3/16/2012

Degas Ballerina Investigation


Fellow art educator Will Paulson sent me a very interesting article on the circumstances surrounding an high value estate, a Dega ballerina and its disposition.  There are claims of it being purchased by one of the founders of H and R Block, as well as being stolen. The ownership history is long and complicated and involves many, including collectors, auction houses, galleries, and of course the FBI.

Definetly a situation with multiple points of view, and certainly an interesting tale of ownership.

The circumstances in which the Degas ballerina disappeared from Clark’s Fifth Avenue apartments in the early 1990s remain unclear, but for the first time the story can be told of how it ended up in Bloch’s living room, above the sofa, between a Seurat and a Toulouse-Lautrec. And how Bloch was allowed to keep the painting even after the FBI came calling.

When it was discovered in 2005 that Bloch and his wife had purchased a painting with a tainted past, a quiet dispute over its ownership erupted. It had been taken from Clark's apartment, but it also had been bought in good faith by the Blochs.

Valuing her privacy more than her possessions, Clark had told her attorney and the FBI in 1992 not to pursue the loss of the painting. She didn't list it on the international registry of stolen art. As a result, in a high-stakes legal version of the children's rhyme "finder's keepers, loser's weepers," she may have lost her claim to the painting. The Blochs' attorney argued that it now belonged to them.

After well-mannered wrangling, Clark and Bloch reached a deal. Clark agreed to donate the painting to an art museum in Kansas City, Mo., the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where Bloch had been a longtime trustee, chairman and benefactor, and where he and his wife had promised to donate all their art when they died. As part of the agreement, the heiress, not America's Tax Man, got the income tax deduction for the gift.To seal the deal, the ballerina needed to change hands. In October 2008, on a clear but crisp Monday at the Bloch home in Mission Hills, Kansas, a Bloch representative handed the ballerina in the gilded frame to Clark's attorney, who walked out to the car and handed it to a representative of the museum, who then handed it back to the representative of the Blochs, and back on the wall it went. The museum had agreed to lend the painting back to the Blochs, and they will have it as long as they live, renewing the loan every year. Then it will go back to its owner, the Kansas City museum, with the rest of the Bloch collection of Impressionist masterpieces.

The parties signed a confidentiality agreement, keeping the whole business secret even from the staff of the museum. Only three of its 21 trustees were told.

When the museum announced in 2010 the promise by the Blochs to donate 30 Impressionist masterpieces at their death, the Degas dancer was featured in The Kansas City Star newspaper, although the museum at that point had already owned the painting for two years.

Last month, when asked about the ballerina, the museum public relations staff said emphatically that it was not owned by the museum.
Source: Open Channel on MSNBC

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