Good buy Duccio?
In Part I* of III, Michael Daley introduces the [$45-50m.] purchase of a panel attributed to the father of the Siennese school of painting (*As published in the November/December 2008 issue of the Jackdaw).
Spending pots of money on works of art is rarely without risk. The Metropolitan Museum’s 2004 decision to pay between $45-$50m (- in a blind “treaty” sale conducted by Christie’s) for the “Stoclet” Duccio Madonna and Child, already seems a source of anxiety. That the acquisition breached the Met’s own “due process” requirements was initially flaunted. It is no more. Our own researches suggest (– as will be discussed in Part II) that the attribution may prove unsound.
Four years after the Met’s Board authorised payment (- after the event ) for this Duccio, the architects of the acquisition, Philippe de Montebello, who is retiring after thirty-one years as Director, and Keith Christiansen, the Museum’s curator of European Painting, now seem to be saying: “The Duccio remains a great acquisition – but it was his responsibility more than mine”.
Above, the “Met Duccio” as it appears today (right) and as it appeared in 1904 (left) when it had recently emerged without provenance – that is: it was said to have been bought by a Russian collector from an antiques shop.
Christiansen gave detailed account of his role in Danny Danziger’s 2007 book Museum ~ Behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
“…Nicholas Hall of Christie’s, with whom I have been friends for many years, phoned me up and said, ‘I would like you to have lunch with me; there is something I’d like to show you.’ During the meal he slipped me a transparency, and I looked at it.
It was a painting that had not been seen by any of the major Duccio specialists for fifty years; it had been in the hands of the Stoclet family and out of circulation. ‘Fantastic, how about the price?’ I asked. He told me. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I will deal with that later.’ And then we finished our lunch.
…I waited for the director to come back from his vacation. And then I went into his office and said, ‘I am duty bound to show you this,’ and then I showed him the transparency. I casually said to him, ‘You know, Philippe, you deserve this picture. Tom Hoving had his Juan de Pareja [a stunning portrait by Velazquez, bought in 1970 for $5.5m], Rorimer had his Rembrandt [the majestic double portrait Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, bought in 1961 for $2.3m.]; I don’t see why you shouldn’t have this towards the end of your career’…”
De Montebello told Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker (July 2005):
“I was just smitten by the transparency, as anyone would be, and I decided we had to go and look at this picture… It’s the single most important purchase during my twenty-eight years as director. It’s my Juan Parega, it’s my Aristotle with the bust of Homer… There was not an ounce of doubt in my mind about it… Technically I was not authorized to make an offer. I just took a chance that my trustees would go along.”
Christiansen had lauded this decisiveness in the New York Times on November 10 2004: “When I showed it to him, it took him about 30 seconds to say, ‘We really have to have this.’” But in a prefatory note to the Metropolitan Museum’s Summer 2008 Art Bulletin (which is given over to Christiansen’s: “Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting”), de Montebello now downplays his own role:
“…I wish simply to correct the misleading impression that in making an acquisition of this importance and expense, it was my response to the picture’s quality and art historical significance and my confidence in that response that was the determinative factor… recommending so large an expenditure to our Acquisitions Committee required more than just my response… It required that this response be reinforced by the assurance that comes from the trust I have learned to place in the curators and conservators in this great institution… As I held the picture in my hands, enraptured by its wonderful quality… I was treated all the while to Keith’s impassioned scholarship… it was particularly Keith’s precise and learned assessment of the picture that allowed me to consider the acquisition an imperative.”
In his own Bulletin foreword, Christiansen again admits this was a work known to scholars only by photographs; that it had very recently been withdrawn from a (comparative) exhibition on Duccio and his followers – despite being in the catalogue; that it had never undergone any modern scientific analysis; and, that in the normal course of events, it would have been sent to the Museum for examination and eventual presentation before the Acquisitions Committee, composed of members of the Board of trustees. He then tells how he and the Met’s restorer, Dorothy Mahon, travelled with the Director to Christie’s, London:
“We spent about two hours with the picture before calling the Christie’s representatives back into the room. I imagined that we were now about to embark on drawn-out discussions and negotiations, with intense pressure from other institutions. This assumption proved dead wrong. The Director seized the initiative and stated that he was prepared to make an offer for the painting. I don’t know who was more taken aback, the Christie’s representatives or Dorothy and I… On the return flight I noticed that the Director was bent over a list of what seemed to be various funds that might be applied to the purchase of the picture. ‘You must have worked out the mechanics for this even before we left to examine the picture,’ I observed. ‘Oh yes, this trip was to confirm that the picture was as extraordinary as it already seemed to me, and if it was, I had determined we were going to get it.’ Trustees still needed to be consulted and further funds identified, and weeks were to pass before a final deed of sale was signed. But the key step had been taken…”
Indeed it had.
Coming next in Part II: “BUYER BEWARE”