BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER ON JANUARY 4, 2018


The evening sales of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London (held on December 6 and December 7, respectively) showed a marked uptick in the art market category—up 75.6 percent from December 2016 and 58.5 percent over 2015, according to Peter Gerdman, an art market analyst at London-based ArtTactic.

At Sotheby’s, 41 of the 50 lots on offer achieved a total of £25,048,950 ($33,552,100). The sale was led by Joseph Wright of Derby’s iconic oil on canvas, An Academy by Lamplight (1769), which brought an artist record £7,263,700 ($9.736,990), more than doubling its £3.5 million ($4.7 million) high estimate.

At Christie’s, 27 of the 36 offered lots sold for a total of £21,772,000 ($29,162,800). The star lot of the evening was Saint Francis and his Brother Leo in Meditation, an early 17th century canvas by Doménikos Theotokópoulos, better known as El Greco. The Mannerist work realized £6,871,250 ($9,203,780) on its £5 million to £7 million ($6.7­$9.4 million) estimate. Christie’s has clearly had a banner year in the Old Masters arena, having sold Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for record-shattering $450,312,500 in New York in November.

The December sales at the Sotheby’s and Christie’s brought in a combined total of £46,820,950 ($62,714,900) with buyer’s premium, easily exceeding presale expectations of £30,660,000 to £44,980,000 ($41,067,900–$60,249,000). By comparison, the December 2016 sales at the two houses garnered £14.8 million ($18.8 million) and £12.2 million ($15.4 million), respectively.
“2017 showed an unpredictable growth in the Old Master auction sector,” says Gerdman, adding that reported sales at auction totaled $797 million. This figure represents a year-on-year growth of 123.1%—growth largely attributed to the single sale of the Salvator Mundi. “That extraordinary sale has propelled the Old Master paintings market back into the limelight,” he says, “but the long-term effect on the wider sector, currently impacted by a diminishing supply of top-tier works, remains to be seen.”

Painting by Chris J. van Dijk. 'The Bridge', Panel, 70 x 60 cm.
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More than a style of art, Impressionism is a movement and a unique way of looking at the world that was shocking in its day and continues to have relevance to contemporary artists. Originally, the Impressionists were considered subversive. Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the violation of the official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. I
t is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. In fact, the works of the Impressionists were repeatedly rejected from the Salon run by the Academy of Fine Arts established by Colbert under the reign of the Louis XIV, which continued to rule the artworld for two hundred years. Because they were unconventional, the paintings of the Impressionists were relegated by Napolen III to the Salon de Refuses (the Salon of the Rejected) in 1863. Rather than accept defeat, many of the Impressionist artists—most notrably, Monet, Morisot, Pissaro, Sisley and Renoir—coalesced into an informal movement that convened in popular cafes in Montmatre. They created their own exhibit in 1874, called La Societe Anonyme (The Anonymous Society).

Even when they united, however, the Impressionists initially suffered critical derision. The critic Louis Leroy, who coined the term “Impressionists” based on Monet’s painting in the exhibit “Impression: Sunrise”, wrote dismissively: “Impression; I was certain of it. I was just thinking that I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it. And what freedom! What ease of handling! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more highly finished than this seascape.” Writing in the same derogatory vein, the critic Albert Wolf, from Le Figaro, charged that Renoir—today known as the painter of sensuality and women–didn’t know how to paint female nudes, making them look like putrid, decomposing corpses: “Try explaining to Mr. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a heap of rotting flesh, with green and purple patches, like a corpse in an advanced state of putrefaction.”
Most art critics at the time, with the notable exception of the naturalist writer Emile Zola (who championed the art of Manet and the Impressionists), considered Impressionist artwork as unfinished, ugly and poorly executed. Which leads us to ask how and why did the works of the Impressionists strike critics and viewers as so different from other art of the time?
This notion of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives—but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.
Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

 

1. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

 

1. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

 

1. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

 

1. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

 

1. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective—the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it.
Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals—but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals.
The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings—where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters.
The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system.
Similarly, rather than de picting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives.
This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Impressionism remains highly relevant in a historical sense, as an important artistic movement associated with innovation and modernity. But it is also alive today as a way of looking at the world that influences the vision of contemporary artists.
To offer one notable example, the artist, art dealer, and gallery owner Chris van Dijk paints in a style influenced by Impressionism and by the Romantic movement, calling his work “Romantic Impressionism”. In 2002, he opened his own highly successful gallery in Dordogne, a beautiful area in Southwestern France between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees Mountains.
His gallery features some of the most important artists working in the Realist, Romantic and Impressionist styles. Since 2013, Chris has also devoted his time to creating his own paintings, which, true to their Impressionist inspiration, focus on plein air scenes: at the beach, in the forest, or in the picturesque poppy fields of Dordogne. Like the works of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, the paintings of Chris van Dijk often feature women and children. The scenes look unposed, as if the subjects were caught unawares.
Most of the time, they look away from the viewer, engrossed in their daily activities, such as playing in the sand, walking in the woods or picking wildflowers. They seem to be at home in their natural surroundings.
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Chris van Dijk’s paintings, like the works of the Impressionists, are a celebration of the beauty of nature and life. You can see many more of the artist’s paintings on his website.

“I think we are overdue and ready to bring back great female artists of the past,” the director of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, Eike Schmidt, tells The Art Newspaper. Inspired by a conversation with the US-based feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls, Schmidt has pledged to show more work by women. Florence’s little-known first female painter, the self-taught nun Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-87), will be the subject of a display opening on International Women’s Day at the Uffizi (Plautilla Nelli: Convent Art and Devotion in the Footsteps of Savonarola, 8 March-4 June). The show anticipates a broadly chronological series of exhibitions drawing on the museum’s collection that “could easily go on for 20 years”, Schmidt says. 

Female artists who were successful in their own time have long languished in obscurity. After seeking—and failing to find—more information on Peeters when they visited the Prado in the 1960s, the US collectors Wilhelmina and Wallace Holladay founded the world’s only museum dedicated to art by women. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC, now counts 42 artists from the 16th to the 19th centuries among its 5,000-strong collection. “We call them Old Mistresses,” says its director Susan Fisher Sterling, citing the pointed term introduced by feminist art historians in the 1970s. “By the 1900s, those early artists tend to fade away. It is like being an old mistress—you’re part of the scene one day and then you’re not.” 

Problem of supplyBut curators of older art hoping to redress the historic gender imbalance face a supply problem. The holdings of the Uffizi reflect the progressive ideals of its founding fathers, the grand dukes of Tuscany. Pickings are slimmer at other European institutions that inherited royal and elite collections and at US museums, which developed later. “What we have reflects a time when it was very hard for women to enter the professional sphere,” says Alejandro Vergara, the Prado’s senior curator of Flemish and northern European paintings, who organised the Peeters show. 

The Old Masters market lacks the volume to make targeted acquisitions of women’s art possible, says Katharine Baetjer, the European paintings curator who brought the Vigée Le Brun show to the Met. The department owns no more than 15 works by women, she says. The Met is, however, displaying a new Angelica Kauffmann portrait, donated in 2016 by the Milan-based dealer Carlo Orsi. 

“Quotas and statistics are not necessarily the way forward for women artists in the 1500 to 1900 period,” says Tabitha Barber, the Tate’s curator of British art, 1550-1750. “Our position is that women have always painted, and their contribution to art history needs to be recognised.” Since 2009, the Tate has acquired six works by earlier female artists, four of which are currently on view at Tate Britain. 

Crucially, almost half a century since the publication of Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, there is a “generation of scholars—female and male—that are finding quality in women artists”, Sterling says. The drive to expand the canon in academic research and museum exhibitions is also generating new discoveries.

