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Metropolitan Reattributes 300 Paintings

Metropolitan Reattributes 300 Paintings
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January 19, 1973, Page 69Buy Reprints
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The “Odalisque,” whose attribution the Metropolitan Museum has said will change from Ingres to a lesser‐known artist, is only one of about 300 Old Master paintings that the institution has downgraded in a major re‐evaluation of its collection.

The changes in attribution, Which have been under consideration in some instances for several years, involve many of the museum's bestknown works, formerly credited to such Old Masters as Raphael, Durer, Van Eyck, van der Weyden, Giorgione, El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens and Goya.

The sweeping nature of the changes, which affect about. 15 per cent of the museum's European painting collection and which have been effected recently without the museum's customary fanfare by merely rewriting the labels, is believed to be without precedent among major art institutions.

Reattributions in museums always raise broad questions:

Will certain art scholars fall into disrepute?

Is the reputation of a dealer tainted or tarnished by the reattributions of works with which he may have dealt?

Do tax laws regarding deductions by donors of art have to be changed?

What is the impact of reattribution changes on “deaccessioning,” or on the sale of works of art by museums?

If a dealer or an individual collector owned the paintings that have been reattributed by the Metropolitan and made the same changes concerning claims of authorship, his potential loss, in terms of the current art market, could be in the tens of millions of dollars.

The museum will, however, make no attempt at redress for “lost” value, since most of the works in question came to it through bequests, or were purchased long ago.

Many of the paintings that have now been reattributed are still sold in reproductions or as postcards at the museum under their old labels but the museum plans soon to rectify this.

In most instances, the new attributions are given to a member of the Old Master's workshop to conform with the consensus of contemporary scholarship. A few are considered to be much later copies or fakes.

Such paintings as the Velázquez “Portrait of Philip IV,” Verrochio's “Madonna and Child,” Rubens's “Madonna and Child,” El Greco's “Adoration of the Shepherds” (the smaller of two versions at the Metropolitan) and Rembrandt's “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails” and “Pilate Washing His Hands” are now considered “workshop pictures” by the museum—that is, pictures executed in the studio, but probably by an assistant or follower.

A large “Annunciation” that was formerly attributed to Roger van der Weyden is now given to Hans Memling; “A City on a Rock,” formerly assigned to Goya, is now given to Eugenio Lucas, a 19th‐century painter much influenced by Goya. “A Portrait of a Man,” exhibited as a Giorgione, has been reattributed to Titian. The portrait of Giuliano De'Medici, Duke of Nemours, long shown as a Raphael, is now considered a copy.

Sherman Lee, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said that “scholarship goes through cycles: the permissiveness of the past was commercially inspired, and the constrictionism today is perhaps exaggerated.” “Some say labels should be written in pencil,” he said.

J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said he was unaware of the Metropolitan's attribution changes. The gallery is not known to have made many changes in attribution since its opening in 1940. Mr. Brown conceded that several paintings at the museum, including a Vermeer, were “under very careful scrutiny and awaiting further scientific evidence.”

Horst W. Janson, the chairman of the department of fine arts at New York University, remarked that “nothing can be taken for granted.” “There is no such thing as a final word,” he said. “We all live on traditional opinions because we can't possibly question everything. The whole discipline of art scholarship is comparatively young, dating to the middle of the 19th century. There is an awful lot of stuff that needs to be cleaned up, in the sense that many pictures or statues floated about with dubious attributions, and the genius of [Wilhelm von] Bode, [Bernard] Berenson and [Max] Friedlander had a great merit in initiating this clean‐up. But this does not mean that their opinions are valid for all time to come. What you read on a label in a museum hardly ever represents the latest state of scholarship—there is an inevitable time lag, in part not to offend donors, in part not to disillusion the public.”

Nicholas Ward ‐ Jackson, the head of the paintings department at Sotheby Parke Bernet, says that an outstanding example of a dubious attribution in a major museum is the “David Playing the Harp Before Saul” in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. “There is no specialist scholar today in Rembrandt who accepts that,” says Ward ‐ Jackson. “The Mauritshuis is still sending out postcards, but very, very soon the Mauritshuis is going to have to admit that one of its star attractions is, in fact, by either a pupil or a 19thcentury imitator.”

Controversies over the attribution of works of art, of course, are not new. The Metropolitan, for example, recently conceded that it might have been wrong when it shocked the art world a few years ago with the announcement that a famous Greek sculpture of a horse was not genuine.

Among the factors that art experts consider in determining the attributions of paintings are age, stylistic analysis of brushstrokes, examination of paint pigments, the scrutiny of signatures and the consideration of documents. Histories of ownership and the opinions of other authorities also play a role.

