December 14, 2000
CONTENTS:
- The Art Newspaper - FORUM
- Artworks and Honesty
(The details of an old painting's provenance can often look like a verbal maze,
a shorthand catalogue of terse allusions to auctions, exhibitions, reproductions
and the lives of former owners)
- EU deals blow to art world
Subject: The Art Newspaper - FORUM
From: Liz Moody-Stuart e.moodystuart@theartnewspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/forum/forum.asp
We now have a forum on http://www.theartnewspaper.com, often linked to articles on the site, so as to encourage discussion among the visitors to our site. We could definitely do with some more discussion on this page ..........
Many thanks
Elizabeth Moody-Stuart
Website editor
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
Artworks and Honesty
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Wednesday, December 13, 2000
The details of an old painting's provenance - the history of its ownership - can often look like a verbal maze, a shorthand catalogue of terse allusions to auctions, exhibitions, reproductions and the lives of former owners. Provenance is just the kind of thing that only museum curators and art historians concern themselves with, because only they are interested in the minutiae of receipts and sales records that make up the economic background of the history of art. For the most part, the details of the provenance of the works in museum collections have remained invisible to the public just as the administrative records of the museum remain invisible. . But everything changes when the ownership of a work of art is disputed, and especially when the dispute arises out of a global trauma like World War II. War always means theft, and in the case of World War II it meant systematic theft. It is striking how that war is still being fought, more than a half century later, not with blood and bombs but with information. Theft can be undone, to an extent, by restitution, but restitution is not possible without information. In the case of stolen paintings, this means providing a public record of provenance. . In late November the National Gallery in Washington returned a painting by Frans Snyder to the heirs of the family that owned it before the Nazis confiscated it in 1941. The Stern family, the rightful owners, learned of the painting's existence from a National Gallery Web site devoted to the provenances of paintings with clouded pasts. A great deal of research has gone into discovering the histories of these paintings, but the research is largely useless unless it can be made available to the public. That, of course, is where the Web comes in. . In a recent agreement between the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, museums now will be required to research and publish on their Web sites the provenances of artworks acquired from 1933, when the Nazis came to power, to 1945. Many museums have already begun to do so. This is one of the most pertinent and valuable uses that museums and their public can make of the Web. . It is hard to estimate how many incomplete provenances will be fleshed out over time and how many works with suspicious pasts will be restored to their proper owners. But this kind of disclosure will clarify the history of a museum's collections and give it clear title to a sound conscience.
http://www.iht.com/articles/4132.html
EU deals blow to art world
A DEAL between Britain and the rest of the European Union over an artists' resale rights levy was thrown out by the European Parliament yesterday. The vote reopens the row over droit de suite, a sliding-scale levy which could damage Britain's £2.2 billion-a-year art market. Droit de suite, which operates in most EU countries, is paid by the seller of an art work to the artist or to his family for 70 years after his death. A compromise was reached this year that would have delayed the introduction of droit de suite in Britain and limit the amount paid. Its supporters said artists should benefit from the increasing value of their work, but opponents said Britain's art market would lose business to those of America and Switzerland.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/