The history of a few paintings attributed to Nicolas Poussin shows the extent to which such highly desirable sanctified objects mobilize dominators of all types: art historians, experts, curators, scientists, museum directors, gallery owners, collectors, auctioneers, but also ministers, mayors, presidents of foundations, lawyers, business leaders, all seek to harness a share of what is sacred about the painting, to make it their own or to associate themselves with it in one way or another. It is the magnetic power possessed by all objects which, imbued with collective beliefs, incite every possible envy, every possible desire, and all possible admiration.
In this story, everyone acts out their role within their own professional universe, at the same time drawing on the result of the actions put in motion by other people in other universes. Art historians or curators seek to associate their names with the paintings of great artists that they have authenticated; scientists working in laboratories seek recognition for the incontestable nature of their analyses in the process of authenticating works; gallery owners and major collectors are keen to secure ‘good deals’ by discovering works by great artists in public sales; auctioneers want to organize ‘successful sales’ which will create ripples in the world of art; lawyers want to defend the interests of clients who own paintings in order to develop a reputation as excellent lawyers in the field and to attract new clients; museum directors want to make the best possible acquisitions in order to enrich their collections and are eager to demonstrate their capacity to use the laws on sponsorship to set up ‘successful operations’ for financing the acquisition of works; mayors of small communities with an established museum seek to transform their towns into the most attractive tourist destination possible; business leaders seek to gain public recognition by being seen to take part in highly mediatized sponsorship operations; journalists want to show off their perspicacity and their knowledge of the field by writing articles on ‘stories’ involving actors from the world of art, etc.1 Each one plays out his own game, but on a sort of giant chessboard – the product of history – whose structure the players have not chosen. This giant chessboard is a self-evident fact made up of institutions of all types (from museums to legislative measures and including universities, institutes, galleries, salerooms, laboratories, courts of law, etc.) and of a foundation of beliefs, for the most part invisible or unquestioned, such as belief in art as distinct from the ordinary, profane world, belief in the existence of great artists, belief in the need to attribute the works of these great artists, etc.
While it is impossible to retrace the individual journey of all of the actors who have played a major or secondary part in this story, we can, nevertheless, focus our attention on some of them with the intention of capturing the biographical construction of their legitimacy, the unfortunate effects of their lack of legitimacy, or even the way they were able to use the painting to try to expand, with varying success, their reputation or their economic capital. Amongst the dominators there are also winners and losers, victors and vanquished, and it is all these that will be our focus here.
In order to give the sociologically relevant account of the trajectory of certain paintings representing The Flight into Egypt, I have had to mention on numerous occasions the names of the four leading world experts on Poussin. Of these, two are British (Sir Anthony Blunt and Sir Denis Mahon) and two are French (Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Rosenberg). Three of them, Anthony Blunt, Denis Mahon and Jacques Thuillier, the three oldest, were to ‘dominate the historiography of Poussin between 1960 and 1974’,2 while the youngest of them would establish a solid reputation for himself somewhat later. The fact that England and France hold the monopoly of the expertise on the painter, and undoubtedly more broadly on seventeenth-century French painting, is the outcome of a history whose main elements I have outlined above. Had there not been a period of relative lack of interest in Poussin’s work amongst the French elite between the end of the seventeenth century and the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, his works would almost certainly not have been bought to such an extent by English art dealers, and experts would therefore not have sprung up on British soil. As for Italy, connoisseurs quickly understood that the appropriation of this painter by those in power and by the French art world turned him into a quintessentially French painter, in spite of the forty years he spent in Rome.
Jean-Pierre Cuzin recalls with admiration these great Poussin specialists, the British ones surpassing the French both in seniority and reputation:
It was an extraordinarily difficult and fragile discipline, and moreover, one in which questions, not of personal enmities, but of personal reputations, were hugely important. Where pride, it must be said (laughs), was a major factor … For Poussin, it was notorious: there were two formidable experts, both dead now, Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon, and Thuillier and Rosenberg in France, but still, Blunt and Mahon were much older and had extraordinary reputations. And Mahon and Blunt detested each other! They behaved towards each other like a pair of exquisite British Lords, but they couldn’t stand each other. They each had – it was comical! – a version of the same painting by Poussin, Eliezer and Rebecca … So Blunt had one version, Mahon had the other … For the pedigree of the painting, to say which one of them was the original … The composition was not the same, you see! It wasn’t like The Flight into Egypt … It was comical … Blunt was stronger than Mahon in the end, but Mahon had a PHENOMENAL reputation!3
Yet the ex-curator cannot express his admiration for Blunt and Mahon without, at the same time, disagreeing with them over their attribution of the ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ version of The Flight into Egypt. In Mahon’s case, Cuzin cites his great age and the pride that prevented him from admitting his mistake:
It is not an exact science. It’s all to do with the eye. Mahon was after all very old at that stage. There was also the question of pride. It never really happened to me personally, but if you make a mistake, if you publish something and then … ah! There’s evidence that there’s another version of the painting which is better, that you looked a bit too hastily and made a mistake … It doesn’t look too clever, does it!
But if Blunt attributed the ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ version to Poussin and died before the second version came to light, it is difficult, however, to claim that Mahon examined the painting in question ‘a bit too hastily’, when in fact he compared the two paintings on several occasions, made reference to scientific analyses and produced a sustained argument in his speech in Monaco in support of the North American version, pointing out the weaknesses in Thuillier’s arguments.
Other arguments against the British and North American art historians point out that there was too close a connection between them and the art market and major collectors. As Isabelle Dubois explains:
Well that’s typically Anglo-Saxon. That’s how it works in England and in America. It’s something that would be impossible here, because we have an ethical code which prevents us [museum curators] not only from effectively acting as mediators for a sale, but equally from putting a price on a work. It’s a practice that I think happens less today, precisely because there were times when they made mistakes, where it was discovered there were bribes, etc. So it’s something that doesn’t really happen anymore, but there were some notorious cases. And Timothy Standring, for example, who is still active, visibly intervened to advise Barbara Piasecka-Johnson and, as a result, was more or less obliged later on to say her painting was an autograph work, even though I don’t think he still believed that to be the case. [In 2008] Timothy Standring explained what had happened, saying: ‘Yes, yes. I made a mistake.’ But the fact is, he couldn’t really admit it officially, given that he was involved in it all. He won’t admit it publicly because he had effectively helped in the acquisition. And that, everyone can see, is damaging because it affects freedom of judgement.4
Mahon was similarly suspected of being close to Piasecka-Johnson:
I think that the Anglo-Saxons were too involved in the market, and indeed, Mahon was also involved in the art market, to the extent that at one point he must have advised … I don’t know exactly what happened. I can’t really tell you precisely what his role was in all that, but he was so involved in the exhibition in ’97 that people suspected him of having personal interests.
If criticism of this problematic connection between experts and dealers is, as we might say, ‘fair enough’,5 it would nevertheless be too simplistic to set the self-interest of the Anglo-Saxons against the ‘freedom of judgement’ or the disinterested search for the ‘truth’ on the French side. Even if they do not maintain direct links with particular interests, refrain from playing the role of adviser to art dealers and have to respect a confidentiality code, French museum curators and leading art historians nevertheless have their own interests in defending the authenticity of certain works over others, interests which can sometimes be purely and simply national considerations (there are ‘French’ paintings as distinct from ‘American’, ‘English’ or ‘Italian’ paintings), and they are just as interested as the dealers are in claiming to have ‘found’ works pre-empted in auction salerooms to enrich national collections.
Moreover, competition does not only take the form of national divides. The very British quarrel between Blunt and Mahon was public knowledge and the fact that these two historians agreed over the ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ version of The Flight into Egypt was all the more significant coming from specialists who had regularly argued over the dates and attributions of seventeenth-century works throughout their careers. In 1994, Olivier Bonfait attempted to pin down the differences in attitude between Blunt, Mahon and Thuillier, the three great Poussin specialists. The one who stood out from the others was Mahon, closest to the great tradition of connoisseurship. When it came to the attribution of paintings, the eye was of primordial importance for him: ‘The art of painting, which the connoisseur focuses on exclusively, doesn’t require anything else to reveal its own explanation and its own purpose.’6 He is therefore more interested in direct knowledge of the works and regards any historical knowledge on Poussin’s theoretical intentions, his religiosity, his patrons or his relationship with the powers of the time as extremely secondary. In the 1960s, he ‘advocated very clearly the primacy and autonomy of the visual for an accurate understanding of the artist, rejecting as useless any investigation into his artistic theories or information about his patrons’.7
For their part, Blunt and Thuillier ponder respectively on Poussin the theorist (philosopher or intellectual) and on his Roman patrons, with Thuillier favouring the biographical method.8 But they all clashed over attributions of paintings to Poussin and over the chronology of the works. Thus, Aeneas and Dido is considered by Blunt to be the oldest work by Poussin, whereas for Mahon it is a painting from the years 1634–5 and Thuillier quite simply excludes the painting from the body of Poussin’s work (‘ugly painting, which is sufficient’, he wrote in 19619).
But, as always, such differences of opinion between them were only possible because they shared a deep-seated passion for art, a passion often originating from their childhoods spent in cultivated circles and then reinforced in the course of their secondary and further education, with its emphasis on the domain of the arts, and in particular, of painting.
Anthony Blunt was born in 1907 and died in March 1983, the son of a vicar, later to be made a bishop, and a middle-class mother. He was a British art historian, specializing in Italian and French seventeenth-century art and has often been regarded as one of the greatest Poussin specialists, both by specialists in the art world and by journalists from the general interest press.10 In the art world, Blunt is generally referred to by his colleagues with deference and admiration. Amongst his greatest admirers is the famous French art historian, André Chastel, who would write in his obituary for The Burlington Magazine in 1983 that ‘few academic careers can have been so uniformly successful’ and that, ‘All his life, Anthony Blunt was Nicolas Poussin’s man’.11 The British historian was feted on several occasions by the same Burlington Magazine, regarded as a leading authority on art history.
