Previous Posts: November 2013

The Nazis sold thousands of the confiscated works on the open art market to fill wartime coffers. Repeal or reform of the 1938 law could unravel an intricate web of art deals involving such works that have been negotiated around the world in the decades since, something that even many museum curators like Mr. Büche are loath to consider.

Despite the lengths Germany has gone to to repair the moral and material damage done during World War II, for decades the restitution of confiscated art was not a topic of discussion or action here, and no German government has sought to repeal the Nazi law.

Your post questions why the law has not been repealed; and, on the surface, it is a reasonable question.  Framing the issue in that way of course obscures a veritable plethora of considerations and ramifications that would flow from repeal of a law, that you have noted, has served as the root of good title to the works upon which many subsequent transactions have undoubtedly been based.  The sheer effluxion of time since the works were taken will mean that many of those works are now in the possession, and have been through the hands, of many people and institutions whose conduct could not be reasonably impugned, and who have acted only in good faith and almost certainly without notice of what may, upon repeal of the 1938 law, become a defect in the title to the works.  Repeal of the 1938 might well satisfy a moral need but the consequence will almost inevitably be the visiting of considerable harm of other people and institutions who are on any any view blameless.  It is for this reason that many common law jurisdictions will ordinarily protect the position of a bona fide purchaser for value without notice.

Nothing that I have written is intended to suggest that restitution cannot or should not be made where the circumstances reasonably permit it.  I write only to observe that the failure to repeal the 1938 law may not be so much a moral failure as a recognition of the extraordinary consequences that may flow and the almost impossible balancing of the many interests that would be affected.  That in itself is not a reason to stay restitution, however it must also be acknowledged that the intergeneration unravelling of so many transactions will not be without ramification or consequence, and the results could well be incredibly harsh for some people who could only be properly described as innocent.  Many legal scholars will tell you that difficult cases tend to make bad law, and these circumstances may become a stark demonstration of the truth of that adage.

Art has become an efficient instrument for hiding cash. Swiss banks are no longer a very private place. But a warehouse in Switzerland — or, for that matter, New Jersey — is nicely confidential.

And art is a way to clean up your dirty wealth. Say you sell, well, drugs. You might buy a painting for $7 million, paying $2 million in cash (helping the seller to avoid taxes), so the transaction is listed as $5 million. You put it in a warehouse for two years, let it predictably appreciate, and then sell it for $9 million. You've not only made $2 million, but you've cleaned another $2 million. Nobody the wiser.

Art, too, is a market that can be handily manipulated in a way that is likely more beautiful than art itself to financial fixers. If you own, for instance, five Warhols, you might put one up for auction, participate yourself in bidding up the price — you might even buy it yourself at a high price — thereby increasing the value of your other four paintings (which, now you can borrow against at their higher valuation).

A notable anomaly in the market is that old masters, with their limited supply, are now in less demand and are often priced more modestly than new artists, with unlimited supply. That defies economic logic — yet can be explained. Living artists print money. If you are a big buyer who helps set prices, you might be offered work at a goodly increase over an artist's last price point: $2 million, where the last sale was at $1 million. For that, you get one thrown in free, hence the deal has cost you nothing, but doubled the value for everybody else who holds the works, including the artist — leaving everybody happy.

Perhaps we need an FSA or SEC for the art market now that it has become a financial asset stored in Swiss vaults.

At least the market indicates to an economist like me that Old Masters are still valued more as art than as financial vehicles often for dodgy buyers.

The five painters have been chosen by no less than three curators (1.666 artists each?), whose ramblings in the catalogue are a disgrace to the English language and an insult to the few poor souls wandering through Tate Britain on the day I visited. No wonder there was hardly anyone there. Why should anyone visit an institution so insensitive to the needs of communication that its catalogues contain sentences that proceed “As painting is no longer in a position of autonomy — alone and apart — this also entails a move away from an idea of medium specificity, defining a practice as ‘painting’ or ‘film’, and towards a post-medium age, what a recent conference at Harvard examined as the ‘medium under the condition of its de-specification’ ”?

It's interesting that the Tate is showing five contemporary painters with such a fanfare. Ten years ago painters were meant to be extinct and even five years ago they were an oddity. Now painting is everywhere and it's the installations that look old hat.

I wondered if you could thank Damien Hirst for this, for overdosing everyone on rotting animals and chemist's shops and for hard-pedalling painting again.

“What kind of a state is it that confiscates my private property?” the Spiegel quoted Gurlitt as saying. The magazine said Gurlitt, 80, who has until now shied away from journalists, agreed to spend several days with a reporter.

“They must be returned to me,” Spiegel quoted Gurlitt as saying. “They are putting all this in a false light. I won’t speak to them and I won’t give anything back -- no, no, no.”

"Without this, we would be in trouble,” Tobias Meyer says. It’s a warm October morning in New York City, and the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s is standing in front of a huge canvas depicting a horrific car crash, the vehicle gruesomely crumpled against a tree. The label reads, “Andy Warhol. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) 1963. Estimate upon request.” The huge (8-foot-by-13-foot) canvas is, by all accounts, a masterpiece; part of Warhol’s disaster series – his reflections on mortality. Nearby are other rare treasures consigned for Sotheby’s all-important November auctions: paintings from the collection of Steven Cohen – the notorious billionaire hedge fund manager; a $40 million Picasso; a 56.9 carat pink diamond. Yet Meyer cannot stop thinking about that Warhol.