“The good news is that since female artists of the past are understudied, you always find additional works that have not been known,” Schmidt says. The inventory of Plautilla Nelli’s works has swelled from three to at least 19 in the past decade. “People are starting to discuss what constitutes a Nelli, what constitutes Nelli’s school,” says Linda Falcone, the director of the Florence-based Advancing Women Artists Foundation, which paid for the restoration of seven works in the Uffizi show.

A rare late self-portrait by the Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster sold at Christie’s in London for £485,000 (with fees, est £400,000-£600,000) last December after resurfacing on an English country estate. “Given the academic process of identifying paintings and tracking them down, it’s very possible that more works by her will be discovered,” says Christie’s Old Master specialist Alexis Ashot. Leyster’s entire oeuvre was unknown for centuries, until in 1893 a “Frans Hals” at the Louvre was revealed to contain her overpainted signature. “There may be other cases of women artists whose names we don’t even think of yet,” Ashot says.

Perhaps ironically, the re-emergence of “Old Mistresses” will rely on the traditional practice of Old Master connoisseurship. The dealer and broadcaster Bendor Grosvenor bought the Carlile portrait as a “sleeper” in a regional English auction in 2014 for £4,200 (hammer price), selling it to the Tate for £35,000. “It is sometimes the case that female artists, because they were obliged to operate outside the usual systems of patronage and study, painted in styles that [look] less like their peers,” Grosvenor says. “The painting of Joan Carlile was really quite easy to identify because she painted quite unlike anyone else at the time.”

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With the Knoedler trial still fresh in people’s minds and an Old Master forgery scandal linked to works attributed to Cranach and Hals among others recently uncovered, the question of how to reduce the number of fakes—of everything from Ming vases to post-war paintings—circulating on the market is more urgent than ever. At the annual art-crime symposium held in November at New York University, participants agreed that the culprit was the market’s notorious secrecy. But discussions revealed deep divisions about what should be done. Insurers, auction houses, dealers and other players each have their own interests to protect in a market where, as one participant remarked, the “level of greed... is so great”.

“Information is the currency of the art market,” said lawyer Steven Thomas, the head of the art law practice at the Los Angeles law firm Irell & Manella. He offered an example showing how information was withheld in trying to close a sale. When one of his clients learned that an Impressionist painting he was interested in had been restored so extensively it was no longer considered authentic, he confronted the dealer, a prominent New York gallerist. “Oh, you found out,” was the cavalier response. Such is the attitude in a market where the burden of due diligence as a practical matter may fall on the buyer. 

But even simple provenance research may be impossible when a dealer or an agent mediates on behalf of an anonymous seller. The Knoedler scandal, of course, highlighted the problem of non-disclosure writ large, with buyers handing over a total of nearly $70m for more than 30 paintings from the collection of a mysterious Mr X. As was revealed at trial, although some experts told the gallery they doubted the paintings’ authenticity, Knoedler did not pass on that information to the sellers. Further, Knoedler never actually knew Mr X’s identity. But the buyers assumed it did, having only been told by the gallery that the owner preferred the usual industry practice of anonymity. Had Knoedler disclosed these facts, the plaintiffs said, they never would have bought the paintings. When a potential purchaser presented gallery director Ann Freedman with a contract requiring her to state, among other things, that the gallery did not know anything putting the work’s authenticity into question, she refused: that just was not how the art market worked. ​
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​The Knoedler gallery sold this painting, purportedly by Jackson Pollock, to the collector Pierre Lagrange for $17m in 2007
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In this system, dealers are not the only ones who benefit by keeping silent. Judd Grossman, the chair of the New York County Lawyers’ Association Art Law Committee, spoke of a Jackson Pollock expert who admitted that he “sees forgeries all the time but doesn’t do anything about it”. After all, scholars have their own interests to protect; they may stay silent because they are afraid of being sued on an expanding array of grounds, from disparagement to professional negligence. Even if the authenticity of a work is called into question, a spooked seller may dump it without disclosing the compromising evidence. No one tells an owner his Franz Kline is faux. The result, the art consultant Martha Parrish told The Art Newspaper, is that “all the fakes are roaming around and coming to market again”. 