Blunt attended the famous Marlborough College, a grammar school founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of the Anglican clergy, before going on to study history and French at the prestigious Trinity College in Cambridge. Whilst there, he wrote a dissertation on Poussin and the literary sources behind his work and completed his thesis on Poussin in 1932. His work was noticed and read with interest by the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, William George Constable. Just set up (in 1932) by the industrialist and art collector Samuel Courtauld, the Institute, linked to the University of London, is entirely dedicated to the history of art. At the same time, Trinity College offered him a grant for four years to continue his research on ‘Artistic theory in France and Italy during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century’. This would form the basis, in 1940, for a publication entitled Artistic theory in Italy, 1450–1600.12
In 1933, Blunt became a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, the legitimacy of which was still in its infancy. Three years later, however, he would give up his Cambridge grant, in order to throw himself fully into the adventure of this new institute as its Deputy Director. He was then just twenty-nine years old. The following year, he also joined the Warburg Institute, the prestigious research centre of the University of London.13 Blunt therefore worked both at the Courtauld Institute and the Warburg Institute and even contributed to bringing them together. He was quickly acknowledged in the art history world, to the extent that, aged only thirtyeight, he was appointed curator of the Royal Collection. For almost thirty years, until 1973, he would be responsible for the paintings in this collection, one of the largest private collections in the world.
This appointment gave his career a boost, both academically and in terms of his society connections. He kept up regular contacts with the Royal Family,14 and in 1947 became Director of the Courtauld Institute. He also accepted numerous very prestigious symbolic appointments: ‘From 1947, the invitations to join art committees, to become adviser to this or that institution, seemed to come almost automatically. Blunt had joined the small cabal of art-world movers and shakers, a combination of grand patrons and worthies who were invited to join, and run, everything.’15 Blunt was indissociably linked to the Courtauld Institute and his growing legitimacy amongst British art historians mirrored that of the Institute he would run for twenty-seven years until 1974. When he left his post as director, The Burlington Magazine extolled his achievements, saying his contribution to the Courtauld Institute ‘has surely been greater than that of any other single person, in ways that are not always easy to define because he has never been a demonstrative man who laid down hard and fast rules, but silently set an example to be silently followed’.16 Ten years later, on Blunt’s death, Chastel took up this eulogy in the pages of the same magazine: ‘from 1947 until 1974 [Anthony Blunt was] Director of that Institute, which, as we know, he turned into a centre of excellence of world stature.’17
In 1953, Blunt published Art and architecture in France, 1500–1700, his study of French classicism and Baroque art, which helped to make his reputation in both Great Britain and France.18 Three years later, in 1956, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and, in 1958 he became Commander of the French Legion of Honour, thus confirming his double British and French legitimacy. In 1960, he was again given the place of honour at the first exhibition of Poussin’s works at the Louvre which he had organized. This event strengthened his position as the number 1 expert on Poussin:
Perhaps the crowning moment of Blunt’s academic career was his curatorship in 1960 of the first exhibition of Poussin’s work at the Louvre in Paris. It confirmed his position as the world expert on Poussin, demonstrated the very considerable extent of his standing outside England, and effectively turned Poussin from an unfashionable, difficult artist into a first-rank, mainstream old master. The exhibition was a great success. For the French Poussin expert and future director of the Louvre Pierre Rosenberg, it was ‘the explosion in my heart for Poussin. I went to the exhibition and I came out drunk’.19
Chastel, for his part, remembers the striking presence of Blunt: ‘When, in conjunction with the Poussin exhibition at the Louvre […] we decided to hold a symposium on the artist, Anthony animated and dominated the event.’20
Now the dominant world expert on Poussin, he was also the person on the receiving end of all the confrontations. So, for example, following the exhibition, Blunt found himself under criticism from Mahon on the subject of Poussin, about questions relating to the chronology of his works, but also on the accuracy of a number of attributions. In an article in The Burlington Magazine,21 Mahon severely criticizes the 1960 exhibition. He describes how he went to the exhibition ‘hoping that Poussin would become clearer as an artistic personality’, but that instead he ‘saw chaos’. Mahon brought up the issue of the dating of some of the paintings and, in his view, Blunt painfully lacked this mysterious visual competence which art historians refer to as the eye: ‘I realized that Blunt did not have an eye.’ The attack was a harsh one. But the conflict between the two men took an even more personal turn in 1964 when Mahon bought, in an art auction, a painting he believed to be by Poussin. He claimed that the work was the original version of Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca. Now the only Poussin that Blunt owned personally was purportedly this same picture, acquired in 1933. Mahon demonstrated that there had been a mistake, and that Blunt’s painting was merely a late copy. In possession of a considerable reputation himself, Mahon attacked that of his senior: ‘Blunt was a recognized authority in the field of attributions. If he said a work was or was not by Poussin, everybody, from auctioneers to curators of national museums, usually felt obliged to follow him. But Mahon had, as he knew, an equivalent reputation.’22
In 1963, Blunt was nevertheless appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and, in 1967, published his book, Nicolas Poussin, which was hailed by numerous art historians. When a new edition was launched in 1995, Michael Kitson (former Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute between 1980 and 1985, specialist in seventeenth-century art history and in Claude Lorraine) and Brian Sewell (British art critic) introduced the book by declaring that it was ‘the most thoughtful, most searching, and most ambitious study of Poussin ever written’.23 David Carrier (American philosopher and art critic) esteemed that the authority of the book had not suffered from the row with Mahon and that ‘the current debate on Poussin largely remains under Blunt’s charm.’24 In 1972, the historian was even named artistic adviser to the Queen, in spite of his past as a double agent, uncovered in the 1960s.
It is, indeed, difficult to mention the name of Anthony Blunt without recalling that he was equally famous as a Soviet spy, the fourth man of the ‘Cambridge Five’, before and during the Second World War. Articles about him in both the French and Anglo-Saxon press rarely omit to mention this life as a double agent and the biography by the British writer Miranda Carter, who devotes considerable space to his career as an art historian and to his relationships with the art milieu, is no exception. During all his years as a university student, Blunt was what was known as a fellow traveller, though not a member, of the Communist Party: he published articles in the Left Review backed by the Soviets, and, from 1937 onwards, began his work as a spy. His recruitment was less on the grounds of an unwavering defence of communism – Blunt would himself say that he was a ‘Marxist on paper’ – than because he was well integrated into intellectual circles, was sympathetic to left-wing ideas and had developed the habit of being extremely discreet, acquired as a homosexual at a time when his sexual orientation was illegal: ‘He was already well adapted for living a double life; he habitually compartmentalized; he was compulsively reticent; he suppressed his feelings; he was wary of emotional intimacy.’25
It was only thirty years later, in 1964, that his espionage activities were discovered by the British secret services. Interrogated, he gave the names of his fellow spies in exchange for keeping the case from being made public. But, in November 1979, Margaret Thatcher made the file public and Blunt was stripped of his knighthood. His public legitimacy was severely questioned and the whole story was widely covered in the British press with Blunt often being referred to as ‘the traitor’ and his ‘communism’ and his ‘homosexuality’ discussed unreservedly and with no holds barred. Yet as an art historian he nevertheless maintained all his authority, proof of the relative resistance of the nature of legitimacy.
Blunt’s taste for difficult painters who were thoughtful and erudite, and not simply sensitive, or for ‘an art which showed an extreme control and manipulation on the part of the artist’,26 logically steered him in the direction of artists like Poussin. His interest in this French painter in particular, like his more general taste for realism in painting, is not without connection to his political tendencies. He saw in surrealism, for example, a movement which was anything but revolutionary, as its adepts insisted, with its works which remained ‘inaccessible to a general audience and out of touch’.27 As for his way of defending his aesthetic convictions in a peremptory, and according to his friends, dogmatic manner, it was undoubtedly not unconnected with his family’s austere tendencies reinforced by the elite educational establishments he had frequented. Finally, his tendency to criticize established values – the medieval gothic or the Renaissance – and to champion less popular painters or movements (notably Poussin and Baroque art) was also in line with his tendency as a homosexual to go against accepted moral standards, conventions and the law.
Only three years later, at the end of his life – he would die of a heart attack in 1983, aged seventy-six – Blunt published his famous article in The Burlington Magazine, in which he refers to a Flight into Egypt discovered in a Swiss collection as an original painting by Poussin, long considered to be lost28 and that he himself had catalogued in 1966. For him, the features of this work are typical of Poussin, the colours used in the painting are similar to those featuring in other authenticated works by the painter dating from the same period (the late 1650s) and the traces of pentimenti leave no doubt as to its original character. Just for once, the arch enemy, Mahon was of the same opinion and it would not be until 1994 that Blunt’s judgement would be publicly contested first by Thuillier, and then by Rosenberg and a whole series of art historians who would range their judgement alongside that of two major French experts.
But if, in 1994, Thuillier did indeed contest Blunt’s attribution, the latter had not always been very kind to his younger counterpart in the past. In a criticism of Tout l’œuvre de Poussin published in 1974, Blunt criticized his French colleague on a number of points, declaring himself ‘unconvinced by his arguments’ (with, amongst others, a difference of opinion over an engraving by Claude Chatillon and over the attribution to Poussin of The Childhood of Bacchus, a painting in the Louvre). He even says he was ‘purple with rage’ after reading certain passages in the book and pointed out ‘two weaknesses in M. Thuillier’s method’. Finally, he observes that in terms of the chronology of the attributions, his colleague, ‘does not have as many revolutionary suggestions to make’.29 Thuillier’s difference of opinion in 1994, eleven years after Blunt’s death, on the subject of the ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ version of The Flight into Egypt is for this reason difficult to separate from the ongoing rivalry between these two great experts.
