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Welcome back to Wall Power, the Inner Circle edition.
I’m Marion
Maneker, writing to you from Waterville, Maine, where I’m visiting the Colby College Museum of Art for the Gertrude Abercrombie show. I’ve been looking forward to this trip and will have a report for you soon. Of course, I’m closely following Trump’s latest attack on museums, and the Smithsonian in particular—a new front that curators and directors have been privately agonizing about for some time. I discussed aspects of this over the weekend on MSNBC,
and we’ll surely return to the topic in the future.
In today’s issue, my conversation with Elizabeth Gorayeb, the executive director of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. We discuss the organization’s important work digitizing catalogues raisonnés—scholarly records documenting an artist’s entire body of work—and why this project is so essential to the art world. Plus, Julie Davich has intel on museums’ growing appetite for solo
shows by female Old Masters and the accompanying uptick of interest from collectors.
Finally, we’re almost out of tickets for our Art of Influence conference, hosted in partnership with The FLAG Art Foundation on September 15. We’ve sold out of tickets at the Inner Circle preferred price, but there are still a handful
remaining for general admission. You can purchase those here. |
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
While many collectors dream of passing their art on to the next generation, tax implications, differing tastes
and the costs of maintaining a collection can complicate a well-intentioned — and sometimes emotionally charged — gift. Explore our guide for valuing, appraising and transferring your collection to ensure the pieces you spent decades collecting live on as you intended. Explore Our Guide |
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| Julie Brener Davich
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- Female Old Masters
find a new market: Solo museum shows featuring female Old Masters are becoming less rare. There was the Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun show at The Met, in 2016, the same year that the Prado’s Clara Peeters exhibition became its first-ever show dedicated to a female artist. In 2018, MAS Antwerp hosted a retrospective of the little-known, 17th century Flemish artist Michaelina Wautier, which became a sleeper hit. And the 2020 Artemisia
Gentileschi blockbuster at London’s National Gallery was also a first of its kind for that museum.
Now the list also includes a Rachel Ruysch exhibition, which is opening this weekend at the MFA Boston after stops in Munich and Toledo. Ruysch was a 17th and 18th century Dutch painter of floral still lifes, the daughter of
a botanist, and, like Gentileschi, a successful artist during her lifetime. The show, which places her meticulously detailed still lifes of flowers, fruit, and insects in the scientific context of her day, also presents a large selection of paintings by her lesser-known younger sister, Anna, who favored the same subject matter.
The growing museum demand for female Old Masters is “definitely driving the market,” an advisor told me. In recent years, records have been set
for Wautier, Gentileschi, Le Brun, and Judith Leyster, among others. (The Leyster is now on long-term loan to The Met.) “Now more institutions and collectors will pay a premium for works by female artists,” said Jennifer Wright, head of Old Masters at Christie’s New York. While Ruysch hasn’t achieved a new record since 2013, when a painting sold for $2.5
million, the Boston show could lead to more interest in, and research into, her work.
To feed the growing market, dealers, collectors, and auction houses have been seeking reattributions of existing paintings and ferreting out hidden gems. A Gentileschi painting, David with the head of
Goliath, that had previously been misattributed to “school of Caravaggio,” sold for $2.7 million at Sotheby’s last month. In the same sale, the house offered another newly attributed painting, this one identified by a professor as the work of Diana de Rosa—or
possibly, a different professor suggested, a collaboration between de Rosa and another artist. Regardless, the painting sold for an artist record £317,500—more than five times the estimate. “Works by women have been undervalued for a long time,” the advisor told me. - “Attributed to…”: Speaking of under-recognized artists, yesterday Skinner Auctions offered an unsigned
double portrait by Joshua Johnson, one of the earliest Black professional painters in America and a former slave. His market exploded in 2019, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s offered paintings for
$60,000 and $40,000, respectively, that both sold for more than 10 times their estimates. The tear has continued: Last year, Christie’s offered a portrait for $100,000 that sold for a record $1.1 million.
