MUSEUM SECURITY MAILINGLIST DIGEST (20 Feb 1997)

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Audit Say French Art Missing

PARIS (AP) Missing: one large marble statue weighing several tons. Last seen: French Ministry of Education.
The marble statue Alexandre Falguiere's 19th-century "Winner of the Race" is only one of 950 missing works, according to a scathing critique of the museum authority published Tuesday by the Audit Office.
France has such a rich abundance of art that its national museum authority has lent more than 100,000 works to ministries, embassies and other public facilities.
But now, the government watchdog agency says that legacy is being pilfered, lost, destroyed or damaged due to mismanagement.
The news comes at a time of record-high attendance: 15 million people visited museums in 1994, up 67 percent from 1981. Yet a $6.8 million deficit remains.
Auditors inventoried 5,000 works. Many had been destroyed or stolen, some surfaced at public auction, others simply vanished without a trace.
In one case, auditors looked for a painting that turned out to have been destroyed in an embassy fire in Turkey decades ago.
Another painting, Theodule Ribot's "The Good Samaritan," loaned to the French embassy in Poland in 1931, turned up in the National Museum in Warsaw. The museum authority had no explanation, the report said.
And some Renaissance tapestries made by the famed Gobelins tapestry works, which also were loaned to an embassy, surfaced at an auction, it said.
Auditors say it is impossible to put a price tag on the missing or damaged works, partly because some have been missing for so long.
The report blamed poor coordination between the museum authority and its facilities, a lack of funds, and the lack of a framework to encourage private and corporate sponsorship.
"The report is overwhelming," the daily Figaro said. "It challenges the museum authority and its usefulness."
The authority oversees 33 museums in France, including the Louvre, the Orsay museum, Versailles and the Picasso museum.
Although the Audit Office has no power of enforcement, its recommendations carry weight.
For example, a confidential, unpublished section of the report, widely publicized last month, revealed the existence of nearly 2,000 works in French museums that were confiscated by pro-Nazi Vichy officials from Jews during World War II. As a result, a complete listing of the works has been published on the Internet.
The report cited examples of mismanagement on every level. Thefts are reported to police late, if at all; inventories are out of date. A Henri Matisse medallion, destined for a museum in Nice, was forgotten in the back of a moving truck. Dozens of pieces of Sevres china and oriental art from the Louvre were lost when the University of Lille moved to new quarters in Villeneuve-d'Ascq.
The report also found many works stored in perilous conditions. One auditor discovered two pastel drawings and an 18th-century painting in the dusty cellar of the Education Ministry.
"They have since found their way back to the Louvre," the report said.

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Russia's New Rich Snap Up Art

MOSCOW (AP) One of Russia's new rich walked into an art gallery, took a look around and pointed to a wall lined with objects from various periods with no common theme.
"He said, `Pack me everything from this corner to that one,"' said a smiling Alexei Zaitsev, deputy director of Gelos, one of Moscow's leading antique galleries and auction houses.
Russia's new well-to-do might not yet be discerning art collectors, but after tossing their money at expensive cars, tropical resorts and casinos, they have turned to art, starting a market boom especially for Russian works.
Several leading banks now have corporate art collections, the wealthy flock to auction previews and government officials exchange antiques as presents.
"It's profitable to invest in Russian art of the 19th and early 20th century," said Zaitsev, sitting amid antique furniture and paintings. "Prices are rising most actively, both here and at the world market."
A Gelos auction this weekend featured a rather modest painting by 19th century artist Ivan Aivazovsky, valued at about $75,000, a Vasily Polenov landscape at $40,000, and a sketch by Valentin Serov for $15,000.
Before the Soviet Union crumbled, Russian art was often smuggled abroad and fetched premium prices, but the trend now is being reversed.
Several paintings in Gelos' next auction were bought at Christies and Sotheby's auction houses in London and are expected to fetch more in Russia.
"Good, solid Russian art of the 19th century is more expensive here. But art of a certain country should be more expensive in that country," Zaitsev said.
The legal trade in art is still rather new for Russia.
The Soviet market was largely limited to a handful of state-run shops and tightly knit groups of private collectors and dealers trading on the black market. The Soviet media, detective novels and thrillers frequently portrayed art collecting as being linked to crime.
The post-Communist free-for-all has ushered in a wild art market with an abundance of antiques shops and art dealers, many of them lacking experience and simply seeking to make a quick ruble.
"Once, the buyers were scientists, actors, writers," Anatoly Gostev, artistic director of Gamayun auctioneers, told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. "Now, these are the so-called `new Russians.' They are buying everything just to decorate their interiors."
Art auctions tend to be dominated by 19th century Russian paintings, many of them considered by experts to be rather pompous and of mixed quality.
The pictures of Aivazovsky, who painted 6,000 known works, and Ivan Shishkin, a realist landscape artist hailed in Soviet times, remain among the highest-priced.
"The new buyers ... want something that they know from childhood, which should also be expensive and striking. They don't care about its quality," said Valery Dudakov, surrounded by masterpieces that form one of Russia's top private collections of early 20th century avant-garde.
Dudakov, the former head expert of the Soviet Culture Fund who now advises Sotheby's and some corporate collectors in Moscow, is critical of Russia's art dealers.
"They claim they educate people's taste? Nonsense! They know quite well what can be sold and for how much, but they don't understand the essence of art," he said. "This is the main difference between art market in the West and Russian sales, which I cannot call an art market."
"They are selling names, not a concrete work," he said. "They are usually unqualified and uneducated people, and no books will help them. It's a question of experience, talent and general culture."
But the market is becoming more professional, and the buyers are getting more scrupulous, seeking expert advice on their collections and thinking before spending their money, Zaitsev said.
Dudakov still has hope for a civilized art market that will thrive on regular customers and experienced art dealers, as opposed to individual and outrageously rich buyers paying artificially inflated prices.
"This roguish kind of antique market will not last for long," he said. "In two, three years it will become civilized."

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