Denis Mahon would be more than just an art historian. A man of private means, often described as elegant and genial, and the ‘epitome of the gentleman scholar’,30 he was known for his collection of seventeenth-century paintings and drawings acquired at a time when the classical age was largely dismissed by art historians and curators. Throughout his life, he would play a significant role in artistic policy in the United Kingdom, militating, for example, for free access to museums. A great connoisseur of Guercino and of Poussin and with no need to resort to university teaching for a living, he would practise the history of art in the pure tradition of connoisseurship based on a direct knowledge of the works, the opportunity to travel and see exhibitions of paintings by the great masters, the only way, in his opinion, to learn how to order them correctly from a chronological point of view and even to authenticate them. Unlike many of his colleagues, Mahon favoured the eye, that practical capacity of discernment, judgement and recognition, which distinguishes the individual who has had a great deal of visual artistic experience from the one whose knowledge of works and their creators is much more heavily book-based and academic. As Duret-Robert puts it:
An eye, means someone who, suddenly, in the midst of two hundred paintings, says ‘Aha! That’s interesting!’ You see, that’s what it is, the eye! You have to say to yourself: ‘There you are, it either is or it isn’t.’ It’s difficult to have an eye. You have to be able to discover the one thing which might be interesting in the middle of all sorts of things which don’t interest anybody, and that’s very difficult.31
Born on 8 November 1910, John Denis Mahon was the son of Lady Alice Evelyn Browne (daughter of the fifth Marquess of Sligo) and of John Fitzgerald Mahon (fourth son of Sir W. Mahon). Having lived in London all his life, in the fashionable district of Kensington, he died there on 24 April 2011. Mahon was therefore from a rich Anglo-Irish family, heirs of the famous Guinness Mahon fortune. One of his ancestors had founded the bank of the same name in 1836, bought out by Investec Bank in 1998. This family fortune meant that Mahon never had to work to earn a living.32
Mahon attended Eton, a prestigious private school reserved for the English elite, and then went to Christchurch (Oxford), where he obtained a BA (Bachelor of Arts) degree in history, in 1932.33 He then spent an additional year in Oxford studying informally with Kenneth Clark, then director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford34 and later to become director of the National Gallery in 1933. It was he who suggested Mahon should focus on the seventeenth century, an era little studied at that time35 and even ‘despised’ since the time of John Ruskin, the great English art critic of the nineteenth century, consequently nicknamed by Mahon as ‘the nuisance’.36 In October 1933, Mahon began attending lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art, following a course called ‘Academic diploma in the history of art’, which led to the equivalent of a Master of Arts. In an interview in 1986, he speaks of his debt to W.G. Constable, first director of the Courtauld Institute, who allowed him to attend lectures in 1933–4 even though he had already graduated from Oxford.37
Mahon came onto the scene at a time when the history of art in England was only just beginning to be institutionalized. Until the creation in 1932 of the Courtauld Institute, the first research centre dedicated to the discipline, the English art world had continued, according to art historian Michael Kitson, to be dominated by amateurs.38 Like Blunt, he attended both the Courtauld Institute and the Warburg Institute and it was in the same context that he trained in the history of art and focused his research and study on the seventeenth century. At the Courtauld Institute, Mahon attended, and was fascinated by, lectures given by Nikolaus Pevsner, a young art historian and a specialist in Italian baroque who had fled Nazi Germany. From him he learned the methodological foundations of the history of art,39 and it was he who suggested Mahon should work on an Italian baroque painter, Guercino, who was to become the principal focus of his studies. From 1935, Mahon abandoned his studies, but continued to use the libraries at the Institute to pursue his research on Guercino. Then he set off on a trip to study drawings and paintings, particularly in Italy and in Russia.
Mahon’s career has few links to university circles. Even though in the 1950s he did some teaching in partnership with O. Kurz at the Courtauld Institute, at the request of Blunt (then director), he did not produce a thesis and never needed to teach out of economic necessity. His status of highly competent amateur in a milieu of art history which was in the process of becoming professionalized explains a certain academic reticence towards him: ‘It’s worth remembering that he was essentially an amateur and, on occasion, fiercely territorial professionals did not welcome his contributions.’40 Ultimately publishing few books41 but instead a series of prominent articles in The Burlington Magazine,42 he focused his attention on exhibitions and exhibition catalogues. Kitson describes for example how, ‘since 1950, a large part of his work as an art historian has been carried out in association with exhibitions, whether lending works, selecting works to be exhibited and compiling the catalogues, or commenting on the event a posteriori’.43 He also emphasized the importance of exhibitions focused on a single artist, the only way, according to him, to seriously work on a body of work and its chronology.44 Thus, from 1954, Mahon concentrated his activity on organizing a series of exhibitions in Bologna, dedicated to the painters of that city, which were, according to Kitson, ‘of international importance’ and ‘put the seal on the rehabilitation of seventeenth century painting’.45
The son of a rich family, Mahon was also, alongside his activity as an art historian, a collector. He bought his first Guercino, Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, in 1934,46 a purchase which marked the start of a long series of acquisitions of paintings and drawings by the painter. After the Second World War, he enriched his collection with works by Guido Reni and Domenichino and continued to acquire works by Guercino. He recounted in 2003 that he was ‘virtually the only collector’ of seventeenth-century works ‘between the 1930s and the early 1970s’.47 He gradually ceased collecting due to the increased price of the paintings, partially the result of the revival of interest in the seventeenth century in which he had played an active role:
‘He opened our eyes’, says Neil MacGregor, the former director of the National Gallery and now director of the British Museum, ‘to find meaning in works of art we had written off, works we had thought were empty.’ Suddenly, painters like Reni, Guercino and Domenichino were re-evaluated and prices began to rise. Mahon, having bought 79 paintings and countless drawings, stopped collecting – he felt the prices were now beyond his reach. Galleries contemplated the yawning gaps in their collections with horror. The only man with the power to fill them was Denis Mahon. His authority was undeniable.48
As a consequence of all that, Mahon would, like Blunt, be knighted in 1986, at the age of seventy-six.
Mahon is the incarnation of the eye, recognized by his peers in the field of art history. Even in his childhood, he had discovered a talent for identifying paintings. A personal and family story tells how, as an only child, visiting Italy with his parents, he realized at an early stage, aged just twelve, that he had an ‘eye’: ‘“We used to go to art galleries and churches – the usual tourist activities. On this sort of grand tour, I found that I was pretty good at this rather amusing game – the attribution game. I found that I could recognize these painters from some distance away. It just happened, you see – I could always say, ‘That picture is by so-and-so’.” He had discovered his “eye”.’49 The history of art, as he would practise it, would cultivate the predominance accorded to this direct perception of works, de visu, in the sense that he placed far more value on visual experience in front of paintings placed next to each other than on the use of secondary sources.50 His work was therefore generally praised for its methodological rigour and for its meticulousness,51 its ‘pragmatism’ and its ‘typical English empiricism’, with a suspicion of theory and of hasty judgements.52 With such a visual approach, Mahon wages war against all those who turn Poussin into a painter-philosopher defined by his ideas and his theories, and neglect the study of his technique, his use of colours, his compositions, etc.53
For Mahon, it was therefore the ultimate insult to claim that Blunt, his principal rival, did not have the eye. He would continue to repeat this accusation even after Blunt’s death in 1983, moreover linking his activity as a spy to a lack of honesty in his activities as an art historian:
Mahon says that Anthony Blunt, one of the leading figures in post-war British art history and a Soviet spy, did not have an eye. He plainly loathed Blunt and linked his treachery in politics with dishonesty in art history. In 1960 there was a big Louvre exhibition of paintings by Poussin. Blunt was regarded as the world authority on Poussin and had written the catalogue. Mahon was convinced he’d got the chronology of the paintings badly wrong and he went for Blunt’s throat. Of course, he won.54
By attacking Blunt, the uncontested world authority on Poussin, Mahon was launching a veritable offensive in the field of Poussin studies. He openly laid claim to the status of being the greatest specialist of the painter. And, once Blunt had died, in 1983, it was clear that Mahon reigned supreme as the master of Poussin’s work, closely followed by Jacques Thuillier.55
When the second version of The Flight into Egypt appeared, in Versailles in 1986, Mahon therefore had very considerable authority, even if he was considered more as a specialist on Guercino than on Poussin. He was, for once, of the same opinion as his elder, an opinion that he could all the more readily share since Blunt was no longer present to rejoice in seeing him coming around to his point of view. Speaking about the comparison of the different versions at the Ritz Hotel in 1990, Rosenberg emphasized how exceptional this agreement was:
In order to defend his point of view, [Mahon] wanted this comparison to try to persuade the Poussin specialists that he was right. And rather unusually, Mahon and Blunt did not get on. They were always disagreeing, challenging each other, competing, etc., all that kind of thing. And in general, they RARELY agreed about anything. And there they were, in agreement. It is exceptionally rare for them to agree about a painting, especially given that the first to publish it was Blunt and the second was Mahon. So this agreement is VERY unusual.56
Although his portrayal as a ‘perfect gentleman, elegant and witty’,57 a collector (with his brother Guy58) and very much an exhibition man, deeply committed to the nation’s museums, might give the impression of shared ground between Thuillier (1928–2011) and Mahon, the fact that Thuillier was very much an academic (and not just a collector and an enlightened art lover), a man of books, of the historical method and theory (and not simply a man with practical and immediate visual experience of the arts), set them quite significantly apart.
Described in 2004 by the art historian Antoine Schnapper as ‘the most brilliant recent art historian of French painting in the seventeenth century’,59 he is, unlike Mahon, a pure product of the educational system. Son of a teacher (his father taught literature in a secondary school), gaining first prize in the Concours Général (a competitive exam open to secondary school pupils) for Latin in 1944, pupil in the Classes Préparatoires (two years intensive study in preparation for the competitive entrance exams of the ‘Grandes Écoles’) at the Lycée Henri IV and the Lycée Louis Legrand, student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1951 to 1955, he wrote a thesis on André Félibien in 1953 and obtained the agrégation in classical literature in 1954. He then began to work on art criticism in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on seventeenth-century French painting. He continued along this very traditional elite track of further education by becoming a resident researcher at the Primoli Foundation in Rome from 1955 to 1956.60 Whilst there, he undertook research on French artists in Italy. From 1956 to 1959, he would join the fifty-ninth class of resident researchers at the Fondation Thiers in Paris, a class made up of only five people.61
During the period 1956–62 he began his teaching career, working as a university teacher and then as an assistant at the University of Paris-Sorbonne within the Institute of Art and Archaeology. From 1962 to 1970 he held the Chair of History of Medieval and Modern Art and of Musicology in the department of literature and human sciences at Dijon University. During the course of these years, his interests became focused on the history of art, and more precisely of painting (he was first of all interested in Fragonard and Rubens, then later turned his attention to Le Brun, La Tour, Poussin, the Le Nain brothers, Stella, Vouet, Bellange, Boucher, De la Hyre, Blanchard, Baugin, Bourdon, Du Fresnoy) and studied for a Doctorate in the arts which he was awarded in 1970 (‘Painting and artistic doctrines in seventeenth-century France’). Between 1970 and 1977 he was professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne with the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art. Then, at the age of forty-nine, he went to the Collège de France to join Chastel (who had been teaching Renaissance Italian art there since 1970), taking up the post of Chair of History of Artistic Creation in France. His career, which officially came to an end in 1998 at the Collège de France, was linear and flawless and his academic credentials are indisputable.
