Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...insurance? When the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show "Van Gogh at Arles" was being planned in the early '80s, it was assigned a global value for insurance of about $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum...
...into trouble with the law over falsifying an auction. In 1985 David Bathurst admitted that four years earlier, when he was president of Christie's New York branch, he had reported selling two paintings that had not, in fact, found buyers at auction in New York: a Van Gogh at a supposed price of $2.1 million and a Gauguin at $1.3 million. Bathurst said he had lied to protect the art market from depression...
Criticism of auction-house guarantees and loans has been particularly widespread in the past few weeks, ever since it was disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make...
...recourse for some museums is to raise funds by selling work from their permanent collections, as MOMA recently did. In order to purchase an indubitable masterpiece, Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin, for an undisclosed price, the museum sold and exchanged seven paintings. But this encourages museum trustees to think of the permanent collection as an impermanent one, a kind of stock portfolio that can be traded at will: not a good omen...
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue...