Valsuani Foundry to Close to Pay Creditors

The NY Times has run an interesting article on the closing of the Valsuani foundry. According to the article the foundry was closed by order of a French judge, and property to be liquidated in order to payoff creditors. In the event the name is familiar but you cant place it, the Valsuani foundry is the foundry which discovered the controversial Degas plasters several years back and were selling them for up to $1.5 million. According to the article, the casts are no longer being used to create sculptures.

Fellow appraiser Victor Wiener has written an article for the 2016 edition of the Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies on the Luke Brugnara case which included a Valsuani foundry Degas Little Dancer from the Degas Sculpture Project headed by Walter Maibaum, a New Jersey art dealer. The article is an entertaining read and takes a good look at art authentication as well as high level art court cases and lawsuits.

The new edition of the Journal will be available for order in just about a week.  Keep an eye on the AW Blog on how to order.  If you are coming to the amazing ISA conference in Ft Worth next week, copies will be available for sale.

The NY Times reports

The Valsuani foundry, whose bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas have roiled the art market for more than a decade, is closing, by order of a French judge who ruled that its business, just outside Paris, should be liquidated to pay off creditors.

For years, some scholars have taken issue with whether the bronzes can accurately be attributed to Degas, because they question whether the plasters from which they are cast can be traced back to wax sculptures he created.

With the closing of the foundry and its continuing liquidation, per the judge’s January ruling, Degas bronzes based on these plasters — which have sold for as much as $1.5 million at auction — will no longer be cast.

Yet the market for Degas bronzes won’t disappear. Some created in the 1920s at the Hébrard foundry in Paris, and others made more recently at Valsuani, remain available for sale around the world. One of the older bronzes, made by Hébrard, sold last year for nearly $25 million.

Disputes over authenticity and value have been a fixture of the art market for centuries. The debate in this case dates to Degas himself, a French artist known especially for his painting and drawing and whose printmaking is the subject of an exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art. Degas sculpted in wax and clay but only as an intellectual exercise. He hated the idea of casting his sculptures in bronze.

“To be survived by sculpture in bronze — what a responsibility!” he is reported to have said. “Bronze is so very indestructible.”

But that didn’t stop his heirs from having bronzes made after his death in 1917, and they have been selling them as authentic Degas works ever since.

“Posthumous reproductions continue to play a contentious role in the artistic legacies of Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas and several other important sculptors who died in the early 20th century,” said Patricia Failing, a retired art history professor who remains affiliated with the University of Washington, in Seattle. Ms. Failing is one of several art historians who question whether the Degas bronzes made by the latest incarnation of the Valsuani foundry should be embraced as his work.

Degas allowed only one of his sculptures to be exhibited: “Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer Aged Fourteen),” which he entered into the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1881. The 49-pound sculpture was made from a combination of yellow beeswax, clay, silk and cloth and now resides at the National Gallery in Washington, a gift from the banker Paul Mellon.

After Degas’s death, his family enlisted the Hébrard foundry to cast in bronze 74 wax and clay sculptures that were found in his studio in Paris. The plan was to cast 22 sets of the 74 sculptures, or 1,628 bronzes.

Between 1922 and 1937, about a third of those bronzes were cast before the foundry closed. With the authorization of the family, the manufacture of Degas bronzes then shifted to another foundry, a predecessor of the current Valsuani, in Paris.

Today, the Hébrard bronzes are widely viewed as authentic, even though Degas had nothing to do with casting them. They are also valuable: In June 2015, Sotheby’s sold a 1922 bronze of the “Little Dancer” for a record $24.8 million.

The Valsuani foundry that succeeded Hébrard as the authorized producer of the bronzes ran into financial difficulty in the late 1970s. In 1981 Leonardo Benatov, an artist and the son of a prominent Russian painter, acquired the rights to its name from the French art dealer Daniel Wildenstein and re-established the foundry in Chevreuse, outside of Paris.

Shortly after taking over Valsuani, Mr. Benatov says he discovered an entirely new set of 74 plaster sculptures by Degas, including a “Little Dancer.” These plasters and the bronzes Mr. Benatov later made from them are the subject of the controversy. Some of the plasters needed repairs and Mr. Benatov, himself an accomplished sculptor, fixed them.