Few people will ever know how hard he fought for this painting – or understand how much he has riding on it. Twenty-three blocks south, in midtown, Meyer’s archrival at Christie’s has amassed the largest cache of art ever to come to auction – more than a half-billion dollars’ worth. In an all-out battle over the summer, Christie’s beat Sotheby’s on consignment after consignment, snaring major trophies of the contemporary art world by superstar artists such as Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Koons, Christopher Wool, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. By early fall, the roster for the Christie’s November 12 auction was expected to sell for between $500 million to $700 million.

Just weeks before the sales were to start, Meyer had nothing that could compete with the caliber of art Christie’s was bringing to market. That Warhol was his last shot at a major consignment, and as its owner wavered throughout September, Meyer flew to Switzerland to plead his case. When that didn’t clinch the deal, he invited the collector to spend the weekend at his country house in Connecticut. The pressure on Meyer was enormous and mounting. And it wasn’t just Christie’s colossal sale weighing on him; Sotheby’s largest shareholder, hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, was growing increasingly disgusted by the company’s lagging performance. In an open letter, he castigated the company’s management and demanded that Meyer’s boss, CEO Bill Ruprecht, be fired.

“You know, I talk about the near-death experience,” Meyer says, recalling his hectic summer. He tells the story of how he put his heart and soul into winning the picture; how finally – right before the print deadline for the auction catalogue – he got word that the consignment was his. Meyer pauses for a moment, mid-tale, as though to add drama to his victory. Then, suddenly, something strange happens: His chest caves deeply, as though a huge weight has been dropped on him. He holds out his hand, as if reaching for support. His voice trembles into a deep, raw sob. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he finally says in a hoarse whisper. Meyer – renowned in the art world for his poise on the auction block – steps behind a wall and into a side gallery where privately, quietly, he wipes a few tears from his cheeks.

• Is it so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune?
• Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance?
• Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning or history?

Can't we just take a high-quality photograph of it and hang that on a wall? Is it the art or the rarity that gives it value?

Perhaps time for a new 3D printing option?

Fascinating -- the Christie's video which you slam (" swaggering, smirking, vulgar display of taste-free excess") has "been removed by the user" from YouTube.

While in a NYC yesterday a person at the Met Museum suggested that the Koons was worth its price because he is more accessible than say Bacon.

Does accessible in the art world now mean shallow and lacking content.

[...] forgers teach us to doubt connoisseurs. There’s a myth out there, propagated by the market and some strains of academe, that certain thoroughbred experts can smell authentic art at 100 yards. After more than a century of bad attributions, reattributions and long-lived fakes, you’d think we would know better than to believe in such fantasy creatures. The truth is, the connoisseur’s eye works brilliantly in that vast majority of attributions where an artwork comes without a name attached but clearly has a single maker’s signature look. And then that eye fails utterly in those remaining, more iffy cases where a piece looks quite like some artist’s work, but may almost as easily be by someone else — including a forger.

Every time an expert is fooled by a fake, the faker has once again taught us that connoisseurship is not to be trusted. More important, we’re reminded that the whole idea of a unique artistic “touch,” along with the ideal of “authenticity” that goes with it, may be beside the point in our understanding of art.

Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made. “Forgeries must be served hot,” said the art historian Max Friedländer. I’ve seen two “Vermeers” that were painted in the nineteen-twenties by the king of modern forgers, the Dutchman Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), and which hung unchallenged, for decades, in the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. They are ridiculous. Among other blinking signs of fraudulence, there’s an interesting suggestion that the likes of flappers and Greta Garbo inhabited seventeenth-century Delft.

How could anyone ever, for a minute, have mistaken those howlers for Vermeers? That’s easy. Connoisseurs are products of their times as much as anyone else, subject to the same unexamined assumptions. But it’s usually a connoisseur who soonest smells a rat. He or she does so not by being wary but by becoming puzzled in a normal pursuit of pleasure.

What do we see when we look at a painting? Decisions. Stroke by stroke, the painter did something rather than something else, a sequence of choices that add up to a general effect. If you’re like me—and, yes, I count myself a middling connoisseur—you register the effect and then investigate how it was achieved; walking the cat back, as they say in espionage. As a trick, ask yourself, of details in a painting, something like, “Why would I have done that in that way?” The aim is to enter into the mind, and the heart, of the creator. Attaining it entails trust, like that of a child attending a fairy tale.

To deny connoisseurship is to deny that there are visually discernable differences between the work of one artist and that of another who is imitating his style.  If that were true then why buy the original if a copy or similar work is as good.

Copyists and forgers are artists and some are very good artists but the point is attribution rather than quality, and either an artists work has unique qualities or attribution of unsigned works is irrelevant except to price.

As to whether there are individuals who can recognize these unique qualities, they vary at least as much as the quality of artists' work.

This should all be obvious to anyone who looks at art.