Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Seizure: Federal Prosecutors Issue Forfeiture Action

Federal prosecutors have filed another forfeiture complaint, this one for a 13th century painting that had been up for sale in the Important Old Masters sale at Sotheby’s in January. Sotheby’s voluntarily pulled the painting and told Courthouse News Service that it had “cooperated fully with the government on this matter.” Sotheby’s has not been accused of wrongdoing. The troubling issues with the work surfaced when Sotheby’s was doing due diligence on the painting.

sothebys-madonna-cimabueCourthouse News said the painting was a “Madonna and Child” (at right) listed in the catalogue as by a “Florentine painter within the ambit of Cimabue.” The painting had “disappeared from a Swiss safety deposit box nearly three decades ago was imported to the United State this year” to be auctioned, according to the forfeiture complaint.

It’s a complicated case, but here’s the gist, quoting from CN:

The complaint details a mysterious Feb. 6, 1991 report that Geneva police provided to Interpol investigating the theft allegations, which appear to involve a squabble over an inheritance from the late Camille Marie Rose Aprosio.

That report is thin on details about the lives of Aprosio and her family, and it is difficult to locate public information about them. Born Aligardi, Aprosio owned half of the painting when she died in 1980, and left her interest to her heirs Paulette and Roger Aligardi, according to the complaint.

These heirs designated as a representative to that interest a man named Henri Aligardi, whose relationship to them is not revealed in the complaint. The other half of the interest belonged to a man named John Cunningham, prosecutors say.

“In or about 1986, Henri Aligardi and Cunningham placed the painting in a new safe deposit box at a separate branch of UBS in Geneva,” the complaint states.

“The heirs of Camille Marie Rose Aprosio reported that Cunningham had also ceded a percentage of his interest in the painting to two other individuals, Michael Hennessy and John Ryan. Hennessy and Ryan subsequently reported that Cunningham had removed the painting from UBS to an account held at Lloyd’s Bank in Geneva and solely in Cunningham’s name.”

But no one appears to know what happened to it since then. And the report did not say who consigned the work to Sotheby’s — or where it is now. But the evidence must be pretty good for the U.S. Attorney’s office to issue a forfeiture complaint.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s via Courthouse News

Koons: One Big Show In More Ways Than One

Koons interviewI’ve never seen a press preview like the one I attended today. The Whitney was unveiling its Jeff Koons retrospective. When I arrived, safely 10 minutes or so after the doors opened, the line of press people extended around the corner. Inside was packed too. Some of us went straight to the galleries; then there was a program.

After Whitney director Adam Weinberg spoke, Donna DeSalvo, the chief curator and deputy director for programs, and exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf took center stage too — and then, when it was time for Koons to speak, all the TV cameras (many) went up and so did most of the cell phone cameras in the room.

Koons didn’t say much worth noting, IMHO, except perhaps that he was now focused on the future and had three decades left to continue his work. (Koons is 59.) He added that he hoped people would “find meaning” in his work.

Weinberg said the Whitney had “spared no expense to match his vision,” referring to Koons and the exhibition. Weinberg explained that visitors can walk chronologically through the show (bottom floor to top) and noted that “contradiction is an essential element of his work.” DeSalvo noted Koons’s foresight and said that “in many cases, Jeff has had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision.” (For example, getting those basketballs to be suspended in a vitrine required the help of a Nobel prize winner.)

The exhibition spans the time frame of “35 years ago” to “literally works finished last week,” DeSalvo said.

Let me stipulate: I am a skeptic when it comes to Koons. I refer you to the recent New York magazine piece by Carl Swanson, which is well worth a read and which said, among other things:

…Koons is, by the measure of sales of new work, which is the money-mad art world’s only objective measure, the most successful living American artist, but he has never before had a museum retrospective in New York, his home base for 36 years. And it’s clear that, for him, one is not enough. “Even though the Whitney has given me the Breuer building, there still isn’t that much space,” he says, explaining why he’s staging these two simultaneous shows after such a long hiatus. …

…[BUT] What’s new in the Gagosian and Zwirner shows is that he’s trying to place himself in art history—quite literally, by placing art history in his work—dragging classical statues onto the canvas or casting them in plaster. His references this time are Picasso and Praxiteles. 

I have seen only the Whitney exhibit, not the two new gallery shows, and the best thing I can say about it is that is is beautifully installed. Kudos to the Whitney on that score. On the other hand, I’m still not convinced of his merit, and I look forward to other peoples’ reviews (I’m not writing one).

For now, I’m going to let readers judge. Whatever your opinion going into this, you should have a look, if you claim to be interested in art. Here are some pictures from the exhibit:

Koons gallery 2

 

Koons gallery

 

Koons1

 

Koons -A

 

Koons -Venus

 

Koons torso

Maybe The Ka-Nefer-Nefer Dispute Isn’t Over — UPDATED

Ka-NeferNeferSome cases never go away. Two years ago, The Saint Louis Art Museum won a court battle in its case to keep the 3,200-year-old mummy mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, when a federal court judge ruled that it should remain in its collection — a ruling that “chastises the U.S. attorney’s office for trying to seize the ancient relic through civil forfeiture proceedings.” The quote is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

U.S. District Court judge Henry Autrey

…said the government did not provide any proof that the mummy mask was “stolen, smuggled or clandestinely imported or introduced” as required under the forfeiture law – only that it went missing….

…[But] The museum’s research showed the mask was part of the Kaloterna private collection during the 1960s, before it was purchased in Switzerland by a Croatian collector, Zuzi Jelinek, who then sold the mask to Phoenix Ancient Art in 1995.”

