Reagan Upshaw

THE WASHINGTON POST – “I’m sure you know a lot of people who’ve been in jail,” my wife remarked. She was right. Even back then, a tally of my time-honored art world knowledge would have required the fingers of more than one hand. Most of them were dealers who had ignored the old saying of the trade: “Any art dealer who confuses his clients’ lifestyle with his own is in big trouble.” »

In Art & Crime, German journalists Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm detail the doings of a rogue gallery of art swindlers, rogues and outright thieves. The action ranges from European watering holes to Imelda Marcos’ New York townhouse to freeport warehouses in Geneva and Singapore, where works of art, legally or illegally obtained, can be discreetly exchanged. We see arms dealers buying art to launder dirty money, academics selling their imprimatur, manipulated auctions to stimulate an artist’s market, and dealers who will buy a genuine painting at auction and will sell a copy to an unsuspecting customer.

Beneath it all are forgers whose creations range from fake Modigliani paintings (a notoriously dodgy body of work – for every genuine oil by him there are four forgeries, according to an expert to the authors) to supposed watercolors of the young Adolf Hitler.

There is a chapter on Donald Trump, written especially for the US edition of this book, which details the destruction of some friezes on an Art Deco building in Manhattan that was being demolished to make way for Trump Tower. In the end, however, the book accuses the former president of nothing more serious than bad taste and furious vanity.

Museums, according to Koldehoff and Timm (with translation by Paul David Young), are too often complicit in scoundrels. Curators turn a blind eye to blatantly false provenances when buying antiquities looted from war-torn countries or unauthorized excavations. Directors host exhibits that are little more than sales opportunities for the people whose “collections” are on display.

The authors also scrutinize museums that deal with thieves who steal their art. Unlike the cliché of the criminal mastermind who orchestrates the theft of a desired masterpiece to adorn his lair, most stolen artwork is taken by decidedly plebeian types who see a quick opportunity and seize it. Unable to sell their loot on the public art market and unable to close it through their usual contacts, these thieves often groped the institutions from which it was stolen. Paying a ransom for the works could encourage more theft, but a museum and its insurance company might characterize the payment not as a ransom but as “compensation for information leading to the recovery of valuable images.” “, as one museum official described one such transaction.

Going as far as possible, from the classical art market to the contemporary, passing by the jet-set from one continent to another, “Art & Crime” reads like an assembly of short presentations cobbled together in a book. Much of the data comes from court records and newspaper accounts, so there are few surprises. That Donald Trump has atrocious taste has long been evident, as have the unspoken negotiations between the compilers of certain catalogs raisonnés (scholarly lists of known works by artists) and dealers with a painting for sale. Art history rubbed shoulders with capitalism a long time ago.

Most dealers are honest enough, of course, and many scholars and curators would quit rather than vouch for a work they suspected to be fake. Koldehoff and Timm tell the story of Salvator Mundi, a painting bought at a small New Orleans auction, authenticated as a work by Leonardo da Vinci, sold to a Swiss art dealer, returned to a Russian oligarch and finally auctioned off at Christie’s New York for $450 million, reportedly to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It was to be displayed at a Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre in 2018, but some curators had valid doubts about its authenticity, and the owner refused to loan the work unless it received the museum’s imprimatur. The painting was not shown.

The art business has always had an air of scam, for the simple reason that the objects it sells, sometimes several million dollars, have no objective value. Who can “prove” that a painting by Leonardo da Vinci is worth more than a daub by the most amateur painter? The art market is a labyrinth of changing fashions, rising and falling reputations, without any guarantees. What is a painting worth? The answer is simple: it’s worth everything anyone is willing to pay for it today.

Koldehoff and Timm call for more openness in the art sector, lamenting the lack of transparency in terms that could apply to Mafia donations: “There is a strange collective spirit in the art world. art… an insistence on old-fashioned traditions that invite suspicion, from the handshake to the anonymity of business partners to the code of silence. Maybe art dealers will change their ways, but until that happens, it might be wise to remember the adage about a fool and his money.