mercoledì 12 dicembre 2007

HAHN V. DUVEEN, New York 1929

The most sensational art trial of the 20th century was a Da Vinci case: La Belle Ferroniere, Hahn versus Duveen.
No art case was ever more extensively reported. The first claim against an art expert for unsolicited opinions.
During the Great War, in France, Harry J. Hahn, a young American Captain in U.S. aviation corps, met and married a graceful French girl, Andrée Lardoux. A wedding gift to Andrée from her aunt, the Comtesse Louise de Montaut, was an ancient picture. In 1916, a French connoisseur named George Sortais had pronounced it to be the work of Leonardo Da Vinci. An identical picture attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci is in the Louvre, in Paris: La Belle Ferroniere. The model used for this picture was Lucrezia Crivelli, second mistress of Ludovico Sforza , duke of Milan, one of the wealthiest and most powerful princes of Renaissance Italy.
A little mystery: in 1848 the Louvre picture disappeared and later reappeared.
Had Leonardo painted this subject twice ? Was the Hahn-Lardoux picture the real La Belle Ferroniere, or is it a fake ?
In 1920, the Hahns took the picture to Kansas City, USA. In 1920's there was no authenticated painting by da Vinci in any American collection, either public or private, and the arrival of this work of the Old Master Leonardo in Kansas City would have been an amazing news.
Leonardo Da Vinci has a special appeal in America because he is considered the model of modern man: artist, engineer, inventor. A genius. In 19th century Leonardo was being loved by new category of businessmen who were transforming the United States. In this context Joseph Duveen quickly became one of the world's leading and spectacular art dealers of all time. He made his name buying works of art in Europe and selling them to the new U.S. millionaires. "Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money" Duveen said. This career was the product of that consideration .
J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, etc. were Duveen's clients. In this way buying art was also buying class for New Barons. The competition among the American millionaires for a small number of high-prestige works of art pushed their prices higher and higer and became the people’s object of curiosity. Duveen was not a quite man, especially concerning works of art handled by rival dealers. The New Yorker, Issue of 2005-10-17 by S. N. Behrman: "On one occasion, an extremely respectable High Church duke was considering a religious painting by an Old Master that Thomas Agnew & Sons, the distinguished English art firm, had offered him. He asked Duveen to look at it. "Very nice, my dear fellow, very nice", said Duveen."But I suppose you are aware that those cherubs are homosexual". The painting went back to Agnew's"."Similarly, in New York, a millionaire collector who was so undisciplined tha he was thinking of buying a sixteenth-century Italian painting fron another dealer asked Duveen to this mansion on Fifth Avenue to look at it. The prospective buyer watched Duveen's face closely and saw his nostrils quiver. "I sniff fresh paint", said Duveen sorrowfully".
In 1920 the Hahns were preparing to sell their Leonardo's picture to the Kansas City Art Institute for a vast sum, rumored to be either $250,000.
A reporter from New York Word heard of the deal and asked for Joseph Duveen’s remarks.
Although Duveen never having seen the painting, he said that La Belle Ferroniere in Kansas City was a copy and the original one was in the Louvre and he added that Leonardo never made replicas of his works.
Lord Duveen said also that "any expert who pronounced it genuine was not an expert".
The Kansas City Art Institute immediately lost interest. It should be borne in mind that The theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre on August 21, 1911 by an Italian painter, and its recovery 27 months later in Florence, led a whole series of owners to claim that their version of the Mona Lisa was the original, and the recovered work was a copy. Experts from the Louvre travelled to the Uffizi museum in Florence to verify its authenticity. They declared the portrait to be the true original. In 1921 Mrs. Hahn sued Duveen in the New York courts for slander of title, claiming his act had ended negotiations in Kansas and made it virtually impossible to sell the picture elsewhere. Andrée sued Duveen for the sensational sum of $ 500,000 in compensation. This case not only raised questions about the authenticity of a picture, it raised the question of whether the 20th-century art world was to be governed by the aesthetic opinions of a self-anointed elite of connoisseurs, or by the rigorous strictures of modern science . Hahn's lawyer also encouraged Duveen and the experts he employed to examine the painting. All experts opinions condemned the American Leonardo as a copy. But Duveen decided on a publicity coup: in 1923 the American and the French Leonardo were brought together in Paris in the Louvre . Duveen assembled a panel of 10 experts to examine the two pictures: Bernard Berenson (the most famous art connoisseur), Roger Fry, artist and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Sir Herbert Cook, owner of the Doughty House in London; Maurice Brockwell, art critic in London; Arthur Pillans-Laurie, Professor of Chemistry at the Herriot-Watt College in Edinburgh; Sir Martin Conway, Director of the Imperial War Museum; Robert Langton-Douglas, an art critic and former director of the Irish Free State Museum in Dublin; Sir Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery, London; Leonce Marie Nicolle, former attaché at the Louvre Museum, Paris; Schmidt-Degner, chief director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. All the experts agreed that the Louvre picture was an original and Hahn's picture a copy. Copies of the two pictures were displayed in Midwestern department stores, and Macy’s sold versions of the picture—“we admit it’s a copy”—for $17.95 . The case came to trial in the Supreme Court of New York in February 1929 . From TIME of February 18, 1929: "The jury, chosen for its ignorance of Leonardo, was composed of a clerk, two agents, two realtors, an accountant, a shirtmaker, an artist, a poster artist, an upholsterer, a vendor of ladies' wear and a man without occupation" . During the proceedings expert Duveen's testimony was attacked and partially discredited. It was also revealed that the experts who had given evidence in Paris had previously provided Duveen certificates of attribution for money. Sir Martin Conway, one of Duveen’s English experts, justified his rejection of the Hahn picture by saying, “I simply look at the Hahn picture and the impression produced on my mind is that it is not by Leonardo”. Another experts, Robert Langton Douglas, described his use of “constructive imagination”. Berenson spoke of the importance of “accumulated experience upon which your spirit acts almost unconsciously” .
Many of Duveen experts had once publicly acknowledged that they did not see the Louvre picture as a work by Leonardo. Hahns' lawyers were able to show that fact in courtroom. At this time modern forensic and scientific analysis was in its infancy: the Hahns used X-rays to demonstrate that their picture had been cut off at the bottom when it had been transferred from wood to canvas in 1777. The Hahn's effort to discredit traditional experts was remarkably successful with the jury. After fourteen hours of deliberation the jury could not decide unanimously (nine to three) if the picture was or not painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Herald Tribune of March 3, 1929: "An artist, an accountant, and a bank worker said Mme Hahn's picture was not original, while two salesmen, two brokers, a man without a vocation, a shirtmaker, a dressmaker, a clerk and a barber said it was". After this open verdict the parties reached a settlement before the new trial was scheduled to begin. Duveen agreed to settle paying Hahn $ 60,000 plus the Hahn's attorney's fees.

Andrea Pizzi