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Christie’s to Sell Wasserman Collections

October 13, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s will be selling Lew Wasserman’s art work including a Soutine, Degas and Matisse painting:

Assembled largely in the 1950s and 60s by the “king and queen of Hollywood,” the collection includes several seldom-seen works by important artists such as Degas, Matisse, Vuillard and Soutine that have adorned the couple’s Beverly Hills home for decades. Over 30 items from this exceptional private collection will be offered in the Impressionist and Modern Art Sales, beginning with seven pieces in Christie’s major Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York on Tuesday, Nov. 1, at 7 p.m. The total value of the collection is expected to exceed $18 million.

Wasserman Collection

Viewing and Buying Degas’s Ballerinas

September 13, 2011 by Marion Maneker

That’s Alistair Sooke, the Telegraph’s critic, appearing in a video about the Degas and Ballet exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Sooke’s colleague, Colin Gleadell, guides interested parties down the street to a gallery where they can buy some of Degas’s related works:

If the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy whets the appetite, viewers do not have far to go to get advice on buying the artist’s work. Two minutes’ walk away in Cork Street, the Browse & Darby Gallery opens an exhibition tomorrow in which half of the works are for sale. The gallery has a long association with the Degas market. One of its founders, the late Lillian Browse, a trained ballet dancer, wrote the definitive book on Degas’s dancers, in 1949. Now run by Joshua Darby, whose father, William, had been in partnership with Lillian, the gallery continues its tradition of expertise in Degas’s work. Roughly 20 of these will be on show, ranging from monotype prints priced at £35,000 to a study for the pastel, Deux Danseuses in the Chicago Institute of Art, priced at £350,000 and a bronze “arabesque” in the region of £400,000. The auction record for a Degas bronze is £13  million for one of the 14-year-old dancers that wears a tutu, while the best pastels of dancers have fetched as much as £23 million.

Degas’s Works On Sale in Cork Street (Telegraph)

Cohan Beats the Degas Bronze Horse

August 23, 2011 by Marion Maneker

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)

Exploring the Degas Bronzes

April 9, 2010 by Marion Maneker

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

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