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Art: Who Painted What?

5 minute read
TIME

METROPOLITAN REATTRIBUTES 300

PAINTINGS proclaimed the headline in the New York Times, and the text went on to add that the changes affected 15% of the museum’s European collection.

A scandal? Well, not really, although the Met is under heavy attack for the seemingly high-handed procedures of Director Thomas Moving in selling off various esteemed pictures without the consent of the curators involved (TIME Oct. 16). In this case, the reassessment is largely the result of the keen eye and energetic investigations of a young curator for European paintings, Everett Fahy, 31, whom Moving brought in three years ago. Many European paintings had to be moved to new galleries to make room for Henry Geldzahler’s 1970 show of New York painting and sculpture, and the transfers gave Fahy and other curators an opportunity to re-examine the paintings and rewrite the labels. The result was a tale of artistic detective work, and an object lesson in how fragile and mysterious is the expertise that separates a supposed masterpiece from a craftsmanlike job or even a forgery.

Some of the corrections were easy.

For instance, the Met examiners found on Ingres’ Odalisque en Grisaille a monogram enclosed in a circle, which Ingres’ student Armand Cambon used to sign his works. X rays made by Hubert von Sonnenburg, the museum’s restorer, revealed that there was no underpainting or preliminary sketches in the Velasquez portrait of Philip IV, so Met experts concluded it was probably a copy, since most great artists sketch in some tentative ideas before they produce the completed work.

Some of the reattributions were, in fact, long overdue. Everybody knew that Hubert van Eyck was a carver and maker of frames. So the two wings of a triptych attributed to him could not possibly be his, but presumably were the early work of his young brother Jan.

Finally, the question of authenticity often comes down to aesthetic sensibility. Take A City on a Rock, long assigned to Goya. Says Fahy:

“Every time Goya put his palette knife to a painting, he knew what he was doing. There are no waste strokes. In A City on a Rock everything just falls apart.” As a result, Fahy concluded that the picture was not by Goya but by Eugenic Lucas, a 19th century imitator. Or in the case of Rembrandt’s long-admired Old Woman Cutting Her Nails, says John Walsh, a curator in the European painting department at the Met:

“Scholars say there is a real weakness in the structure and technique of painting in the work. The hand is not very well executed, and there are whole areas which are not as firmly painted as in his authentic works.”

Not all the reattributions were a downgrading. Restudying a landscape attributed to a minor Dutch artist, Allart van Everingden, Fahy’s experts concluded that it was painted by Jacob van Ruisdael, one of the great landscapists of all time, thereby increasing its assessed value at least tenfold. The experts decided that a nativity “attributed to the Florentine school” had been painted by Giotto himself.

Time Lag. Outright forgeries can usually be detected by chemical analysis (use of pigments that had not been invented at the time of the original painting, electronic dating of the wood or canvas or clay). But even the most careful scholarship is uncertain. Says Horst W. Janson, chairman of the department of fine arts at New York University: “Nothing can be taken for granted. There is no such thing as the final word. What you read on a label in a museum hardly ever reflects the latest state of scholarship-there is an inevitable time lag, in part not to offend donors, in part not to disillusion the public.” Largely, when it is a question of whether something was produced by the master himself or by a member of his workshop (and many old masters maintained extensive workshops), the eyeball alone is still decisive. Bernard Berenson freely changed his attributions. In her reminiscences of B.B., his longtime librarian Nicky Mariano remembers how he would view a canvas years after the first inspection and reverse himself. “What of it?” he would say. “I have learned to see more clearly, and that alone is important.”

The game of attribution can involve big money. When the collection of Texas Oil Millionaire Algur Hurtle Meadows was declared largely a collection of fakes by the Art Dealers Association of America, Meadows’ investment, valued at $5,000,000, depreciated overnight into a collection of junk. The Met’s own famed Etruscan warriors, proudly exhibited for 28 years, were relegated to the basement when it was discovered that they were skillful forgeries produced by a Roman tailor back in 1914.

A Mrs. Mary Lake sold a portrait of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and got $325 for it from Parke-Bernet. Later, experts certified it a Raphael, and Mrs. Lake sued the buyer, claiming the painting was now worth $ 12 million, and that she had been deceived by earlier “experts” who said it was a painting by an unknown member of the Italian school.

From $325 to $ 12 million? The contrast is staggering. The Met’s reattributions are not quite of that order, involving more whether to attribute paintings to workshop rather than to master. As Sherman E. Lee, the director of Cleveland’s Museum of Art, emphasizes, who painted the picture is not the point. The point is the picture. Says he: “The whole problem of attribution is, fortunately or unfortunately, that it is tied to a value in money. This gets mixed in with the art, and people stop looking at the pictures and look at the labels.”

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