The magnifying glass, is not the art expert's only tool. Technological methods, such as chemical analysis, microphotography and X‐rays, are now widely used, but offer only negative proof.

The full‐length portrait of Philip IV that the Metropolitan Museum has now attributed to “Workshop of Velázquez” rather than to the master himself is an example the use of X‐rays.

“We became increasingly more and more skeptical about the way the collar sat there, the mechanical dry way the gold chain was done,” Everett Fahy, the museum's painting curator explained. “If Velázquez had painted each stroke of the brush would be telling. There is a very similar one in the Prado, and when it was recently X‐rayed it was found to have the same position of the hands and even the same gold chain underneath it. The explanation that arises from this discovery is that the Prado, the primary version, was repainted two years later when he [Philip IV] got the order of the Golden Fleece and that our picture had been made as a kind of royal present for some Habsburg. We X‐rayed our portrait and found that there were no pentimenti in it.”

Pentimento is a term used to describe underpainting or drawing that surfaces over the years as paint ages and becomes more transparent.

The person most responsible for the attribution changes is Everett Fahy, the museum's 31‐year‐old curator in charge of the department of European paintings who came to the museum in his present post in 1970. Studying the Metropolitan's paintings, Mr. Fahy decided it was time for a general re‐evaluation. “I believe that attributions are like medicine or any field in which knowledge is constantly changing or advancing,” he said.

“Many people,” Mr. Fahy said, “call me the “Baby B. B.,” [in reference to Bernard Berenson] which is one of the nicknames I'm trying to live down. Unlike a lot of my older contemporaries who will, if they publish a picture as Botticelli, go to their graves saying it, it is no skin off my back if I say I've changed my mind.”

Mr. Fahy came to the museum with the responsibility of rehanging the Metropolitan's paintings, which had been moved to the north wing during the centennial in 1970. The task itself was formidable, for the museum has space in its 41 European painting galleries to exhibit only about 700 of its approximately 2,000 paintings. Of the 700, about 500 are on permanent display, and 200 are rotated.

It was decided to take the labels off the frames and put new ones on the walls to the side or beneath the paintings. “It was like making a clean sweep—by using these, new labels, it meant the label copy could be completely rewritten and amplified with much more information about each picture,” Mr. Fahy said.

The most important change, of course, was the reattributions. In 1971, the museum published a catalogue of its Florentine paintings, written by Frederico Zeri. Dr. Zeri's attribution changes were not reflected on the labels in the galleries until late this fall along with the many other changes made by Mr. Fahy and his associate, John Walsh.

The museum's painting collection, according to Mr. Fahy, had “accumulated over the past 100 years, and no one had sifted through them in, a systematic way.” Perhaps most important to Mr. Fahy was his “realizing the perplexity” of graduate and undergraduate students confronted with attributions at the Metropolitan that did not conform with contemporary scholarship.

“There were dozens of these cases where the students would turn to me and ask, ‘Why, if everybody knows that Hubert [Van Eyck] is just a framecarver, do they say “Hubert painted the two panels?”’” This was in reference to “The Crucifixion” and “The Last Judgment” of a triptych at the Metropolitan. The panels have now been reattributed to Jan Van Eyck, Hubert's brother, but had not been when the museum published them in a special centennial catalogue. The panels are unquestionably among the greatest treasures at the Metropolitan regardless of the attribution and are on its highly exclusive “bomb list” of first priority items to be removed in time of danger. Some scholars have said that Hubert never existed, although the present consensus, Mr. Fahey said, is that he did, but was not active as a painter.

“What if all the symphonies of Beethoven,” Mr. Fahy asked, “came down to us attributed to Carl Maria von Weber? You'd have a distorted view, and this is precisely the kind of thing feel we've got to get after. We are really defending their reputations or putting them in their proper place.” A wrong attribution of an important work, he said, “represents a misunderstanding, I would say a gross misunderstanding, of the man's creative powers.”

Mr. Walsh said that of the museum's 38 Rembrandts, 8 were reattributed at the time of the galleries' rehanging, six have recently been changed, and two others are considered doubtful. “There is,” he said, “a contractionist. spirit growing to a large extent” on the part of young scholars, and “by and large the older generations of experts took a more permissive view of the matter of attributions than most of us today.”

Museums in general have been slow to reattribute paintings for three basic reasons. First, some museums, one curator noted, do not have the expertise. “In some cases,” the curator said, “the museum might be the last to learn; it's a struggle to find staffs with scholarly qualifications and the time and energy to really keep tabs on a large collection, and sometimes labels are not changed because the information is not received.” Second, curators who have had to “sell” their trustees on an acquisition are not going to be pleased to downgrade it afterward and hurt their “chauvinistic pride.” Third, and most important, most institutions for obvious reasons have a general rule of not making waves with their donors or potential donors.

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