworks to accept on loan and how they should be displayed.
Although the guidelines are voluntary for now, they may be adopted by the association's accreditation commission, which holds its next meeting in November. In that case, museums could risk losing funds from governments and foundations if they fail to comply with the rules.
"This code of ethics will have a big impact," said Edward H. Able Jr., president of the association of 3,000 museums and 11,400 museum professionals. "Many museums have been asking for guidelines like this, and they will help clear of some confusion in the field."
Sunday August 06 08:47 AM EDT New fire hits Mesa Verde
By Todd Hartman, Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
A new wildfire crossing into Mesa Verde National Park grew to 3,500 acres Saturday and was threatening several park buildings, including the headquarters and a museum containing thousands of artifacts. About 200 firefighters, along with air tankers and helicopters, are battling the Pony blaze, which forced the closure of the national park Friday, hours after it had reopened following last month's Bircher Fire. That blaze scorched about one-third of the 52,000-acre park, known as one of the country's premier archaeological preserves for its extensive catalog of centuries-old Anasazi ruins. An additional 100 firefighters were on their way Saturday afternoon to Mesa Verde from Alaska, said Joe Colwell, a spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Interagency Management Team. Those firefighters include some of the same crews who were on scene last month. Fire officials are also bringing in 10 archaeologists to ensure firefighters don't inadvertently damage ruins or artifacts while battling the blaze.
Full story at Denver Rocky Mountain News
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