Throughout his career he was to hold various roles in central institutions. President of the Society of the History of French Art from 1970 to 1972, deputy scientific secretary (1964–9) then scientific secretary of the International Committee for the History of Art (CIHA) (1969–83), member of the advisory committee on art for the Musées Nationaux (since 1991), member of the Commission for classified and controlled museum acquisitions, member of the Committee for national celebrations (from 1998), he also sat on academic committees at the CNRS (Modern and Contemporary History) and at the University (Universities advisory committee, between 1970 and 1982).
His reputation led to Thuillier advising the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, on the state of the history of art in France in 1973. One of his recommendations was the creation in Paris of an art institute which would function in a way not dissimilar to the Courtauld Institute or the Warburg Institute. This Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), a centre for research, education and the diffusion of knowledge, would only be created in 2001. The different periods of his professional trajectory would also be marked by national honours: officer of the Légion d’honneur, grand officer of the National Order of Merit, commander of the National Order of Merit, commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. Finally, towards the end of his career, he was awarded prizes for his work: the Prix Minda de Gunzberg and the Grand Prix d’histoire de la Ville de Paris in 1991, the Grand Prix national d’histoire in 1994 and the Grand Prix d’histoire Chateaubriand in 2002.
By the same token, it is easy to understand that, in 1994, when the art historian published first an article in the Revue de l’Art, an international reference revue he had helped found in 1968 with Chastel, and then his book on Poussin both of which asserted, in contradiction to Blunt, that the ‘Pardo’ version of The Flight into Egypt was the original, it was a whole stock of recognition from the milieu of art historians that hung in the balance. He was at any rate, at that time, one of the rare art historians capable of confronting and contradicting the judgement first of Anthony Blunt and then of Denis Mahon, over a Poussin painting. Throughout his career he had published prominent articles and books on the painter, including Tout l’œuvre peint de Poussin (1974 and 1994), Nicolas Poussin (1969 and 1988) and Propos sur La Tour, Le Nain, Poussin, Le Brun (1992).62 And this knowledge of the painter allowed him, in turn, to claim that he too had an eye when it came to paintings by Poussin: ‘In the last analysis, he wrote in his 1994 article, whatever the claims and the silences of catalogues and inventories, the eye is the only judge.’63
In his review of Thuillier’s work on Poussin, published in 1994, Pierre Rosenberg wrote that ‘a Poussin year without Jacques Thuillier was out of the question’ and expressed his ‘admiration’64 for the work of his great colleague. The way he introduces his review clearly situates the respective positions of the dominant older brother and the respectful younger one: ‘Reviewing his book is not an easy task. Criticizing it – a purely hypothetical notion – would be put down to jealousy or envy. Showering it with praises would be attributed to friendship or indulgence. Consequently, we will try, quite simply, to emphasize the original aspects of the work and to highlight some of its main innovations.’65
A belief in art, and in a rather classical art, made him an ardent defender of traditional conceptions (which no one would call reactionary) of the work of art as opposed to the ‘avant-garde’ and the idea of ‘progress’ in art, ‘ideas accredited in the nineteenth century in a mystical or controversial spirit’,66 against the extension of the term ‘art’ to newcomers such as photography, raw art (the ‘work of madmen’) or of so-called ‘contemporary art’67 and especially the Ready-mades, Body art and ‘installations, as cumbersome as tedious’), against the ‘confusion’ ‘between art and ethnology’, the subject of which led him to speak, without the use of quotation marks, of ‘backward peoples from Africa or Australia’68 in his lectures at the Collège de France.
In the prologue of his book Théorie générale de l’histoire de l’art,69 Thuillier points out André Chastel’s importance in art history and sees his own work as continuing in the same tradition. He takes up the thinking of his illustrious predecessor concerning the importance of the role of the art historian as the person ‘responsible for the work of art’ and develops it further by writing: ‘In order for that to be the case, the art historian needs to know what he is defending. Yet it seems to me that today he no longer knows what that is and no longer has much of a feeling for it.’ And, later in the prologue, he adds: ‘Today the word art seems to apply to anything and everything regardless.’
In spite of the laudable intentions of the Collège de France professor to examine ‘four thousand years of history’, to fight against the disappearance, at the end of the twentieth century ‘of the majority of great “generalists”, of whom André Chastel was in France one of the most prestigious models’ and against the imposition of the ‘fashion of the “specialty”, with its admirable spirit of precision and rigor, but often too, a regrettable myopia’,70 the art historian’s conventional ethnocentricity prevented him from examining the broader meaning, and in particular the deeply political meaning, of what began to take on the name of art in Renaissance Europe, instead fixing his prescriptive and reproachful gaze on the most recent variations of artistic production. The limitations of such an approach are, however, inscribed in the history of a history of art profoundly attached to rarely challenged state and national frameworks, which resulted in one of the most ‘brilliant’ (and powerful) of them being described as having a ‘mystical zeal […] for the nation, the State, France and knowledge’.71
Born in Paris on 13 April 1936, Pierre Rosenberg was the son of Charles Rosenberg, lawyer, and Gertrude Nassauer, and later the husband of Béatrice de Rothschild. He attended the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris, obtained a law degree and then turned his attention to art history, graduating from the École du Louvre, Section Supérieur. Pierre Rosenberg could be described as the Institution of the Louvre incarnate. Educated in its school, in 1961 he joined the department of paintings and would remain at the museum for the whole of his career, working as assistant, curator, lead curator, General Inspector of Museums, general curator for cultural heritage, Head of the department of paintings, and finally, in October 1994, Director of the Louvre museum, a post he occupied until 13 April 2001.
Very much a museum man, he organized a great many exhibitions in France, Italy, Germany, England, the United States and Canada, and compiled a great number of exhibition catalogues and publications. Moreover, he was, ten years after Thuillier, President of the Society of French art history (from 1982 to 1984), as well as curator of the national museum of the Musée Franco-Americain (Museum of Franco-American cooperation) in Blérancourt, from 1981 to 1993, and president of the French Committee of art history in 1984, the aim of which is to establish links between French art historians from all backgrounds and all specialities and to maintain links with the International Committee of art history. His remarkable career, culminating at the very summit of the greatest French museum, led to him being elected to the Académie Française on 7 December 1995, taking the place of the philosopher Henri Gouhier.
His work as an art historian was primarily focused on French and Italian drawings and paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He developed a particular interest in Watteau, Vouet, Caravaggio, Chardin, David, Titian, da Vinci, Tintoretto, Callot, the Le Nain brothers, de La Tour, Cretey and, of course, Poussin. It was, indeed, for his work on Poussin (Nicolas Poussin, 1994 and the Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 1994) that, in 1995, he received the Prix XVIIe Siècle.
On 3 August 1995, he wrote in L’Express that he was essentially a connoisseur of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and in Italy, and notably of Poussin: ‘I am particularly fascinated by Nicolas Poussin, the painter I know most about.’72 He considered Poussin as ‘one of the greatest painters in his century – and perhaps the greatest French painter of all time’.73 Poussin was, in his opinion, a demanding painter, who was not immediately accessible, and who demanded an ‘effort’ from the spectator: ‘Poussin deserves some effort and those who are ready to put in that effort will be rewarded. The effort consists in having a better understanding of the century in which he lived, the city which was his, Rome, and the ambition of an artist which equalled that of the greatest poets and scholars of his century.’ Poussin is in the end the perfect painter for great connoisseurs of art, in that he could not be understood without a certain effort and that, in front of his paintings, the spectator initially finds themselves mystified.
Like his colleagues, he maintained that in order to reach a decision and to be sure whether a work was a copy or an original, ‘in the absence of any objective references, only the “eye” and consensus can decide’. He took as an example the controversy concerning different versions of a Poussin painting which was only resolved after a comparison of the versions:
Take the most recent example. In 1650, Poussin painted a famous composition, ‘Madonna on the Stairs’ – or ‘The Holy Family on the Stairs’ – of which numerous copies are in existence. Two paintings, one in Cleveland, the other in Washington, were thought to be originals. For twenty years there were violent arguments about which one was indeed the original. It reached a conclusion last year, when the two pretenders were shown side by side at the National Gallery in Washington. In the space of a split second, all the important Poussin specialists agreed that the Cleveland painting was the real one and the other, the copy.
But the Director of the Louvre ‘forgot’ to point out that, even after comparison, controversies are not always resolved, as in the case of The Flight into Egypt in March 1990, and that all art historians have regularly wavered in their judgement, casting some doubt on the evidence in favour of immediate perception and the famous ‘eye’.
It was, moreover, the same Rosenberg, he who claimed that the ‘eye’ was so fundamental and that comparison is a decisive test, who proved that it is often extra-visual information that ends up tipping the balance where attributions are concerned:
Fortunately, archives materialize from time to time. Inventories made after death for example. That of one of his friends, who died before he did, enabled certain disputed works to be attributed to Poussin. Conversely, many of Poussin’s paintings have disappeared. There are about twenty famous paintings, known from engravings, but which we have lost sight of. Some of them will reappear. Since 1960, I have seen around ten of them resurface. They’ve turned up in English castles, in public sales and even in museums!74
We have seen how the controversy over the different versions of The Flight into Egypt eventually ended, at least temporarily, with the gradual disappearance of some of the combatants. When, in 2008 the ex-‘Pardo’ version was hung in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and numerous personalities from the major international museum and academic institutions had gathered to confirm the legitimacy of the work, Rosenberg dominated the assembled by dint of his distinctive characteristics, known and recognized by all. With Blunt dead (1983), Mahon absent, weakened by age and illness and dying three years later (2011), the great opponents of the attribution of this canvas to Poussin were no longer in a position to lend their full weight to the matter and, after Thuillier’s death (1928–2011), Rosenberg (1936–) would be the only surviving great expert on the painter. Until, that is, a whole new generation take up the battle and decide, perhaps, to alter the course of the history.
