|
Kelly Crow, Buyer Makes a Big Bet His New Caravaggio Is Really by Caravaggio; Experts split over the authenticity of the long-lost painting found n an attic. Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2019 (front page).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy ... avaggio-11561503854
https://webcache.googleuserconte ... p;ct=clnk&gl=us
--------------------------body of the print full text (excluding title, byline and dateline)
Michelangelo Merisi, the artist known as Caravaggio, always drew trouble.
The highly anticipated public auction Thursday of a painting credited to the Italian master, who fled Rome after killing a man, was scratched when a buyer cut ahead of bidders to get it first.
Even though experts are split over the authenticity of the long-lost work from 1606, "Judith and Holofernes," the anonymous buyer seemingly has no doubt.
"He made an offer that we could not refuse," said Eric Turquin, an appraiser and auctioneer in Paris who advised on the deal. The final price late Monday [June 24] was "exceptionally more" than the starting bid of $ 34 million, he said.
The price tag reflects the enduring appeal of Caravaggio, a notorious hothead whose dramatic style of painting heroes and saints like everyday people upended the art world during his career. He died in 1610 at age 38. Four hundred years later, his work still causes a stir.
"When new Caravaggio comes up, it's always a controversy because he's a passionate, violent artist," said Guillaume Kientz, European art curator at Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and one of those who believe the painting is fir real. "No one can see his work and keep cool."
The work was said to be found in a Toulouse attic, takes a scene from apocryphal book Judith, the namesake widow. She saves the Jewish people by seducing and the [sic; should not be here] beheading Holofernes, the general of a besieging army.
In the macabre denouement depicted by Caravaggio, Judith, dressed in black, wields a sword and glances at the viewer – eyes burning, brow furrowed – as the bloodied general writhes beneath her, neck gaping. Between them, a wrinkle servant stands.
All but five of the 68 paintings believed done by Caravaggio are in museums in Europe and the US. Part of this week's fuss was because no Caravaggio has come to auction in at least 40 years – if it is indeed his work.
The trouble is that many of Caravaggio's followers imitated the master's gritty or gorgeous figures bathed in a stark, slanted light. Pieces painted in his style have sold at auction for as much as $ 707,000, according to Artnet, the auction database.
"Judith and Holofernes" began its journey from dusty attic to global celebrity five years ago. Marc Labarbe, a little-known auctioneer in Toulouse, got a call from a local family who said they had spotted the dusty canvas behind a mattress. The owner was renovating the attic into an apartment for his daughter.
Nobody knows how the painting got there, but the family's Toulouse roots go back centuries, according to Mr Labarbe.
Mr. Labarbe specializes in auctioning aeronautical memoranda – parts from the supersonic Concorde, for instance. He examined the painting and sought a second opinion from Mr Turquin, which specializes in old masters.
Mr Turquin said after one look at Judith's face, he realized he had "stumbled onto the impossible, a Caravaggio." He and his team spent two years studying the painting in secret, taking X-rays of the canvas to detect clues beneath the surface. Tests confirmed that paint pigments matched wgat Caravaggio uses.
Caravaggio is believed to have painted at least two versions of Judith story. The first; dating from about 1598, is in the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome. The second, Mr Turquin said, was discussed in letters between Italian noblemen and art dealers in Naples in the 1600s.
Caravaggio had painted it shortly after he had killed a man in Rome and fled to Naples in 1606. Maybe he was asking too much, nearly 300 ducats because he didn't sell right away.
Adding to the mystery, one of Caravaggio's 17-th century art dealers in Naples at the time, Louis Finson, also was an artist. His estate included a "Judith and Holofernes" that some experts believe might have been the unsold caravaggio. Finson himself painted a copy, which now belongs to a bank in Naples.
Mr Turquin spent the past three years showing the Toulouse painting to dozens of curators and Caravaggio scholars. Several experts in Italy ruled that the painting was a copy, possibly by Finson.
Others have argued the work's legitimacy, including Keith Christiansen, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and David Stone, an art history professor at the University of Delaware.
Mr Stone said he studied Toulouse painting and the Finson copy side by side and believes that the one found in the attic is genuine. "There's just a quality to Judith's face, an intelligence in her expression that's clearly Caravaggio," he said. "Judith looks like a raccoon in the copy."
Attention now shifts from the painting to pinpointing the identity of its buyer – a well-known collector of contemporary art and old masters, according to Mr Turquin. The Caravaggio will reside in a "major public museum," he said, which apparently rules out trophy-art hunters in Asia and the Middle East, whare disinclined to share.
Mr Labarbe said he spent more than $ 2 million preparing for the auction at a Toulouse concert hall. This spring he sent the painting to New York, London and other cities, where he estimated more than 10,000 people viewed it.
He and Mr Turquin had planned a feast in Toulouse. Turquin after Thursday's sales for the roughly 2,000 people, mostly locals, who were expected to attend.
The celebration, Mr Turquin said, will go on as planned.
|
发表于 6-27-2019 15:54:45
收藏
分享
支持
反对
楼主