The Catalogue Raisonné

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on the background, pluses and minuses of cataglogue raisonnes.  The article states some catalogues raisonnes can by truely useful, while others can be incomplete and questioned. With collectors becoming more experience and demanding, the need to document and authenticate works is paramount, and the inclusion and documentation of important works within an accepted catalogue raisonne is now an important part of the sales process.

I know sometimes it is hard to link to WSJ articles so I took the liberty of posting the complete article.

The Wall Street Journal reports

Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari arguably wrote the first catalogue raisonné in 1550 when he published a book pinpointing the whereabouts of Michelangelo's works. Since then, dealers and collectors have gravitated to these academic inventories in large part because they brim with market intelligence about individual artworks—from size to patina to past owners—which helps ascertain an artwork's authenticity, and therefore, value.

Recordkeeping can also be faked, of course, but artists who boast thorough catalogue raisonnés—Paul Cézanne, say, or Paul Klee—enjoy stable markets in part because collectors feel confident that someone has captured the entire sweep of the supply, said Marc Blondeau, a Geneva private dealer who published an index of 1,500 catalogue raisonnés in 2008.

The opposite is also true: Italian modernist Amedeo Modigliani has at least five inventory lists but dealers say none are considered comprehensive. So conclusions about the authenticity of his paintings tend to vary wildly, as do his prices. Modigliani copies have also surfaced, further muddying his market. To make matters worse, Italian authorities arrested the president of the Modigliani Institute in Rome, Christian Parisot, in January for allegedly authenticating forgeries. Mr. Parisot remains under house arrest as the investigation continues. He couldn't be reached to comment.

The task of figuring out how many artworks an artist produced can be difficult. Consider Rembrandt: In 1880, scholars said the Dutch Old Master had created 350 paintings. By 1921, the art world had pushed up his tally to 711 paintings, according to Mr. Blondeau. By the 1960s, the tally had been winnowed to 411 paintings and today the Rembrandt Research Project puts the artist's painting output back at around 350, roughly the original number. People who bought excommunicated paintings are now left with less-valuable examples, presumably by his pupils.

Given this volatility, Sotheby's specialist Simon Shaw said prospective bidders expect "maximum info" about artworks today in a way they didn't demand a couple generations ago, which makes having a reliable catalogue raisonné "really important" to an artist's market, he said. Christie's specialist Adrien Meyer said he won't even try to sell an Impressionist or modern artwork unless it has a certificate of authenticity from the artist's heir and a mention in the artist's catalogue raisonné—or at least a pledge from the catalogue's author to add it in the next round of updates.

The situation puts pressure on the authors, who must navigate a minefield of heirs, dealers and collectors leaning on them to add pieces to the final tally. In May, a French court ordered Werner Spies, a former Centre Pompidou director and a Max Ernst scholar, to pay a collector half the roughly $850,000 sale price of an Ernst forgery. The court said the buyer of that forgery, Louis Reijtenbagh, was justified in thinking the Ernst was legitimate because Mr. Spies said so. This week, Mr. Spies said he erroneously notated the work, and added: "Who has not made a mistake in publishing a catalogue raisonné?"

Véronique Wiesinger, who oversees Alberto Giacometti's catalogue raisonné, said she knows historians who have received threats and faced lawsuits from collectors whose works were ultimately passed over. "It's greed," Ms. Wiesinger said. "People want to believe they have uncovered something precious."

Source: The Wall Street Journal