Until recently, Mr. Benatov and his artisans had been churning out posthumous Degas bronzes, as well as reproductions of sculptures by Rodin, Modigliani and Dali. Under French law, Mr. Benatov can brand bronzes as “originals,” with the permission of an artist’s heirs or rights holders, or as “reproductions,” once the artist has been dead for 70 years and the bronzes are clearly stamped as such. Since he did not have the authorization of the Degas family to produce originals, he had made reproductions, since it has been more than 70 years since Degas’s death.

Mr. Benatov then cast, and in 1997 sold, 12 bronze “Little Dancers” for around $60,000 each, and another 34 or so a year later. They were all marked “reproduction” under the tutu.

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to cast them,” he told ArtNews in 2013. “Customs would have come out to the foundry.”

The problem for some Degas scholars is that the plaster sculpture used to make the Valsuani bronzes of the “Little Dancer” is different — the face, the collarbones, the hair, the position of the legs — from the “Little Dancer” that Degas is widely embraced as having made and exhibited.

The authenticity debate has accelerated in recent years, as the foundry had expanded the number of bronzes it produced that were based on the disputed plasters. Increased production was tied to a contract the foundry entered into with Walter Maibaum, a New Jersey art dealer. Mr. Maibaum said he was convinced that the plasters were based on wax sculptures made by Degas, a view that was supported in a published paper by Gregory Hedberg, an art dealer at Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York, and endorsed by some of the artist’s relatives.

Acting as the Degas Sculpture Project, a business created to buy and sell Valsuani bronzes, Mr. Maibaum contracted with Mr. Benatov to cast 27 sets of the 74 plasters into bronze. Armed with Mr. Hedberg’s expert opinion, Mr. Maibaum has been trying to sell the sets, which are marked as reproductions, for upward of $30 million. In 2010, one dealer, working from figures associated with sales of the earlier Hébrard bronzes, appraised a set of Valsuani bronzes at $37.25 million, according to a copy of the appraisal. But Mr. Maibaum has declined to disclose any sales figures.

The Valsuani bronzes have been exhibited in several museums, including ones in Tel Aviv, Havana and St. Petersburg, Russia (the Hermitage), which all presented them as the work of Degas.

Mr. Maibaum and Mr. Benatov declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a 2012 paper, published at the time of the Hermitage exhibition, Mr. Maibaum wrote, “there is every reason to conclude the plasters are authentic, and therefore the posthumous bronzes cast from them are authentic as well.”

The men’s lawyers have complained that articles about the debate have been unfair and have damaged the Valsuani bronzes’ marketability. Mr. Hedberg did not respond to requests for comment.

Since plasters cannot be carbon-dated, it is difficult to determine when they were made. Mr. Maibaum believes that at least 10 were made while Degas was alive and that a vast majority of the rest were created within two years of his death, according to Mr. Maibaum’s lawyer.

There is no independent arbitrator who decides authenticity issues in the art world. But some experts on Degas have questioned whether the plasters truly represent his work. In 2011 the National Gallery declined to list them in its comprehensive catalog of Degas’s sculptures.

In 2010, a handful of Degas experts went so far as to hold a secret meeting in New York to try to address what they considered to be the inaccurate attribution. But they did not release a public statement for fear of being sued for slander and incurring prohibitive legal costs. The Degas expert Gary Tinterow, now director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, said in 2010, “In my opinion, there is nothing that demonstrates that Degas had a set of plaster casts made of his sculptures during his lifetime.”

In the ensuing years, few Degas experts have come forward to support the Valsuani bronzes as works that can conclusively be traced back to the artist.

Yet even as the foundry closes, there remains a market for its Degas works. Eric Buikema, a lawyer for Mr. Maibaum, said his client intended to remain an active player in it.

“Although the Valsuani foundry is unfortunately closing,” Mr. Buikema said, “my client, the Degas Sculpture Project, remains viable and active in placing the Degas bronzes with appropriate collectors and in organizing museum exhibitions.”

Source: New York Times