Such is wretchedness of the human condition which sees all the symbolic power accumulated by a particular individual ebb away or vanish and sometimes disappear immediately following their death. As Max Planck said so lucidly: ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph simply by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’75
In the position which now, at the end of his career, gives Rosenberg a monopoly, the last major hurdle was to dethrone the dead monarch represented by the figure of Blunt. While he recognized Mahon’s importance, it was Blunt whom he saw as reigning supreme: ‘[Mahon] is a VERY great art historian and he played a major role in re-establishing Poussin’s chronology. But Blunt is altogether something else. He is an extraordinary character, a legendary figure.’ And, to outdo a legend or dethrone the king, you need to produce a catalogue raisonné which will go beyond the one he regarded as the model to surpass:
You realize that, since Blunt’s book, which is the basis of any research on Poussin, since 1966, everybody refers to Blunt. Whether it’s Thuillier, whether it’s Mahon, whether it’s myself, whether it’s other people, whether it’s Laveissière. … In the end, everybody takes Blunt as their starting point, the incontestable reference. In fact, what I am trying to do at the moment, is to use Poussin, and not Blunt, as the starting point. It’s not about forgetting Blunt, who cannot be ignored, but about making his work merely one stage in understanding and reconstituting Poussin’s work. That task still remains to be done and is an enormous task. I hope I can do it. But the problem is that, at the present time, I am the only person who can take on this task which consists in redoing Blunt, in recreating a real corpus. I am the only one. That’s how it is. It’s a huge responsibility, but a bit more than that too …76
The four great art historians whose lives we have looked at here all learned to share beliefs and cultural skills in the field of art, and particularly in the art of the seventeenth century, but they also embody different national traditions or specific institutions. They have all had professional and extraprofessional biographical paths which could potentially jeopardize their professional recognition or their public renown. On an individual scale, social determinations are always more entangled than may seem to be the case when, taking a more distanced view of the world, we see social structures unfolded. Understanding their actions and gestures, and particularly in their acts of attribution, implies, as we have seen, measuring the relative weight of their legitimacy, or in other words, the relative performative power they are in a position to exercise. For if the major forces in attribution could have been compared to gods who decide on the sacred or profane nature of objects, if they possess the magical power to give existence to or condemn to oblivion the objects on which their judgements are focused, their plurality inevitably raises the question of the balance of power between individuals who are not completely interchangeable. ‘God said: Let there be light! And there was light’: such a scene implies the exclusive monopoly of the power to pronounce the reality of things and, more than that, the power to make things happen in reality. But in the reality of the historical world, this power has rarely been concentrated in the hands of a single person, which explains the strategies often resorted to which consist in combining and bringing together legitimacies in order to tip the balance in the desired direction.
But this narrow focus of attention on the great Poussin specialists that are Blunt, Mahon, Thuillier and Rosenberg, four men from two great nations in the history of art, should not allow us to forget the multiplicity of names of art historians and experts – essentially European or American – whom we have cited throughout these pages devoted to the story of The Flight into Egypt and whose performative power is infinitely weaker and sometimes almost non-existent. Failure to accumulate sufficient renown during one’s career or simply being a newcomer on the scene, not specializing sufficiently on an era or a painter, being associated with less prestigious cultural or academic institutions, are all factors which considerably weaken the possibility of being able to say what there is to be said about what is and to have influence over the world.
When I met him on 10 February 2011, Richard Pardo was clearly deeply hurt by the reversals of fortune he had experienced. He has thought about, and even written about, the story of this painting a great deal, going over the various events, from the purchase of the canvas in 1986 to the moment it was restored to its former owner in 2003. It would be impossible not to understand the bitter tone of a gallery owner who gambled on the original status of a painting by buying it for a high price at a time when nobody (neither the auctioneer, nor the expert for the sale, nor the owner, nor Pierre Rosenberg) believed in it, and who, for eight long years, fought in vain to have its authenticity recognized by the appropriate authorities (contacting them regularly by post, inviting them to come to his gallery, allowing a comparison with the ‘Princeton’ canvas, cleaning the painting, organizing an exhibition, etc.77), who was not able to sell it either abroad or to the Louvre for the whole of this time, who, during the court case, failed to get recognition for all the work he had put in to getting the painting authenticated as a Poussin,78 who sold his gallery, and who, in the end, was forced to return the painting to its former owner and watch helplessly as it was acquired by the Louvre and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for the sum of €17 million? Who would not feel somewhat bitter in such circumstances? Having lost everything, gallery and painting, and faced with the request by the former owner in 1995 for the sale to be annulled and then in 2003 with the return of the painting, the disappointment was immense:
The gallery was founded in 1947. My father handed it over to us, I think, in 1982 or something like that. He died in 1986. We found the Poussin in 1986. We were all set to go straight to the top! And sadly, the Poussin which was one of the rungs on the ladder of that success and something I would have liked to have shown my parents, because we owed it them, all that sadly ended up in a court case which saw us stripped of everything. I was stripped of everything. I was ruined, you can call it that.
Haunted by the sense of being the victim of a profound injustice, Richard Pardo even goes as far as to believe that the fact they were Italian immigrants may have worked against them during those years:
It’s not ‘normal’ – and I put the word ‘normal’ in inverted commas – that two jokers like the Pardo brothers who were at the time, aged thirty-five and thirty-three, could have discovered a masterpiece of French painting, all by themselves in front of a stunned audience who had failed to understand what was happening. All that was bizarre. It was abnormal. I think maybe that we were punished on moral grounds because it was immoral that two young art dealers with a vaguely foreign-sounding name should find themselves with this painting in front of everyone, like that. I felt I was surrounded by enemies and in the end they did for me. It was all very, very strange. But, there you are, that’s the law and we have to respect it. I do. I have no choice.
Consultant at the Cabinet Turquin, Jean-Pierre Cuzin takes a sympathetic view of the tragic story of the two gallery owners:
It’s an extraordinary story. Buying that painting was an incredible deal for them! And they judged well, especially as they didn’t get it for ten euros, but for one or two million francs at the time. It was already a sum of money, it was much-much-much more … than that. Anyway, it was a huge gamble. And in the end, it turned into a terrible ordeal and the end of a great gallery. Because the Pardo Gallery, their father’s gallery, was actually quite an important gallery in Paris. And this story was dragged out … It was terrible! They wanted to sell the painting of course, but in fact the painting had been blocked by the legal process. The Pardo brothers really were the victims of something which was bigger than they were and they found themselves ruined over an affair that should have made their fortune.79
The former head of the department of paintings at the Louvre was not the only one to think that the gallery owners had paid a high price in this story and that enormous injustice had been done to them. Didier Rykner, for example, founder of the magazine La Tribune de l’art, suggested in 2004 that the cartel associated with this painting once it had been acquired by a French museum could ‘pay tribute to the Pardo brothers, unfortunate heroes, sacrificed on the altar of a justice which in this case can certainly be described as blind’.80 Then, three years later, at the moment when the canvas was acquired by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Rykner again emphasizes their role: ‘It is a pity that, for the time being, nobody has pointed out the fundamental and unfortunate role played by the Pardo brothers in this matter. These dealers genuinely discovered the work and yet they gained nothing from it, indeed quite the opposite.’81
In 1986, when the Versailles auction sale was announced, the gallery owners received the sales catalogue but did not at first pay it much attention given the un-prestigious location of the sale. How could an exceptional painting end up buried in such an obscure auction sale?
To tell the truth, I threw that catalogue [of the 1986 auction] in the bin. I threw it in the bin BEFORE the sale. I hadn’t even looked at it. Someone came to see me, before the sale, on the DAY BEFORE the sale, and said: ‘Have you heard, there’s an interesting painting going on sale at Versailles?’ I said to him: ‘Yes, in fact I’ve thrown that in the bin.’ You know, finding a Poussin in a flea market, that’s just a joke! We’re pros after all. The Versailles market doesn’t have much of a reputation. Even the Hôtel Drouot is NOT exactly amazing. But Versailles even LESS so than the Hôtel Drouot.
His attention was therefore drawn to this canvas by an outsider, and Richard Pardo suggests, throughout his account, that this warning, as well as the sequence of events which followed, were perhaps not simply a matter of chance. It all happened as though someone – and the ‘someone’ can be situated in the Louvre and in the person of Pierre Rosenberg, ‘because he is the BIG NAME YOU SEE, he’s the star turn of the company’ – wanted to draw his attention to the painting and get him to buy it so that it would remain in France:
Someone came to speak to me in a VERY pressing manner, saying: ‘Listen, it would be interesting for you to see it …’ This person was someone close to the Museums and who was getting involved in sponsorship. So this person, who is called Jean de La Motte [Viscount Jean de la Motte de Brööns de Vauvert], who is a donor of the museum in Rennes, a well-known figure, very friendly with the museums in general, came to see me even though I didn’t know him, and said: ‘There’s a very interesting painting. You should go and see it. Pierre Rosenberg doesn’t believe in it.’ He left at that point. I went IMMEDIATELY to Versailles. I went to Versailles and I saw the painting from a distance, and I saw Rosenberg, in the process of examining the painting. Which meant he had already seen it, since this person, an hour earlier, had said to me: ‘Pierre Rosenberg doesn’t believe in it.’ The expert for the sale came over to me. I don’t know him very well, but I’m a fairly well-known dealer. Anyway, he came over and he said: ‘Did you see that!! Pierre Rosenberg was there. He does NOT believe in it!’ And then he added, with a knowing air: ‘Anyway that’s really good. That way the painting can at least leave France.’ A word to the wise is enough. So, I let Rosenberg, who I know, go past! I let him go past, I didn’t greet him, I didn’t get myself noticed.
