‘Russian Schoolroom’ Teaches New Lessons

Norman Rockwell's 'Russian Schoolroom' (Courtesy: Las Vegas Sun)

Norman Rockwell’s “Russian Schoolroom” typifies the artist’s transition from the production of idealistic, dreamlike American scenes to then modern-day socio-political commentary. Today, the same painting has shifted in representation once again: now, “Russian Schoolroom” stands for modern greed and the ever-spinning, circular financial ramifications of art theft disputes.

The lithograph in question features a room of Russian schoolchildren (male) facing a bust of Lenin. It was produced in an era when the Cold War and the Russian Question in general were at the forefront of global consciousness–quite a leap from Rockwell’s characteristic happy-family-and-turkey productions for which he is mainly remembered in modern cultural recollection.

The plot began in 1968, when Jack Solomon, a lithograph company owner who worked with Rockwell during his heyday, purchased “Russian Schoolroom.” In 1973, after Solomon lent the piece to a gallery, it was stolen. In 1988 Judy Goffman Cutler bought the painting (and then sold it to director Steven Spielberg, whose assistant eventually discovered the stolen status of the painting).

“Russian Schoolroom”’s estimated value hovers around the figure of $700,000, but Cutler and Solomon have already collectively surpassed this amount in legal fees through their litigation. The painting is still in limbo, and the year-long argument over the piece seems to have taken over both of their lives.

Of course, art isn’t about monetary value. This Rockwell piece is a piece of history. But isn’t it also true that during the time this pair spends arguing over a piece of history, they are losing critical moments of history in their own lives?

Brooklyn Museum’s Crop of Coptic Art a Historical Farce

One of the earliest Christian carvings, according to Scripture and various Charlton Heston movies, is the Decalogue: the Ten Commandments.  Inscribed by a Divine Hand, the stone tablets revealed a collection of ten laws, including one that the Brooklyn Museum probably wished that their 1960s-era Egyptian art suppliers had followed a bit more closely:

“Thou Shalt Not Lie.”

Before the official revelation of the fake Coptics, Brooklyn Museum was billed as housing the second largest collection of Coptic Art in North America (immediately after New York’s Metropolitan Museum).  With 30 Coptic sculptures, the vast majority of which acquired in the years between 1960 and 1970 from Switzerland and New York, who acquired the sculptures directly from Egypt, the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of Coptics was nothing to sneeze at.

Coptic Sculpture refers to Christian sculpture created in Egypt between the 4th Century Anno Domini and the year of the Arab Invasion, 641 AD.  Carved from limestone, coptic sculpture has served as the artistic bridge uniting the artisan styles of Pagan and Christian cultures.  It is also credited with existing as historical evidence of the continuity of the large-scale sculpture form made standard during the Classical period.

For scholars like Coptic art specialist Thelma Thomas, a professor at New York University, Coptic art represents something besides continuity and cultural conduits–Coptic art has practically become synonymous with “fake,” as more and more supposedly authentic Coptic sculptures, upon closer inspection, prove to be false.

10 of Brooklyn Museum’s collection of 30 sculptures have been officially declared false.  An additional ten have been determined to have been recarved and repainted in the modern era.  The remaining 10 may well be authentic–but the damage has clearly been done.

What is Brooklyn Museum doing in response to the recent official denouncement (rumblings have been heard in the past, but no voice from the mountain had come down quite yet) of the authenticity of their collection?

Why having an exhibition, of course!

On February 13, 2009, the Brooklyn Museum will unveil an exhibition detailing the voyage of the forgeries.  The false sculptures have gleaned their own history from the fraud, and have become valuable in their own right (though clearly  not so much as the 1,000 original, authentic Coptic sculptures which supposedly still exist).

Never underestimate a national art gallery’s ability to spin fraud into profit.

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.

Chistoph Büchel’s “Training Ground for Democracy”

Chistoph Büchel’s work entitled “Training Ground for Democracy” has found itself altered and expanded due to the legal processes which were incurred due to the difficulties the artist and the gallery had with each other.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams won the lawsuit against Büchel, and won the right to exhibit Büchel’s incomplete work, which he had stopped progress on as the artist-gallery relationship grew more and more acrid. When the artist community balked at the thought of an unfinished work presented to the public without the artist’s consent, Mass MoCa relented and dismantled “Training Ground,” which had been housed in a warehouse before the lawsuit commenced.

Today, “Training Ground” has leaked out of the warehouse and now includes an exhibition of the legal correspondence between the lawyers, museum officials, and the artist himself. Fueled by rage over the destruction of his art piece, as Büchel claims Mass MoCa has done by suing and later dismantling the installation, Christoph Büchel has expanded his art and taken it in a new direction and a new metaproject based on the ideals of free speech and freedom of expression.

Lies, Accusations, and Accounting

The trouble between Büchel and Mass MoCa includes the museum’s assertion that the artist was “difficult” to deal with, while Büchel maintains that MassMoCa lied about budgets.

Büchel, according to the New York Times, has investigated heavily into the accounting side of the museum, familiarizing himself with budget concerns and endowment issues to an extreme degree. It would seem that the ongoing battle between the artist and gallery has brought the artist further from his art as he gets bogged down in the bureaucracy of art exhibition, rather than concerning himself with the tenets of its creation.

Read the full New York Times article here.