To regulate or not?So what is to be done? With art market participants unwilling to proffer critical information voluntarily, Christiane Fischer, the chief executive of AXA Art Americas, suggested that the government should require it: “It’s better for everyone if there’s more regulation.” But “when the government does it, it’s ham-handed,” objected Christopher Marinello, the chief executive of the Art Recovery Group, which maintains a database of stolen and fake art. He cited US regulations intended to curb the illegal slaughter of elephants by banning the sale of items with even a sliver of ivory. “It’s so over-regulated…that it’s difficult to sell and affects the value of the work,” he said. 

And who would enforce the regulations? Attorney Lawrence Kaye, the co-chair of the Art Law Group at Herrick, pointed out that there is no dedicated enforcement agency in the US and it “would be very hard to get a regulator” that could enforce laws around the world. That is if those laws can get passed at all. In New York, a proposal to encourage scholars to sound the alarm by protecting them from frivolous lawsuits has been stalled in the state legislature for nearly three years. 

Insurance companies could be a powerful force in keeping fakes out of the market, Marinello suggested. If buyers cannot get insurance, they might be more careful before they buy and sellers might be forced to step out of the shadows. “When you buy property, you have a survey done or you can’t get a mortgage. Banks control the market. Why don’t insurers refuse to insure unless you have good due diligence?” he asked. Ron Fiamma, the global head of private collections at AIG, which insures 52% of the people on ArtNews’ Top 200 Collectors List, had a simple answer. Insurers “don’t push for documents because it’s a competitive business,” he said. Companies like his would be at a disadvantage unless everyone did it. 

Some suggested that the market should police itself. But competing interests make self-regulation a mirage. There is no “cohesive alliance”, said Sherri Cohen, a director at Bonhams’ trusts and estates department, who noted that she sees art crime “daily”. Further muddying the waters, some of the most active buyers are also sellers. “Big collectors control the market, so they prefer to see it go on as business as usual,” noted one panellist. 

Risky businessGiven the impasse, Steven Thomas suggested an alternative. Attention should be focused not on due diligence but rather on who should bear the risk that a work is fake. He had no doubt it should be the sellers: they put the work on the market, get the money and control the information shared. 

Thomas notes that market is already regulated, just inadequately. He cites two New York statutes designed to protect buyers and reduce the number of questionable works in circulation. Under one, when a dealer or auctioneer writes on an invoice that a work is by a particular artist, the invoice serves as a four-year guaranty that it is by that artist. The other statute applies only to multiples, theoretically at greater risk of unauthorised duplication. If a multiple is proven to be a fake, the dealer must refund the purchase price with interest, and if the buyer proves the seller was deceptive, the seller has to pay the buyer’s legal fees—a protection, Thomas suggested, that could be extended to unique works as well.

At the very least, he says, the statute of limitations for each scenario is too short. Most owners do not discover they own a fake until they try to sell it – ­typically after more than four years. Contrary to the statutes’ purpose, the risk of loss is then shifted back to the buyer. Thomas supports amending both laws so that the statute of limitations begins not on the date the buyer purchased the work but on the date they discover (or should have discovered) that it is fake. 

Even this step to bring the law’s effect back in line with its intent might meet resistance. Auction houses and dealers would likely have strong objections to a revision or expansion of the statute of limitations, said Gregory Clarick, of Clarick Gueron Reisbaum, who represented some of the Knoedler plaintiffs in their claims against the gallery. In his experience, sellers think four years is long enough to be held liable. “They want that finality,” he said. Clarick believes the judgments supporting the Knoedler buyers’ claims of fraud are “the starting point to regulate the industry” because they “require honest and frank disclosure about works a dealer is selling”. Marinello, though, doubts that relying on the courts is a suitable answer. “Judges are on the same level as criminals when it comes to fine art,” he said. “They don’t know much.” 