Those successes brought more paintings out of obscurity, including the one at Skinner. But before the sale, Skinner downgraded the painting to being just “attributed to” Johnson,
explaining in the saleroom notice that “there are dissenting opinions regarding the attribution of portraits to Johnson, who signed only one painting in his lifetime, and for whom there is no independent authenticating body.” The painting went unsold. - And finally…: After a months-long search, the Dallas Museum of Art has announced that Brian Ferriso will become its new director. He will join the institution in December after
inaugurating the $111 million expansion he oversaw at the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, where he was director for almost 20 years. The DMA is about to embark on its own $150 million expansion. He succeeds Agustín Arteaga, who left the Dallas Museum last spring after nine years for the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.
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The Wildenstein Plattner Institute is dedicated to the resource-intensive
production of catalogues raisonnés—scholarly compendia of an artist’s entire oeuvre. Executive director Elizabeth Gorayeb explains why the work is a “money pit”—and why it’s so essential. |
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Few artists or institutions have the time or resources to produce catalogues raisonnés:
comprehensive scholarly records documenting an artist’s entire body of work. And yet, these projects are essential to the art world. Dealers, gallerists, auction specialists, and curators rely on them to authenticate, contextualize, and accurately price artworks. Without art historians and nonprofit organizations dedicated to this work, a crucial part of establishing provenance and preserving artistic legacy would be at risk.
Founded in 2016 as a nonprofit private foundation, the
Wildenstein Plattner Institute digitizes catalogue raisonné projects and other archival materials, making them publicly accessible online at no cost. Elizabeth Gorayeb, the institute’s founding executive director, has led W.P.I.’s critical research and digitization initiatives for artists including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Tom Wesselmann,
and Romare Bearden. |
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
While many collectors dream of passing their art on to the next generation, tax implications, differing tastes
and the costs of maintaining a collection can complicate a well-intentioned — and sometimes emotionally charged — gift. Explore our guide for valuing, appraising and transferring your collection to ensure the pieces you spent decades collecting live on as you intended. Explore Our Guide |
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|
Last week, I sat down with Gorayeb to discuss her work, how the Wildenstein family became pioneers
in their field, her ambition to create a master public resource, and much more. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. |
Marion Maneker: Can you give me an overview of how the
W.P.I. came together, and what exactly the project is?
Elizabeth Gorayeb: We were founded in 2016 by the Wildenstein family and the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The Wildenstein family gifted all of their catalogues raisonnés and intellectual property that they’d assembled, and their library and archives that supported these research projects. And the Hasso Plattner Foundation gifted us the technological know-how and finances to
utilize these materials, digitize them, and make them more accessible than ever before.
Over the last several years, we’ve digitized the archives of the Wildenstein Institute. Those digital scans are being processed and slowly being released on our website, through our public archive portal. Some of the catalogues raisonnés projects are new, some of them are ongoing from the former Wildenstein Institute, and some of them have started afresh. We are intending to publish all of
them online and have them freely accessible to the public, and have them link where relevant to their foundational archival material that we’ve digitized.
The Wildensteins were actually some of the pioneers of catalogues raisonnés, especially with many of the best-known names in impressionist art. Could you provide any background on that?
The Wildenstein family were pioneers in financing
art-historical research, both for the benefit of their endeavors as dealers and to support the legacy and knowledge about these artists. Catalogues raisonnés, first and foremost, are used by the art market as references to figure out what an artist has created. So it would make sense for an art dealer to support such an endeavor. It’s definitely a money pit, so there has to be a love for this type of work in order to financially support it. It isn’t just for commercial purposes; you
have to devote time, resources, and energy to ferreting out a lot of information that otherwise isn’t available.
The Wildensteins were really great at that, starting with George Wildenstein and then Daniel Wildenstein, who began a catalogue raisonné in the 1950s on Claude Monet. And at the time, the Wildensteins were known for working with Old Master paintings, so Monet was considered really modern, and Daniel and his wife,
Martine, began this effort, somewhat surprisingly, to focus on a quote-unquote contemporary artist. They spent a lot of time with Monet’s son, and got to know all of the resource materials that existed—and they assembled dossiers on Monet’s production. It took Daniel and his staff several decades to do the first iteration. The catalogue raisonné was published in 1979, and it was remarkable because it was the first time that an entire accounting of Monet’s
production had been assembled.
Is the plan to build a larger website where all these things can live, to create a sort of master resource?
