Slow posting this week

Popped down to Manhattan for a quick visit, during which I managed to catch the late Byzantine show at the Met (more about that later).

Am still fighting off a cold, and will be heading down to DC shortly for a colloquium hosted by Tyler Cowen. Not much time left for posting -- hope to catch up once I get back.

Art history, market history

The first version of art history is written by dealers. They work on the front lines, making bets on artists and objects long before collectors, critics and curators decide what's truly valuable.

Not to mention publicizing and promoting artists and artworks. Critics may show independence in evaluating what's up in the galleries, but it's the dealers who set the menu. And many a "discovery" has been quietly handed over to a (buying) curator by a dealer whose own research efforts (and the contribution of hireling art historians) go entirely unrecognized.

To offer a glimpse into this rarefied world, the Getty Research Institute has mounted a small but engrossing exhibit titled "The Business of Art: Evidence From the Art Market." Consisting of 81 documents spanning 450 years, the show has no intention of covering its subject encyclopedically. Instead, the curators, Maria L. Gilbert and Mark Henderson, have assembled an eclectic array of ephemera from the Getty's archives to illustrate how values have been assigned to art through history. Advertisement

Among the items is a 1939 exclusive contract between the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard and the painter Georges Rouault; a ledger of "sales," "bargains" and "deals" by a 19th-century British collector who invented the steel pen nib; a haunting set of letters documenting how the Nazis forced sales by an art dealer in The Hague; and a colorful 1982 German board game in which players compete for art-world recognition, with the winner receiving this guidance: "From now on you can afford (practically) anything, your glory seems to be secured, your posthumous glory is merely a question of your inevitable demise (probably soon)."

From the NY Times, which also notes:

The exhibition is a coming-out party for the recently cataloged Duveen archive, a vast trove of information about the backstage operations of the international art trade. In the Getty's care since 1998, its contents have never been presented to the public. Among the gems is a book bearing the title, "Things Seen: Homes of Fine Goods." It contains typed and handwritten reports used by Duveen's associates — obtained who knows how — listing every valuable object inside certain British aristocratic homes.

The most eye-opening section of the exhibit is a set of documents laying bare Duveen's business dealings with Bernard Berenson, the Renaissance scholar and connoisseur who authenticated Italian old master paintings for Duveen and, in return, received a 10 percent commission (later upgraded to 25 percent), and a retainer. Displayed here is a 1928 contract reaffirming their secret agreement, along with an "attestation album" — a collection of photographic reproductions of Italian paintings, accompanied by Berenson's signed attributions — which Duveen occasionally presented to clients after a sale.

More on protecting the past in Iraq

A rather discouraging report in Sunday's NY Times on the ongoing looting of ancient sites in Iraq. This observation was interesting:

The occupation military has periodically beaten back looters. But the Italians are the only ones who have made a sustained effort to halt the looting. Since the fall, rotating teams of four to six Carabinieri, specially trained to protect Italy's antiquities, have tried to safeguard the archaeological sites in Dhi Qar Province.

The Carabinieri have made a detailed map of local sites, with aerial pictures of the extensive damage done by looting. They have arrested dozens of people. They have returned more than 400 objects to the Iraqi board of antiquities and cataloged them, in case they ever appear on the international art market.

As usual, the problem comes down to money: local guards are short of everything, while the looters are prospering and better equipped than ever. Alas, we are still waiting to hear the international archeological community start a fundraising drive for the site guards -- how about, "ammo for artifacts" as a slogan? -- though in all fairness, most archeologists don't get paid much, and are much more attuned to digging than development.

Nazi art loot miscellany

Using a musty bank vault as a backdrop, a prominent American lawyer announced Thursday he was filing a US$1 billion lawsuit on behalf of Holocaust victims whose precious artworks were stolen by the Nazis and sold off after World War II.

Edward D. Fagan, a New York-based attorney who has fought for reparations for American blacks who are descendants of slaves and for victims of South Africa's apartheid system, said the suit would be filed later Thursday in U.S. District Court in New York.

From CBS News. No idea how this will pan out; Fagan got a $45m settlement out of Bank Austria several years back, though, over other looted Jewish assets.

Meanwhile, in the NY Times:

More than a half-century after a Paris art gallery was looted by Nazis, one of the paintings that was taken has been returned to the owner's daughter.

A small pastoral painting, "Les Jeunes Amoureux" by François Boucher, was part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after a Jewish art dealer, Andre Jean Seligmann, fled with his family to the United States. The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector in 1993.

David Dee, the museum's executive director, returned the painting to Mr. Seligmann's daughter, Claude Delibes, and his daughter-in-law, Suzanne Geiss Robbins, on Thursday.

Ms. Robbins estimated that 400 paintings had been looted from Mr. Seligmann's gallery; 25 percent have been returned. The Louvre recently returned a painting of the Crucifixion to the family after discovering it was owned by Mr. Seligmann, who died in 1945.

Protecting the past in Iraq

Interesting profile in yesterday's Boston Globe of John Russell -- an archeologist whose name was much in the news during the Iraq war (some citations here).

Russell is still very much involved with preservation of Iraq's archeological heritage. For those who remember how the art historical community reacted to the war, note the following, about Russell's current work for the new Iraqi government:

It is a job other American archeologists, reluctant to partner with the US government and loathe to take time from their research, shied away from and for which Russell is especially well suited. Much of his day-to-day work in Iraq is bureaucratic drudgery, such as negotiating contracts to revamp the devastated national museum. But by the time he leaves this month, Russell intends to have the museum ready to reopen, thanks to a $1.7 million grant from the US State Department. And the atmosphere for the staff is vastly changed. Before the US invasion, he says, museum personnel put themselves in danger speaking their minds. Now, things are opening up. Asked how he feels about working for the US government, he retorts: "I'm working for the Iraqi government -- that's why I took this job."

The past months have mellowed his criticism of the United States' actions during the early days of the invasion. Initial reports that all of the Iraq Museum's artifacts were stolen proved exaggerated, though some 13,000 items that vanished in the days immediately following the American assault on Baghdad remain missing. "It is fair to say the US military could have done more," he says, "but I can't pretend to know what should have been done."

Anyway, read it for yourself.