Legislation against frivolous lawsuitsThe worth of a work of art hinges on its authenticity, so experts who render opinions are in everyone’s crosshairs. A proposal to protect them from frivolous lawsuits was introduced by Senator Betty Little and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal in New York in 2014.

Initially, the twin bills said that if a lawsuit against an authenticator was unsuccessful, the plaintiff must pay the defendant's legal fees. The costs can be steep: the Andy Warhol Foundation paid nearly $7m to defend itself in one lawsuit and later disbanded its authentication board. The bills do not protect any person or entity with a financial interest in the work of art—such as a dealer who represents an artist's estate.

It was hoped the prospect of paying the other side’s fees would discourage nuisance suits. However, in yet another instance of competing interests impeding change, the New York State Trial Lawyers Association lobbied for adjustments; as amended, the judge would decide whether the losing plaintiff has to pay. Even in its revised form, the law has not been passed. It will be reintroduced in early 2017, says Dean Nicyper, the lawyer spearheading the proposal. ​

Thanks to  LAURA GILBERT, BILL GLASS  

​In what will surely be one of the biggest blockbusters in the Middle East next year, Qatar Museums will stage the first exhibition in the region focused on the two legendary 20th-century artists Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.

​The show, which will take place at Fire Station Artist in Residence in Doha, is a collaboration between Qatar Museums, Paris’ Musée National Picasso, and the Fondation Giacometti. The first leg of the show, in fact, is currently on at the Parisian museum.
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Gathering over 80 works by these two emblematic artists, some of the highlights that will be included in the exhibition are Self Portrait (1901), Woman Throwing a Stone (1931) and The She Goat (1950) by Picasso; and Flower in Danger (1932), Tall Woman (1960), and Walking Man (1960) by Giacometti.

The exhibition, curated by Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti, will take place from February 22 to May 21, 2017, and represents the culmination of over two years of research.
One of Grenier’s main tasks of was to shine a light on the similarities and relationship between these two artists, who are seemingly disparate in their approaches to art making, and had a 20-year age gap.
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Launched in 2005 and led by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Qatar Museums continues its ambitious plans to turn Qatar into a top art destination—not only in the Middle East, but also beyond.

Thanks to Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

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Sotheby’s joined the long-running dispute over a Leonardo da Vinci painting that has pitted Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev against a Swiss businessman who operates the biggest art storage facilities around the world.
The auction house fired a preemptive shot with a request to a federal judge for an order clearing it of any wrongdoing in the private sale of “Christ as Salvator Mundi” to Yves Bouvier, president of Natural Le Coultre, that operates Geneva Freeport.

The painting was sold in 2013 to a company controlled by Bouvier for $80 million by a consortium of dealers that include Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries, New York art dealers Alexander Parish and Robert Simon, Sotheby’s said. Bouvier flipped the painting to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. The dealers’ group is now threatening to sue Sotheby’s for the difference, claiming they were shortchanged on the sale, the auction house said in a filing in Manhattan federal court Monday.
The international battle is being watched closely by the art market. The Russian fertilizer billionaire accused the freeport mogul of overcharging him by $500 million to $1 billion during the course of a decade for works by da Vinci, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso. Rybolovlev sued Bouvier in Monaco and Singapore, claiming he was the victim of fraud.

Rybolovlev declined to comment on the Sotheby’s filing. Simon also declined to comment on behalf of the consortium.
Sotheby’s had nothing to do with the private deal Bouvier struck with Rybolovlev and it didn’t make any money on the sale, the auction house said in the court filing.​

Estate SaleParish had apparently bought the painting for less than $10,000 at an estate sale in Louisiana in the early 2000s, Sotheby’s said in the filing. It was long believed the work was a copy of a da Vinci, but Sotheby’s said in the filing it later helped in the authentication of the painting as having been done by the master around 1500.
The group that sold the painting may be “experiencing seller’s remorse,” Sotheby’s said in its complaint. “The defendants no doubt wish they had made even more money.”
Sotheby’s asked for an order declaring that it’s not liable to the selling group for any losses they claim to have suffered from the sale.

