Monet’s Beach at Pourville, stolen from the National Museum in Poznan, Poland, about 10 years ago, has been recovered. And police have arrested the thief, who has apparently confessed to the crime.

According to the Art Loss Register, the painting has been on many “Top Ten” lists of stolen works for years. At the time it was stolen, the painting was valued at £615,000, and it’s probably worth more today.

In the theft, the painting was cut from its frame and replaced with a poor copy (painted on cardboard, ALR says). Fingerprints from the suspect, who is 41, helped police nab him, as did other traces he left behind in the museum.

Monet painted the work, one in a series, in 1882, and the museum — then in Germany — bought it in 1906.

Here’s a link to the article in The News, Poland.

Photo: Via Art Loss Register

Connoisseurship, as I’ve mentioned here before, is one of those loaded words in the art world. Still, from time to time, it’s amusing to test your eyes. The other day, Gerald Stiebel, a New York/Santa Fe gallerist who deals in Old Masters, European works of art, French 18th century furniture, and the like, posted an entry on his (new) blog, Missives From The Art World, called “What’s It Worth?”

Before you go there, exercise your eyes here. The entry examines two 18th Century French sideboards, one priced in the mid five-figures and the other in the low seven-figures (that’s as specific as he will get). This should be very easy for RCA readers.

Here they are:

1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, I’m pretty sure you answered correctly — for the why, and a close up of a key reason, go to Gerald’s post.

Photos: Courtesy Stiebel Ltd.  

“Is Good Limited?”

“Murderme Ltd.”

“Overthesofa Ltd.”

Got any idea what those titles are? Try the names of companies in Damien Hirst’s business empire. I’m not always a fan of Hirst’s work, but I have to appreciate his sense of humor after reading an article in the January Art Newspaper by Martin Bailey.

Bailey went through British corporate records and found those among the names claimed by Hirst for his companies. There’s also “Underthesofa Ltd.,” “Resign Ltd.,” “The Goose Wot Laid the Golden Egg Ltd.” and “Victim Ltd.” His main company, Bailey says, is “Science Ltd.”

Explaining the sofa moniker, Hirst apparently told Interview magazine, “I’ve always thought at the end of the day art just goes over the f—ing sofa. You can’t take it too seriously.”

Bailey also cites the Sunday Times Rich List, which estimated Hirst’s wealth at GBP 235 — or $378 million.

Bailey’s article is not (yet?) posted online, but it’s at newsstands.  

A week has passed since the publication of my deaccessioning op-ed in The New York Times: the screams have occurred, the rebuttal letters have been printed, and it’s time again for me to weigh in on the objections. 

First, it seems I must repeat (because this has been ignored or misconstrued): I am not pro-deaccessioning to raise money for operations or endowments. I merely think that, on occasion, it will be considered, like it or not, and the museum world should have a process for that. I proposed arbitration to make it tough, not easy. I expect proving the need for deaccessions to be onerous in itself, and the hurdle to be set high by arbitrators. But it must be done in the open and in an orderly way, and often it isn’t now.

Here are the stated objections, with my responses:

1) Donors will not give art if they know it may some day sold. This is a canard: they already know (or should know) that their gifts may be sold to raise money for future acquisitions. Those who fear this put restrictions on their gifts.

2) It is “unreasonably paternalistic” to put museums through arbitration. The answer instead is to let museums sell any art they purchased, but not donated works. To me, this “solution” is worse than current practice, and really does turn museums into galleries, subject to the times, the fashions and the whims of each director.

3) The art that could be sold would never raise enough money to make a difference. Maybe yes, maybe no. Don’t forget that my proposal included all institutions with collections: a sum that means nothing to the Getty could well help bail out a historical society. But if it didn’t make a difference, the arbitrator — in my scheme — would not permit the sale.

    Furthermore, I doubt that deaccessioning would ever be the sole solution to financial woes — it would be part of a package of measures, including new donations.

4) We should rework “professional practices” to mandate that gifts of art include a cash payment to the museum’s operating endowment “equal to a set percentage of the tax-deductible value of the work.” Nice idea, in theory, but I believe it is unworkable and will truly discourage donations of art.

5) The decisions to be made by the arbitrator are “too central to the integrity of a museum to be given to others.” In other words, don’t tread on me. Fair enough — except that no one would invade the museum’s prerogatives if mismanagement by the director and trustees hadn’t gotten the museum in trouble in the first place. Maybe the director and the trustees should be replaced by people who can preserve institutional integrity without outside help.

      And by the way, museums/arts institutions currently seek outside approval for other things central to their integrity — they go to court or to an attorney general’s office for permission to invade their endowments, for example. And they try to do it quietly or even secretly.   

6) If deaccessioning is allowed, trustees will regularly leap to it, changing “the board’s perception of its fiduciary responsibility to one more focused on asset management than philanthropy.” Ah, yes — the slippery slope. Here I must question whether the right people are on boards, for the right reasons, and — equally important — the relationship between the director and trustees.

Numbers 5 and 6 are the true crux of the problem. I’ll return to them in a separate post.  

As the dust settles at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, it is interesting that few, if any, voices have been raised in support of Michael Brand (right), who stepped down as director of the Getty Museum this week. Contrast that with the aftermath of Deborah Gribbon’s 2004 resignation, when practically everyone placed the blame on Getty CEO Barry Munitz and her colleagues rallied to her support.

Of course, Munitz was unloved in the museum world, and not of it either — as Jim Wood (below), the current Getty CEO, is. Wood (who, btw, curiously took time during this tumultuous week to write a letter to the editor rebutting my deaccessioning op-ed, more about which soon), of course, was the longtime head of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood retired from that job, but Chicagoans have always said, sotto voce, that he was eased out by powerful board chairman John H. Bryan.

But back to the Getty: according to my sources, neither Wood nor Brand liked one another, and Brand made no bones about that publicly. He told people. So, late last year, when Wood informed Brand that his contract would not be renewed upon its expiration at the end of this year, Brand worked out a better package and quit.  

Wood, it seems, may have been meddling a bit with Brand’s acquisitions aspirations, but not without expertise and support from trustees, who wanted better oversight. They also wanted Brand to cultivate donors who would contribute art, and Brand took the Getty job thinking he wouldn’t have to do much of that, one source told me.  

When I interviewed Wood in late November, 2008, for an article that ran last January in the Wall Street Journal, he told me that he wanted the Getty branches to be more collaborative and he instituted several Management 101 practices to get them to do that — like meeting once a week and writing better mission statements. At the time, he had not planned to make budget cuts, but he reversed himself very shortly after publication (yes, I checked with the PR department right before the article ran — no changes in the budget, I was told).

Aside from Brand, the other branch chiefs don’t seem to be chafing. Some Getty staffers say Wood has started to change the nasty, competitive, infighting culture that goes back to the days of Harold Williams. They are eager to dispel the notion that the Getty is structurally ungovernable, a notion that was repeated this week in several news reports.

Yet Munitz, for one, encouraged such thinking. A 2005 article in The New York Times, for example, contains this paragraph:

‘The fact is that they are one very important piece of what we do, but they are not the ultimate decision makers.’ Mr. Munitz said of the museum’s leaders, adding that the tensions were part of ”a philosophical, organizational issue that goes back 20 years.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, insiders say — the problem is cultural, not structural, they insist. Maybe, or maybe that’s wishful thinking.

In any case, Wood and the trustees now have a difficult recruiting job, not unlike the one faced by the Guggenheim Museum, when the director was supposed to report to Foundation CEO and former museum director Tom Krens. Trustees had to change that to win over Richard Armstrong. But I don’t see that happening in Brentwood.