Art: Secret Choice

A ritual air of sanctioned duplicity at times surrounds auctions where the stakes loom high. Ostensibly, two big art dealers bid against each other until the hammer falls. In all probability, each represents a major museum or collector who has secretly commissioned the dealer to bid for them. The theory is that if the true bidders were known the price would skyrocket. When the game is played out, the art world is left to guess who actually bought the piece.

Thus it was with Velásquez’s portrait of his mulatto assistant, Juan de Pareja, which brought $5,544,000 at Christie’s last November—the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction. The winning bid belonged to Wildenstein & Co., and young Alec Wildenstein explained at the time, with a straight face, that the family gallery had bought it because his great-grandfather had been in love with it and left instructions to snap it up if it ever came on the market. But last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced proudly that the Velásquez was theirs, admitting Wildenstein had bid on it by arrangement with them. Met Director Thomas Moving explained that the bulk of the money came from a fund set up back in 1917 by Isaac Fletcher, industrialist-banker, who stipulated that it should be used only for purchases.

In the five and a half months that the picture has been out of sight, hidden away in a back room of Wildenstein’s Manhattan gallery, the Met’s chief restorer, Hubert von Sonnenburg, has wrought some minor miracles. He cleaned off the aging varnish, discovering a new richness of skin tones, transforming Juan’s lace collar to a blazing white, and revealing the background as a rich orchestration of grays rather than the rather dim greenish cast it had had. More important, he found that a 1½ in. margin at the top and one of 2⅛ in. at the right side had been folded under for framing purposes some time in the 19th century. With the canvas restored to its original size, the figure occupies the space with new authority and commanding ease.

Hoving was frankly ecstatic, declaring the portrait “one of the half-dozen most important single acquisitions” in the museum’s history. Said he: “When you have a combination of a great master at the full height of his powers, painting a subject he obviously deeply understands and enjoys, that has by luck come down 322 years in pristine condition, you have something that is really extraordinarily special.”