Art: Scent of Scandal

All week long, Ottawa crowds poured into the National Gallery of Canada, and the gist of what they demanded was: take me to your fakes. The show of paintings from the collection of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. had proved unpredictably popular, but for all the wrong reasons. Between 60 and 70 of the 187 paintings in the exhibition were under critical indictment as phony—a scandal so big as to strike at the confidence that the art market is founded on.

Collector Chrysler had put on this same exhibition last summer in his own museum, a converted Methodist church in Provincetown, Mass. There the doubtful bona fides of many paintings won a scowl of worried if secret disapproval from the Art Dealers Association of America. The association had been formed early this year by a group of top Manhattan dealers to protect the public against shoddy practices and shady dealers; this was its first big occasion to act. Unobtrusively, the association got its able counsel, Ralph Colin, to try to warn Canadian art officials that the show, which was scheduled to go from Provincetown to Ottawa, was potentially damaging. The National Gallery of Canada put on the show anyway, in effect threw its own prestige behind the Chrysler paintings.

A Case of Ingestion. Lawyer Colin also alerted John Canaday, art editor of the New York Times, who had given the show a rhapsodic review when it was on display in Provincetown. Only when the story seemed ripe to break did Canaday rush to Ottawa to review the show again. This time he echoed what the association had been saying all along, explained his goof of last summer as being due to the intoxicating air of Cape Cod and “the ingestion of seafood platters.” Now the curious story began to unfold in public, and the Chrysler catalogue itself became a kind of classic.

A more bizarre assemblage of omissions, misspellings and mysterious documentation could hardly be imagined. While the catalogue devoted paragraphs to the pedigrees of Chrysler’s many acknowledged masterpieces—when they were painted, what collectors had owned them, when and where they had been sold, and what scholarly publications had mentioned or reproduced them—scores of paintings simply had a couple of lines giving date and gallery of purchase. A few of these paintings came from Manhattan Dealer Harry B. Yotnakparian, who simply let Chrysler make whatever attribution he wanted to on the assumption that a collector of such experience would surely know what he was doing. The vast majority of suspect paintings came from another Manhattan dealer named Joly Hartert.

“The Best Publicity.” But often, when the catalogue said more, confusion reigned. A Hartert Redon was said to have been owned by A. Giez Delius, but a Hartert Vlaminck was listed as having belonged to F. Delius Giese. Three Seurats were listed as having been bought at Paris’ municipal auction in 1949, but the Paris art world has no memory of this important sale.

Dealers Yotnakparian and Hartert in effect made no defense that the paintings were authentic. “We don’t sell paintings ‘by’ anyone,” said Yotnakparian blandly. “We sold the paintings as ‘attributed to.’ ” A lawyer for Hartert described him as “one of the few art dealers who have no pretensions. He guarantees nothing.” Chrysler himself apparently fell into the trap by a dogmatic but sometimes erroneous faith in his own taste and judgment.

In Ottawa, a member of Parliament demanded to know whether the government should not make an investigation of its own. in view of the fact that the National Gallery had so deeply committed itself to the Chrysler exhibit. At the gallery, goateed Director Charles Comfort sought what comfort he could in denouncing the American charges and in celebrating Ottawa’s sudden new interest in art. Said he bravely: “We expect we will have even bigger crowds. This is the best publicity we could possibly use.”‘