Seeing the painting for the first time, Richard Pardo was genuinely bowled over and was immediately convinced that the painting was by Poussin. But, for this very reason, he finds it hard not to believe that Pierre Rosenberg was totally innocent in this story:
I went to see the painting. And it’s difficult to say EXACTLY what I felt, but for me the painting was OBVIOUS, straightaway.82 As soon as I saw it, I could feel the richness of its beauty. I phoned my brother and explained everything to him, because we always liked to discuss things. And I said to him: ‘Listen to this. There’s an amazing painting TOMORROW.’ By chance, we had sold something quite big to the Louvre four months earlier, and had received the bit of paper which said we were going to get the money just the week before. So, we had the means. That means that the people at the Louvre KNEW we were going to get the money, quite a lot of money. That’s not innocent either. The next day, I went to the sale. There were quite a few colleagues there. There was a real buzz. And as another supposedly original version of the painting had been published in England, everyone was making a big fuss about it. They were saying: ‘But then which is the original? Which is the true one, which is the real one?’ And two hours before the sale, on the morning of the sale, a Swiss friend of ours, a dealer, said to the auctioneer: ‘But Maitre!!! Why don’t we move the picture a bit more into the light? So we can see it! In the courtyard, in natural light.’ They moved the painting by six or seven meters. There was a ray of sun and it was absolutely obvious. A MARVEL.83 So honestly, from the beginning, I thought that Rosenberg wasn’t being entirely honest about the truth. He didn’t have to give his sincere opinion, because, as a curator, he shouldn’t be saying ‘I believe in it’ or ‘I don’t believe in it’. So it was already VERY STRANGE that he should be saying ‘I don’t believe in it.’ Really, he shouldn’t have said anything at all. The fact that he had said ‘I don’t believe in it’ to someone who had come to talk to me about it an hour earlier, AND THEN IN FRONT OF ME, to the expert at the sale, the day before the sale, was already really, really TOO MUCH, it was really laid on thick … And, because my job means being a bit cunning, not being completely naïve, I said to myself: ‘He’s not telling the truth.’ Remember that he is after all one of the greatest connoisseurs of Poussin and his name is on every page of the catalogues. Everyone says of him: ‘What a great connoisseur, what a great scholar.’ I cannot accept that such a great scholar would have been mistaken in front of a painting that was so BEAUTIFUL and so OBVIOUS. That story about the painting being a bit too high to be able to judge it accurately, that’s just tactics which nobody is taken in by.84
Once the painting had been bought, the problems began for the gallery owners, because, in spite of the ‘false price’ which it had been bought for and the conviction of the buyers, it was still just an ordinary copy. In order to alter its status from that of a copy to that of an autograph painting, they needed to attract the attention of the highest authorities in the field, the only people capable of publicly authenticating the work. But, over the course of many years, the authorities in question turned up at the gallery on various occasions, sometimes displaying a certain amount of interest but without anything ever changing publicly. Moreover, the British experts were defending the other canvas which made it difficult to sell this version:
I was sure that the painting was the original. BUT it was a question of getting those in authority to agree. That’s just how it is. I had it restored by my restorer who cleaned it up. The painting was in very good condition. There were some minor restorations, but it was really just a question of gently cleaning the whole thing, very delicately. A curator from the Louvre came to the gallery. At the time, we had very big premises on the Boulevard Haussmann, near the Musée Jacquemart-André. It was Monsieur Foucart, the specialist on Flemish painting.85 We showed him the painting and Monsieur
Foucart started stammering in front of us and turned very red, because, clearly, he saw a Poussin masterpiece. He saw the painting, he was very impressed, and we said to him: ‘But listen, it would be great, get them to come …’. And so the rest of the team at the museum came along: Monsieur Laclotte,86 whom we knew already, who’s a really nice man, with his deputy, Jean-Pierre Cuzin. And, in the next half hour after their visit, along came the other two, Pierre Rosenberg and Foucart, who had come back to see the painting. And when we showed them our Poussin, not one of these four curators whom we knew well said to us: ‘Bravo, you’ve bought a Poussin.’ But we saw – it was written on their faces! – that we were absolutely right! But they didn’t say that it was a Poussin! They didn’t say to us: ‘It is the Poussin.’ In fact, Monsieur Laclotte said to us: ‘But look, the angel’s hand is really very badly drawn.’ And I said to him: ‘No, not at all. It’s a simplification which goes perfectly well with the rest of the picture.’ But it was a word to the wise. We were all being diplomatic! Because museums don’t have the right to say ‘yes’ to you. But it was clear that the painting … Besides it’s so obvious! So, following that, I got in touch with Mr Mahon. I had no idea about Mr Mahon’s connection with the other painting. So, I thought to myself, ‘Mr Mahon is a charming old man, just like Mr Thuillier, I’ll write to him.’ And he replied in a very funny way. He said to me: ‘Listen, no. I would like to see your painting, but the original is the one in the Swiss collection.’ And, when you look at the Burlington Magazine, even if the photo in the Burlington Magazine is a poor one, you can see that that painting is an absolutely DAUB. Right. Well, I put Mr Mahon in the pending tray and I didn’t give it any more thought. Later on, we had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Thuillier. It wasn’t us who approached him. I should have done, but I hadn’t really thought about it. I’m quite timid in my approach. I don’t like going to people to ask them things. I like things to just happen naturally. And there were two young historians I knew at the time who said to me: ‘Monsieur Thuillier is our professor’. They came along with Monsieur Thuillier whom I didn’t know. I made the acquaintance of Monsieur Thuillier who was a very nice little man, an academic, a bit eccentric, but really, really nice. And at that point, he said to us, when he had seen our painting … it was one evening in Paris: ‘Listen, I’d like you to give me the photo so I can replace the photo of the engraving in my catalogue with the one of your painting.’ Which meant that the painting he had seen with us was the right one. In 1989, I put on an exhibition at the gallery and in the catalogue I decided NOT to mention Thuillier’s positive opinion, because that seemed to me a bit discourteous, offhand somehow. I would have felt I was being a bit rude to Thuillier if I had said: ‘Monsieur Thuillier believes in it’. I didn’t say it. I was so convinced that it was obvious that the painting was sublime and that it was clearly by Poussin that well, the fact that Thuillier believed in it was great, but I was NOT about to stick a label on it: ‘Thuillier believes in it.’ I felt the painting didn’t need that, if you like! So in 1989, I had already seen Thuillier, I had already had my letter from Mahon. I had already UNDERSTOOD that this situation had been completely sabotaged on all sides, BUT I was still trying to do things normally. I put on an exhibition. I’ll tell you quite honestly that we resented the fact that the museums were preventing us from selling abroad. So we decided, in order to BREAK this vicious circle a bit, to put on an exhibition. And we felt, at the time – I’m telling you this in all honesty, in all sincerity, I’m choosing my words carefully – that the Louvre had played a part in having us hushed up! We had understood, it was very clear. They weren’t buying it from us and they were preventing us from selling it. And actually, I’ve got a little story that’s quite amusing. We knew Monsieur Agnelli.87 He’d been a client of my father’s. He came back to see us. And we tried to show the painting to clients like that. Monsieur Agnelli really was colossally wealthy! He was very well off. We showed him our picture and we said to him: ‘You should buy a painting like this.’ And he said to us: ‘Ah but I was shown the OTHER version, and someone said to me: “whatever you do, don’t touch it!”’ So, even from the point of view of the wealthy jet-set clients, this business had had a sort of black mark put on it. There was another painting, there were other dealers, there was a dispute between experts, there were the museums … There was some kind of imbroglio which we were involved despite ourselves, but it was a reality, if you see what I mean … It made the sale of the painting more and more difficult, this business of differing opinions between the experts.
On the occasion when the two paintings were shown side by side at the Ritz Hotel in March 1990, the two gallery owners tried, initially, to persuade Barbara Piasecka-Johnson to buy their picture:
I was a bit naive. I had met Mrs Johnson before doing the comparison at the Ritz, that grotesque farce of an occasion. I had met Mrs Johnson and I said to myself: ‘Perhaps Mrs Johnson might have been a bit foolish in buying that awful picture over there… But still! Maybe she could give it back. She could perhaps make up for it and give this pathetic painting back and buy the original!’ We thought Mrs Johnson wanted to get rid of this rubbish and then, maybe, buy the original. We approached Mrs Johnson. I met her lawyers. We knew them.
But the extremely rich collector was not to be persuaded. The comparison of the two paintings therefore took place and did not succeed in uniting the two camps.
The gallery owners, however, organized a second improvised comparison between the two canvases, after the first one had taken place, for the benefit of Jean-Pierre Cuzin, then curator of the department of paintings at the Louvre. In so doing, they were taking advantage of the opportunity they had been given of keeping the Piasecka-Johnson painting in their gallery for a while:
After the exhibition at the Ritz, Mrs Johnson, the grand lady, said to us: ‘Listen, could you keep my painting for now? Someone from Chenu will pick it up in a couple of days?’ So we had a van, taxitransport, you know, that you can hire in Paris for the whole day. Perfect! We took our painting and hers to the gallery and I had the idea of getting Monsieur Cuzin to come along, as he hadn’t been invited to the session at the Ritz! I knew Monsieur Cuzin. He was someone who I was on good terms with at that time, a charming man. And we said to him: ‘Monsieur Cuzin, come along. It’s all rather amusing. We’ve got Mrs Johnson’s painting at the gallery so come and have a look!! You’ll see, it’ll be very entertaining!!’ He came along. It was interesting. For him it was certainly an experience. He came into our big room, and it really is a really big room. He said: ‘WHAT?! ... You’ve brought me over here for this piece of crap!!’ This painting of Mrs Johnson’s is LAUGHABLE. Laughable! How could Mr Denis Mahon, who is after all a great connoisseur, Mr Standring, Keith Christiansen of the Met,88 this man from the Albertina Museum in Vienna all want us to BELIEVE that they are convinced that…?
Jean-Pierre Cuzin’s recollection of this moment confirms Richard Pardo’s account:
I remember seeing the two paintings, Mrs Piasecka-Johnson’s painting and the Pardo painting, of seeing them side by side. Which VERY MUCH confirmed my personal judgement, which was that Mrs Johnson’s painting was a pretty hideous copy – and I’m not mincing my words89 – and that the Pardo painting was the original. It was almost, without wanting to sound pretentious, but it almost seemed grotesque to me to see those two paintings side by side, with one so ugly! (laughter), so weak, dark, harsh, and the other so wonderful. And there, very, very immodestly, the quality was indisputable. Especially as, I’ll say it again, the other was REALLY ugh! Dark, heavily outlined, I mean, really!90
But Jean-Pierre Cuzin did not at that time have the necessary authority to make his opinion public and to change the status of the painting.
