Caravaggio Crises

I don’t know what it is about private art galleries…they seem to be attracting lawsuits like cartoon bears to picnic baskets. Remember 2007’s Salander-O’Reilly artgate debacle? Tennis stars and fathers of A-list actors (John McEnroe and Robert DeNiro, Sr) were called into a conversation on investment, consignment, reimbursement, art, and broken friendships.

With the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, the sheer number of lawsuits propelled to the door of the Manhattan gallery caused the event to make grand strides in negative notoriety and periodical disdain. The New York Observer seemed positively bemused with the immense quantity of personal lawsuits against the S-O Gallery, calling the event “The Enron of the Art World,” while at the same time celebrating the impressive collection the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery heralded in October of 2007, before the gallery was dramatically shut down in true Manhattan cinematic fashion.

The exhibit, Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting & Sculpture, featured works of such historic greats as Rubens, Correggio, Botticelli, El Greco, Titian,, Parmigianino, Barocci, and even Caravaggio. For an exhibit of this caliber to be shut down, at the behest of a few millionaires…well, it just seems a shame.

And the naysayers? None other than John McEnroe, Earl Davis, Roy Lennox…the high and mighty at the tops of their games, apparently duped by the art world.

15 lawsuits! The Observer declares with obvious glee. The Caravaggio work is the most dramatic: Masterpieces of Art partner Clovis Whitfield purchased the piece for a scant $110,000, as a piece belonging to the title “Circle of Caravaggio.” Further interest in the painting revealed that (gasp!) it showed characteristics of an authentic Caravaggio, simply mired over with an opaque, cloudy glaze–thus rendering the piece both much more valuable and much more important.

The current state of the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery is as murky as the cloudy layer of varnish that had set in over the Caravaggio in question. Shut down in October of 2007, January of this year saw Lawrence B. Salander himself filing for the big “B”–bankruptcy. Asked by the court to sell his house, I fear the troubles for Lawrence B. have just begun.