More on the Degas Bronze Controversy

Bloomberg is running a column by William Cohen on the Degas bronze controversy. Cohen asks and answers the question on why the leading arts scholars have not come out publicly and criticized the new discovered Degas plaster casts and the bronzes being made from them.

Cohen states the reason for the "self censorship" from many scholars and museum experts is fear of being sued. This has been a long standing issue in the case of authentication of fine and decorative arts, where the authenticator may be sued by interested parties based upon the decision.

This Degas plaster mold "find" and the sales of new bronze castings are definitely a situation all appraisers should be following as it deals with so many issues of importance including authentication, expert opinion, documentation, research, scholarship, valuation and the law.

Cohen write in his Bloomberg column

In late 2009, in an elegant four-color catalogue produced in conjunction with the first exhibition of the 74 bronzes cast from the new plasters at an obscure museum in Athens, Maibaum and Hedberg announced to the world their findings. Their essays in the catalogue were full of vim and vigor and were bursting with confidence.

“All the bronze sculptures in this exhibition were cast from recently discovered plasters made from Degas’ original waxes during his lifetime and with his consent,” the catalogue claimed. “This is remarkable since all the other bronzes one can currently see in museums and elsewhere were cast from masters made after the artist’s death. Therefore, the bronzes in this exhibition can be considered the original versions, and all the others the second versions of these sculptures.”

Not surprisingly, the catalogue -- and its hyperbole -- caught the attention of Degas experts worldwide. They were appalled by the claims of Maibaum and Hedberg that museums around the world -- including in Israel and Bulgaria -- had agreed to exhibit the bronze sets, and that they were being sold to collectors for millions of dollars.

A group of Degas experts agreed to meet discreetly in January 2010 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss what, if anything, they should say or to do about Maibaum and Hedberg and their seemingly outlandish claims.

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.”

I heard about the secret meeting shortly afterward and then wrote a lengthy article about the growing controversy for ArtNews magazine, which appeared in the April 2010 issue. None of the participants in the meeting would speak with me on the record, nor would they confirm that it had in fact occurred, what transpired there or what they intended to do, if anything, about the Degas Sculpture Project. j

To read the full column in Bloomberg, click HERE.