The two brothers had such faith in their painting that, in October 1990, they decided to sell their gallery, inherited from their father, and to put everything into getting their canvas authenticated:
My brother and I decided to close the gallery. It was a bit of a whim but that says it all. We had quite a few paintings. Our father had handed down things which were important, but the Poussin painting was more than that and we felt that the Poussin painting which was the source of all our problems, required special measures. Those special measures were based on a whim, which came down to us saying: the painting isn’t in our gallery any more, it’s the gallery that’s in the painting. That meant that our gallery, our work tool, what we loved, what our father had left to us, had all gone into the painting. And that if we wanted to defend this painting, it was not so much a matter of defending the gallery, in the sense of an address near the Jacquemart-André museum, with three employees, etc. But it was about defending the sale of a Poussin. We decided to stop our commercial enterprise. We bought up part of the stock, we paid some substantial taxes, we put quite a few paintings on sale, and my brother and I went our separate ways. We each took part of the stock we had bought and that included the Poussin painting. We bought it at the sale price, one million eight hundred … something like that with the expenses. And it went into a vault.
So for all those years, from 1986 to 1994, the gallery owners found themselves locked into the same situation, with a painting that was proving difficult to get authenticated and which was unsellable. They became aware of the performative strength of experts who had the power to establish the status of works, and of their total dependence on them: ‘In our business, because there’s quite a lot of money involved, it can sometimes just be a matter of a word, a signature. “Monsieur Thuillier has said yes; Monsieur Thuillier has not said yes.” It might seem strange, but that’s how it happens.’ When in 1994, six years after buying the painting and four years after making the decision to close the gallery, Thuillier published an article, and then a book, indicating that the ‘Pardo’ version was the original version of Poussin’s The Flight into Egypt, and when these publications were followed by an exhibition at the Grand Palais where their painting was mentioned in the catalogue in a piece written by Rosenberg, the gallery owners could finally hope for a happy ending to their long and painful wait. But it was instead only the beginning of a new nightmare. Referring to the 1994 exhibition where their canvas was not exhibited, but nevertheless mentioned in the catalogue, Richard Pardo had this to say:
So in a sense it was a way of helping the painting, but in fact, it turned out to be a way of POINTING IT OUT to the former owners: ‘There you are! We’ve cleared the way for you, all you need to do now is to follow it.’ At that time, Mr Rosenberg had led us to believe that he was doing everything he could to buy our painting, even though he couldn’t exhibit it. And he had even hinted that he might be going to open a national fund. And instead of the national fund, we were served a writ.
At the time of the auction in 1986, the ‘Saint-Arroman’ case law had still not been established (the final verdict would be delivered in 1987). But, in 1994, it represented a precedent which put art dealers in a very difficult situation in cases where an annulment of a sale was requested. Richard Pardo returned to the subject of this case, in which he, too, would become one of the big collateral victims. For him, it was clearly a piece of jurisprudence which prevented art dealers from exercising their profession since it meant it was no longer possible a priori to discover an art work without the risk of the sale being annulled:
The case law which was in the process of being established with the ‘Saint-Arroman’ case, IN FRONT OF our very eyes at the time, because there were articles in the newspapers, this case law provided sellers with a retroactive weapon, and a pretty powerful one at that. It amounts to saying: ‘Oh, er, I didn’t know! I made a MISTAKE!!’ And after that, they get their painting back, once it has been shown that it was worth a lot more. […] It hadn’t occurred to me that the ‘Saint-Arroman’ case law could also be an extraordinary means of giving a joker to people who go to art auctions and providing them with a comprehensive insurance!
Once the case was over, he had wanted to go and see the judge to question him about the absurd situation that the law has put art dealers into:
I’m going to say something which is not really about the Poussin, and that is that if I found myself today or tomorrow with another Poussin or with a Michelangelo painting or I don’t know what, what should I do? I’ve sometimes thought I would have liked to have gone to see the judge who made the interim order to ask him the question: ‘Your honour, now that this problem is behind us, what would you advise me to do? Because that’s what my profession is all about: finding pictures that others … that other people have missed. I make sure I don’t miss them, when I get the chance. What should I do next? There you are.’ Well, let me tell you, there’s no answer to that question.91
During the course of an interview which took place on 10 February 2011, Hubert Duchemin, Parisian collector and gallery owner, gave his view of the case. He was twenty-three at the time of the Versailles auction in 1986 and had never heard of this painting until the press first started to show an interest in it. He confirmed the fact that ‘the Pardos had a good reputation at the time’: ‘Their gallery was on the Boulevard Haussmann. They produced catalogues. They were dealers in the prime of life and with a good reputation. I mean there are some dealers whose reputations are a bit nefarious, who can even be almost a bit unsavoury, whereas they had a rather good reputation.’ He explained that, ‘in the years 1960–1970–1980, the principal role of dealers in old paintings was to discover pictures’ (‘dealers in old paintings were essentially just discoverers’) but that, with the expanding role of experts ‘there were less and less things to discover’ on the market. And, above all, the story of the Pardo brothers has been ‘a disaster for the market, for dealers, for discoverers’. He esteems that ‘what’s happened to them is really disgusting’ and that the lesson to be drawn from it is that ‘there is no merit in discovering works, in working hard, in taking bold decisions’. The decision to annul the sale is a way of ‘denying everything that makes up the essence of an art dealer who is working to advance knowledge and out of love for what he does’.
In Duchemin’s view, ‘sellers are OVER-protected’ by the law and, by annulling the sale without acknowledging the role played by the dealers, the judges have made the dealers’ role as discoverers of art works impossible:
That’s what is disgusting in this business. It means that these days, you practically no longer have the right to make any discoveries! Because the seller and the expert are protected against the knowledge of the buyer who is taking a risk. What’s unfair is that having taken the risk and done a fantastic amount of work, they ended up losing the painting. […] The logic of the case law, means you no longer have the right to discover a painting. The annulment for erreur sur la substance can be invoked at any moment … Whereas at the Hôtel Drouot, EVERYWHERE in fact, there are paintings which are poorly catalogued, drawings which get sold every single day! All day long, all over the world, there are paintings in circulation and there are dealers who are there to try and get their hands on them and then to bring them into the light. So yes, of course they also do it to make some money and because they enjoy doing it, but at the same time, they are SAVING works of art.
According to Duchemin, the only possibility of making any profit from a discovery is when the sellers do not know that their painting has been the object of a positive change in status: ‘The sellers are not always informed that they have lost out. […] The owner, the seller, would need to stumble upon their painting one day. Because if someone sold a painting for a few thousand francs at the time, or some hundreds of euros today, it’s because they thought it wasn’t worth very much.’ But when the painting is published, when it’s all over the press and the owners get to hear about it, there is a strong chance that they will request the annulment of the sale:
If there is only one person involved in discovering it, and this person who bought it for a few hundred euros ends up reselling it for millions … If several people are involved in the discovery, then when that happens, the price goes up, and THEN the seller can find out about it. He might say to himself: ‘What’s happened? I was told my painting was worth €100 and it’s sold for €25,000.’ So then, he can start asking questions! But he needs to know a bit about it. As long as the painting doesn’t reappear.
Convinced that the authenticity of the painting was so obvious, Richard Pardo just cannot understand how the owners did not know they owned a Poussin. Immersed in the art world himself, he imagines that anyone who is the slightest bit cultured would at least have a bit of an intuition that they were in possession of a work by a master:
To make out that these people were completely taken aback, and that their painting which was some old daub hung in their grandmother’s dining room later turned out to be by Poussin, is, in my opinion, a lie! I think these people knew that, according to the family tradition, they had a painting which was potentially by the great French painter, Poussin. It’s like Racine. It’s something which every French person know about, even if they don’t know very much about the actual paintings.
In 2007, four years after The Flight into Egypt had been restored to its former owner, Richard Pardo wrote an account of the various events which had taken place, from the purchase of the painting in 1986 to its return to the original owners in 2003. His account is in the form of a typescript document of fifty-four pages, photocopied and bound, entitled An unsatisfactory domain. In a very polished style which is metaphorical and sometimes very abstract, Richard Pardo sets out to tell the story of his unjust dispossession, motivated by a ‘fundamental desire for the truth’.92 In it he points out the ‘ease with which you can cast someone down’ and of the obligation he feels to ‘pick himself up again’. Writing was a means of re-establishing a truth which had been flouted: ‘It’s incumbent on the person scorned by the group, to rewrite their story and to put it behind them, with the sense of a combat in which they had no part, and from a socially alienated consciousness.’
It was the purchase by the French Museums in July 2007 ‘of a painting discovered by his efforts’ and which he saw ‘snatched or looted’ from him (he also speaks of ‘a clever misuse of a treacherous case law’) in 2003, which unleashed the pressing need to go back over the whole story. This account begins with the description of the family gallery run by his father and uncle and then handed over to his brother and himself. Having been in various ways a victim of both the law and of the experts, he broadly challenges the ‘deference to authority’ which is, for him, the ‘excuse invented at that time to salve their own consciences’. He also talks about these ‘tame specialists who spare others from having to think and who guarantee to the passive ranks that their jobs will always be safe’ and describes himself as ‘sceptical’, like his father, ‘about the value of the modern world, which people without experience are so quick to praise because its lack of depth serves their mediocrity’.
Stripped of any illusions about the art world and the law in particular, and more generally about elites, the extremely dense text hovers between denunciation and revelation. His disillusion allows him to describe the social magic which lies at the heart of relationships with the artistic sacred. He is, for example, aware that ‘routinely pronouncing the name of great painters, confers on the individual who does so through their profession, however ordinary that may be (for example, the warehouseman, the framer), the privilege of a familiarity with the extraordinary, with the domain of the erudite’. He recalls the feeling of distinction that took hold of the young apprentice art dealer: ‘For a beginner aged twenty who was learning the profession of art dealer, this ability to name, casually and with familiarity, the idols collectively elected to the pantheon of glory could feel like a kind of refinement.’ And, continuing the analysis, he glimpses the links between culture and social domination:
An enormous fiction, where the intimidation of individuals revealed its aim as propaganda, and the pathetic worth of its representatives demonstrated its low value, particularly if you yourself possessed the rudiments of it, culture in France appeared as the deception resorted to by the ‘superior’ castes, in order to belittle the servants incapable of seeing their own servitude, and who miraculously embraced the idea of being trained so naturally that they undoubtedly believed they would end up acquiring in their turn all the qualities of domination that this apprenticeship led them to hope for. The opposite of the task I imposed on myself in my years of apprenticeship which consisted in dismantling the machinery which generates myths about art and science so as to dispense them as a social and psychological remedy to my collectivity, and to rid myself of such illusions in order to become ‘intelligent’ outside the narrow limits of a little theatre, which was at best a shallow one and at times actually false.