Now, however, the Egyptian government has issued a statement saying (in part):

Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim said that he will resort to the private sector in the United States to practice pressures on St. Louis Art Museum according to the agreements signed in this regard. He stressed that Egypt will not abandon its right to “Ka-nefer-nefer” mask.

Hat tip to the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s alternative weekly paper, which reported the development on a blog last Friday, and brought us up to date on developments since 2012:

…When the government tried to appeal in January 2014, however, it apparently missed a filing deadline, causing Judge James Loken to remark the government now had to “beg for a do-over.”

Last week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the government that do-over. Loken, who wrote the judgement, chastised the government lawyers who “knew many months prior to the order of dismissal of the possible need to amend its pleading.”

One judge, Diana Murphy, agreed with the ruling but nevertheless showed some sympathy with the other side, saying”

I concur in the court’s opinion but write separately to express my concern about what the record in this case reveals about the illicit trade in antiquities…The substantive issues underlying this litigation are of great significance, and not only to museums which responsibly seek to build their collections. The theft of cultural patrimony and its trade on the black market for stolen antiquities present concerns of international import. These issues affect governments and the international art and antiquities markets, as well as those who seek to safeguard global cultural heritage.

Egypt’s statement is dated today, not Friday, but then again it may have  been updated.

UPDATE: The Art Law Report has an excellent analysis and a crack at what may happen next here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of SLAM 

Another Great Job Opens Up — In London

Surprise: today Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, said he was stepping down from his job next year, as soon as a successor can be found. Penny will be 65 then, and according to The Telegraph, he plans to “spend more time with ‘family, friends and books’.”  Penny became the NG’s director in 2008.

nicholaspennyjpg_2826541bOften, when the “spend more time with family” reason is used, something else is amiss — and it means the person was fired. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, but never say never.

Yet, as The Telegraph continued:

It will also bring to an end the most successful period in the National Gallery’s history.

Last year, annual visitor numbers topped six million for the first time. The 2011 Leonardo da Vinci exhibition was the most visited show ever to be staged at the London gallery.

Penny’s departure means that both Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, where Sandy Nairn announced his imminent departure recently, and the NG are in need of new directors — big shoes to fill.

I’ve often praised Penny (here, here and here)  for taking controversial stands. Interestingly, Richard Dorment, The Telegraph‘s art critic, wrote today that

The only surprising thing about Nicholas Penny’s announcement that he is to retire in 2015 after six years as Director of the National Gallery is that he lasted as long as he did. Penny is among the most distinguished scholars and gifted curators of his generation, the author of a seemingly endless stream of books, articles and catalogues on all aspects of Renaissance art. Since people like him are usually too sensible to want to direct museums, when news broke that he was to leave his post as curator of sculpture at the National Gallery in Washington to take up an appointment at Trafalgar Square the museum and gallery world roared its approval.

And I too was delighted, though puzzled that anyone would want trade his extraordinarily successful career in Washington for the thankless job of directing a national institution in this country.

Dorment goes on to give his reasons, here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Telegraph

Why The Morgan’s Roger Wieck Is A Surprising Proselytizer

R.WieckAnecdotally, we think we know that interest in “older art” is waning, and a smaller pool of those anecdotes suggest that it’s partly because of their subject matter. In this increasingly secular age, religious subjects — and some historical subjects — seem to be of less interest to some art-lovers and collectors. When a story or a symbol is involved — even as simple as a lily, representing purity, or a fish, for Christ — people miss the significance. In 2009, The Art Newspaper wrote about this problem, and how the Victoria and Albert Museum dealt with it when reopening its revamped Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. 

The subject has been on my mind since then.

Earlier this year, when I reported on the sale of the Rothschild prayer book, it was striking that a masterpiece that was fought over by five bidders in 1999, when it sold for $13.379 million, had only one bidder in January. It sold for $13.605 million. While some of the difference in interest has to do with the big-time money flowing increasingly into contemporary art; some — sources told me — probably had to do with the religious nature of a prayer book.

One expert I spoke with for that story was Roger S. Wieck (at left), curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum* — who is so steeped, so knowledgeable, about illuminated manuscripts, which are mostly devotional, and about the liturgy and about Biblical stories, that I was surprised when he told me he was a non-believer.

So I decided to use Wieck as a hook to talk about interest in religious art now, at least on a mini-scale. The result is half-profile, half-exposition of his exhibit now on view at the Morgan: Miracles in Miniature: The Art of the Master of Claude de France.

Published today by Al Jazeera America, the piece explains why Wieck grew interested in illuminated manuscripts as he was studying art history. And he also explains a couple of the attractions held by Medieval and Renaissance art, which is mostly religious in nature, that other categories don’t have:

“It’s the variations on a theme that’s so appealing,” he says, naming one: “It’s so interesting to see how many variations there are on the Annunciation. Is there a lily? Where does the artist put the lily? How is the Holy Spirit shown: a dove, a stream of light?” 

I’d never thought about that before, but he is absolutely correct. Then, later in the article:

…Wieck also notes that in an era when art appreciation frequently involves seeking out works by well-known artists, “One of the attractions of medieval art is that it’s not signed and is insecurely attributed, so it’s not about names. We don’t know who the Master of Claude de France is. We know by the eye that something is by him. That aspect I find challenging and very rewarding because all the judgments are about what you see.”

miraclesI agree with that, too.

You can see a digital facsimile of the Prayer Book of the Master of Claude de France, btw — right here. But I hope after reading my article, you’ll also want to go see the exhibit.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Morgan.