We’re dealing with the materials that we were gifted, and the few projects that we have taken on recently, but our aim is very much guided by advancements in technology. We want to make this information available. We’re not aiming to put individual catalogues raisonnés up online that
are siloed. We’re looking to make these cross-searchable. This is the technology initiative, and in order to do that, you need to ensure that your data is fielded, that your data is discoverable, and that you’re working with authoritative vocabularies in creating metadata for individual artworks.
When you have an artist’s foundation that’s creating a very beautiful and well-researched catalogue raisonné online, it’s definitely a gift to art history and a showpiece for the artist.
But is it queryable? Our aim is to get as much structured and vetted data into our catalogue raisonné platform as possible, and through the expansion of technology, make that data cross-queryable and have other sources of data ultimately partner with us. |
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Does that mean approaching some of these estates that maintain their own online
catalogues raisonnés and licensing the data, so it can be on your platform and cross-searchable, or is it just a matter of waiting for a preponderance of catalogues raisonnés to be on your site, and making it advantageous for people to work with that?
This is going to be a group effort. First, we really want to build something that shows what the technology will
be able to do, using the catalogues raisonnés we already have. Then it behooves the art-historical community to contribute their data and make it exportable. We’re talking about a technology that has yet to be developed, but it’s a vision that we hope to achieve.
There’s been a lot of gatekeeping around our historical information, and that’s now to the detriment of these artists, and also to the collectors and people who want to learn about these artists. You can find
information online, but who’s to say where that information is coming from, and whether it’s been vetted? So our real drive as, first and foremost, an art history foundation, is to make sure that we’re doing our research and we’re assembling the information in a format in which it can be found. |
The
Hasso Plattner Factor
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Can you talk to me about Hasso Plattner, who also plays a major role in the
creation of databases and database technology?
Hasso Plattner is one of the leading industrialists in the tech world—but he’s also an art collector and art lover, and he has a major collection of impressionist works. Through the Hasso Plattner Foundation, he and his family are really trying to ensure that technology is put to best use in terms of preserving the history of art and preserving the information. Most museums that
house incredible collections of art do not have robust I.T. departments, or the money to build databases that can best feature and render searchable information about their works of art.
The great thing about W.P.I. and its financial backing from the Hasso Plattner Foundation is that we’re dealing with a founder who understands the importance of longevity. Art historians are suspicious of technology because they want to make sure that information exists forever in some sort of physical
form. Having someone like Plattner and the Plattner Foundation behind our tech initiatives provides a level of assurance. We’re dealing with someone who deals with worldwide tech infrastructures. This is really his gift to the art world, in that regard, for the longevity and preservation of cultural heritage.
Is there some sort of collaboration with the Plattner Foundation to develop the technology you need for what you envision being able to
do?
Yes. We work in partnership with a company called Navigating Art, a tech company financed by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, and initially, they were exclusively working with us to build our catalogue raisonné platform. As Plattner’s foundation saw the potential for the technology that they built for us, Navigating Art became its own independent offshoot of the W.P.I. It is wholly owned and financed by the Hasso Plattner Foundation,
and they, in consultation with us, are expanding upon the technology that they created, to host and publish our catalogue raisonné and digital archives.
Can you tell me about the Romare Bearden Project?
This is so important to the W.P.I. This is a major American artist who didn’t have a catalogue raisonné, an African American artist who, culturally, has been overlooked for a number of years. And because of the
circumstances surrounding African American art history, there hasn’t necessarily been an infrastructure to do a catalogue raisonné of his art. When Bearden was working in the ’50s and ’60s as a social worker, he gave a lot of his art away to members of his community. He didn’t have one mega-dealer tracking everything in his production, like some other artists of his generation did. So there’s a lot of missing information about what he was doing. So it was a real
challenge for W.P.I. and our research team to do a catalogue raisonné for this artist—but it was super necessary, not only for his legacy, but also for the art market.
African American artists have gotten a lot of attention in the market in recent years, and that attention sometimes brings a lot of bad actors. When you don’t have a catalogue raisonné, you don’t have a resource to go to, to check to see if the artist actually did it. So there are a lot of opportunistic
people creating works that they’re trying to pass off as being by the [original] artist. By signaling that this [Romare Bearden] catalogue raisonné is in production, there’s now a resource that people can go to, to have these works vetted, researched, and checked to ensure that they will be included. |
That’s it for today. More from my late summer art tour of New England soon.
M |
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