William Cohan has previously called for regulation in the art market. He continues his crusade on Bloomberg View with a self-promotional column recapitulating an earlier story about the traffic in Degas bronzes by Walter Maibaum who has created a series of 74 posthumous bronze works supposedly by the 19th Century master. Cohan has already questioned the bronzes. Now he thinks there is conspiracy of cowardice in the art historical community because museum officials haven’t come out forcefully enough against the authenticity of the works for his taste. (The Art Newspaper has also covered the issue.)

Attendees at the meeting have told me that among those present were Gary Tinterow, chairman of the department of 19th- century, modern, and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum; Richard Kendall, consultative curator at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts; Theodore Reff, professor emeritus of European painting and sculpture at Columbia University; Patricia Failing, professor of art history at the University of Washington; Shelley Sturman and Daphne Barbour, conservators and Degas specialists at the National Gallery of Art; and Arthur Beale, retired chairman of the department of conservation and collections management at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and co-author (with Kendall) of “Degas and the Little Dancer.”

Still, on the grounds that I would not attribute the comment to any individual participant, I was told there was universal agreement among the experts that these things were not what they were being advertised as. In declining to speak on- the-record to me, each attendee cited a fear of the potential legal consequences any criticism of Maibaum’s and Hedberg’s “discovery” might engender. […]

Since then, I have continued to write about the controversy, peeling back one layer of it after another whenever possible. Yet the Degas experts remain silent. Only Tinterow, of the Metropolitan Museum, has stepped slightly out of the shadows. In May 2010 — after fully vetting it through the Met’s legal department — he gave a brief statement to ArtNews about the controversy: “In my opinion, there is nothing that demonstrates that Degas had a set of plaster casts made of his sculptures during his lifetime.”

Shaky Degas Dancer Gets the Silent Treatment (Bloomberg)

The Silence of the Degas Scholars (The Art Newspaper)

There’s no way or reason to summarize Judd Tully’s long feature on the Degas bronzes available to read on ArtInfo.com. Instead, here’s the lead and a link to the rest:

The 74 bronzes displayed in the traveling exhibition “The Complete Sculptures of Edgar Degas,” which is just finishing a run at the Herakleidon Museum, a private museum in Athens, have thrown the art market and the elite community of Degas scholars into a tizzy. The pieces, depicting dancers, bathers, and horses, were recently cast in France from previously unknown plaster models purportedly made during the artist’s lifetime from his wax studio sculptures. Walter Maibaum, an art dealer and the head of the New York-based Degas Sculpture Project, who brought the trove to light, calls being shown the plasters in a foundry storage area in 2004, “like walking into King Tut’s tomb.”Continue Reading