by Katya Kazakina

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Canadian art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov's new publication 

Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook (Abrams) was unveiled in Paris on Tuesday. But with all the fanfare, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was notably not on board with the supposed discovery of some 65 sketches by the famed artist from his pivotal period in the south of France.
Van Gogh scholar Ronald Pickvance wrote a foreword about the sketchbook, claiming: “The most revolutionary discovery in the entire history of Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Not one drawing; not ten, not fifty, but sixty-five drawings.”



​An expert on van Gogh, Welsh-Ovcharov says she was contacted in 2013 by a local scholar about the find. She made a detailed analysis of each drawing, connecting them to final works made by van Gogh in Provence. She points out new insights on his last years and masterworks such as The Night Café and The Starry Night.
"The patina is there, the brushwork with the reed pen, the way he executes with such vibrato, with such passion, with such force every individual object in nature — you can't duplicate that," she said to CBC.
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The Van Gogh Museum has contested the sketchbook's authenticity, based on a review of high-quality photographs, releasing a statement that says, in part, "...it contains distinctive topographical errors and...its maker based it on discoloured drawings by Van Gogh."
Welsh-Ovcharov's publisher says they will issue a response to the museum's claims later this week, reports CBC.

​“In the nineteenth century,” Brancusi declared, “the situation in sculpture was desperate. Rodin arrived and transformed everything.” In a way, Rodin was fortunate that initially he wasn’t part of the system. Rejected several times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Rodin was not trained according to the rigid academic standards of the time. Nonetheless, he never gave up and showed great confidence in his talent. In 1865, for example, his sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose (1865 and 1875) was initially rejected by the jury of the Salon, partly because the clay fissured and the sculpture cracked in the back of the head.
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​After a trip to Italy, the works of Michelangelo served as his main inspiration. Like the Renaissance masters, he studied human anatomy. In fact, his sculptures were so life-like in his sculptures that his first major work, The Age of Bronze (1876), caused a great controversy. Rodin was accused of cheating by making it from a live cast of his model. Rodin protested and put together an impressive dossier defending himself, but to no avail. In Rodin’s defense, his model, Auguste Neyt, recalled “I had to train myself to strike the pose. It was hardly an easy thing to do. Rodin did not want straining muscles; in fact, he loathed the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted ‘natural action taken from real life.” (http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin)
Eventually, however, thanks to recommendations made by influential friends, the French government bought the sculpture in 1880 for the hefty sum of 2000 francs. Henceforth Rodin’s fame would continue to rise.
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The charge of the Salon could have been further from the truth. Rodin never worked from live casts. He asked his models, both male and female, to walk around freely in his studio. Often he would follow them around, making rapid sketches of their movements. When he spotted them in a particularly interesting pose or expression, he would try to capture it quickly, modeling in clay. For Rodin, as for Michelangelo, the body itself was expressive of emotion. He stated: “I have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.” It is said that Rodin’s wife, Rose Beuret, once stormed into his studio in a fit of rage and began screaming at him. She would have had plenty of reasons to be upset with Rodin since he notoriously cheated on her with his young models, most of whom were can-can dancers. Instead of responding in kind, however, Rodin quickly modeled her angry expression in clay, saying “Thank you, my dear. That was excellent.” Nothing was as inspirational for him as visible emotion, read in facial expressions and gestures.
Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, his chef d’oeuvre, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, The Kiss, as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:
“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”
Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone.

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"This donation, exceptional both in its size and its consistency, is the biggest received by a French museum from a French museum since 1945," the French culture ministry said on Friday.
The 89-year-old couple have bequeathed their huge collection to Paris's Seineside museum of 19th-century art when they die but 187 works, worth 173 million euros, were to be donated on Saturday.


Degas, Corot and les Nabis

The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.


The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.

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