Having been dependent on the great experts who alone had the power to pronounce the truth about works, Richard Pardo was aware of all the conditions which need to be fulfilled in order for a word to become performative. His critical lucidity led him to discover the analytical elements of Austin’s speech acts. A knowledge without power, a skill without the possibility of practising it, is worth nothing. It is only when pronounced by an authorized person, in a legitimate public (versus private) situation, that the word, or even better, the written text, transforms the status of things: ‘An acknowledgement delivered in private and not confirmed in writing is worthless’, wrote Pardo,
even if the essence of what is unknown in such an acknowledgement is ultimately resolved. Simply saying to someone that you believe in the authenticity of something or indicating to them that authenticity is assured does not bring consequences which are useful in any practical terms unless you are yourself entitled to give an opinion, either because your role is a well-recognized one, or because you have had long experience in a discipline ..., and only has value inasmuch as this opinion is capable of modifying the outcome of the situation by one or more developments. All that is to say that pure knowledge does not carry authority if it is not backed by power over things and does not lead to practical effects, without going into the results that might arise from a broader disclosure of recognition, and its credit.
All this is a way of making sense of the situation he had experienced with Thuillier who had come to their gallery to see the painting and had asked if in the re-edition of his catalogue raisonné of Poussin’s work, he could replace the phrase ‘missing painting’ and the photo of the engraving by a photograph of their painting:
That simple phrase meant that our painting was going to feature in the catalogue of the painter’s work, a catalogue which was already a ‘classic’ text and whose author deserved his reputation for great severity in uncertain cases, and there are plenty of those when it comes to Nicolas Poussin, our greatest painter. Just like the day we first acquired the painting, we felt a pure joy, difficult to convey to the reader, for it is no longer possible today to convey the significance of that simple suggestion of replacing the photo of an old engraving in the catalogue raisonné by the photo of our painting, which, as a result of this change, became the rediscovered original!
But the acknowledgement of authenticity was, for the time being, only private and oral and could not therefore produce any practical effect.
This awareness of all the symbolic work that makes up the reality of works of art, of all the conditions which need to be in place in order for an acknowledgement of authenticity to begin to have consequences in real terms, has led the former gallery owner to an awareness of all the acts of magic which make up social reality, all the play of words and of silences which produce the well-established illusion of theatrum mundi: ‘We witness, children and adults together, the prestige of the magic which operates behind the words and accessories of the magicians, in the full knowledge that what we think is true is not so! It was the same there where the audience in the theatre to which we were summoned was none other than that of French social and cultural reality in all its triviality.’
For a museum director, the purchase of a new painting, like each new exhibition they organize, is always a key moment in their career. And the more prestigious the painting is, the more the acquisition will attract local, national and even international public attention to the museum. It goes without saying, therefore, that the arrival of The Flight into Egypt by Nicolas Poussin at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, a painting which would complete an already solid collection of French seventeenth-century paintings, was what might be called a very clever move on the part of director, Sylvie Ramond. Such an acquisition is all the more important in that the practice of international exchanges between museums means that the more significant items a museum has in its collection, the more it is in a position to negotiate interesting exchanges with a view to organizing specific exhibitions:
A museum must make acquisitions. Acquisitions are what gives a place its strength. We’re particularly aware of that, within the museum, in terms of being able to put on exhibitions. The works in a museum are really our war chest. We’re lucky to have some major works, and that’s absolutely vital for us. I mean, with the exchange system in place with other museums, if you don’t have works of significant quality, if you can’t offer a certain level of quality or of interest in terms of your works, you can’t really do anything. If the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art of New York] is ready to lend us a Pollock for the exhibition Repartir à zero, it’s because we can lend them a Miro. You see, that’s how it works. So, a museum has a duty to make acquisitions and we do so on a regular basis.93
But how did the centuries-old trajectory of a painting today considered to be by the hand of Nicolas Poussin, end up crossing paths with that of a museum director? Having been director of the Unterlinden museum in Colmar for around fifteen years (1989–2004), Sylvie Ramond, born in 1959 and with a DEA (Diplôme d’études approfondies) in art history, former student at the Institut Nationale du Patrimoine (National Institute of Cultural Heritage) and a specialist in twentieth-century art, welcomed the opportunity represented by this painting at the time she took up her post at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Her predecessor, Vincent Pomarède, a long-standing friend of Ramond, left Lyon in order to take over the department of paintings at the Louvre: ‘I know her well’, the curator explains:
We were at the École du Patrimoine together at the time when it was still called a ‘school’ rather than an ‘institute’, in other words, right at the beginning. We were both in the same year, the first year of the École du Patrimoine. So we’ve known each other since then. And I’d also seen her again just afterwards when I was in the restoration department of the museum [the Louvre]. I had gone to Colmar for professional reasons when she was a curator there, and then when I left Lyon and she took over the museum, I saw her very often. There was a partnership between the Louvre and Lyon which was just being set up for joint exhibitions, so we met in the context of preparing the partnership. And then it’s true that I deputized at Lyon for almost six months. It was difficult for her to get away from Colmar, so it was a while before she could start. There was quite a long period during which we were both at the museum and we saw a lot of each other. So yes, we knew each other extremely well. And of course, later on, that gives everyone confidence and means we can speak to each other much more freely.94
In 2004 therefore, just as Ramond had arrived at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Pomarède was proposing (in July) that The Flight into Egypt, recently restored to its former owner, should be classified as a ‘national treasure’. At that time, he suggested, as we have seen, that Lyon or Lille could potentially acquire the painting:
I had suggested Lille or Lyon because neither of them had a Poussin, thinking that, from my point of view, Lyon should nevertheless have a preference given that the painting had been commissioned by someone from Lyon, and that therefore it seemed not unreasonable to go with Lyon. Yes, it’s true that the people in the commission all knew my background and they could see that I wanted to help the city of Lyon to get hold of a fine acquisition, but it was only really mentioned in passing. I mean it wasn’t necessarily one for the Louvre since the Louvre already has a lot, and it would be a great opportunity for a regional museum, so why not the birthplace of the man who had commissioned the painting. It all seemed quite logical. So, at the end of the commission, when the minister signed the paper refusing to issue the certificate, or rather when he did not sign the certificate, I contacted the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and said to Sylvie Ramond: ‘Listen, Sylvie, here’s an opportunity not to miss, since we’ve got thirty months … Everything possible should be done to get the money together.’
It was an exciting enough challenge for the new director who could, therefore, in the very year she took up the post, launch into this ambitious acquisition project to complete an already rich Lyonnais collection. ‘From the very beginning, Raymond recounts, two hundred years ago, the museum had built up a rich and important collection of seventeenth-century painting, with paintings by Philippe de Champaigne, Charles Le Brun, Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet. Recent purchases have helped to strengthen the collection, with works by Simon Vouet or Jacques Stella. But this collection, one of the greatest in Europe for painting from that period, suffered from two significant gaps: Nicolas Poussin, we had two drawings by him, and Claude Lorraine.’95 A seventeenth-century collection needing to be consolidated: this was therefore the implicit expectation of the objectivized history of the collections of the Lyonnais institution. If the director wanted the reputation of her museum to grow, she needed to complete what was incomplete and launch a major undertaking which would be nationally recognized.
If the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon benefited from the help of the Louvre in terms of its experience in corporate sponsorship, the Louvre would also find in this collaboration a very useful way to prove, in the middle of the controversy over the Abu Dhabi Louvre, that it was not turning its back on its traditional mission. In fact, from the end of 2006 onwards, the project for a ‘Louvre’ built in the capital of the United Arab Emirates had provoked indignant reactions and petitions from curators and art historians:96
We used the Louvre, as I think the Louvre used us, explained Cipriani, head of development at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. I’ll tell you why. It was pretty much at the height of the Abu Dhabi controversy. People were saying that the Louvre was selling its brand, selling itself abroad. Amongst curators, in museum circles, it was something that really, really got people going. And there were two very clear sides. Besides, the Louvre has this image of being at the same time, the biggest and most beautiful museum in the world, and alongside that, there is also the need to remain very much a French museum, a national museum and a museum with good regional links, as we can see with the Louvre-Lens project, for example. And I think that, in terms of image, the fact of joining up with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, was by no means neutral. It was an extremely generous gesture, but by no means neutral.
Such an acquisition is seen as all the more of an achievement because curators understand how difficult it is to organize that kind of financial set-up outside the major Parisian institutions, particularly when the sums involved are significant. As Pomarède explains:
So then, really, I said to myself: ‘We need to send a strong signal like that by saying that in the end national treasures can benefit the whole museum network. It’s just a matter of finding the right museum.’ And yes, afterwards, we realized that there was an element of fantasy in all that, because the museums in question need to find the money, and when the sums involved are large, it’s obviously difficult for them to do that. Here at the Louvre we can do it, but not without a struggle. But for a regional museum, having to raise tens of million euros just like that, or anyway almost two tens of millions, can be an unsurmountable task, something very challenging indeed.97
Florence Hudowicz, a curator from the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, confirms this difficulty in an interview: ‘Companies want visibility on a national scale and prefer to be involved in acquisitions for the Louvre rather than for a provincial museum.’98
But there is still a little more to this purchase than just the name of Poussin. By deciding to acquire such a painting via a quest for a series of corporate regional sponsors, the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon was also demonstrating her capacity to take advantage of a recent law (2002) on sponsorship. In acting thus, she demonstrated the dynamism and pragmatism she is capable of bringing to the service of the institution: ‘At last it’s ours. It’s the most expensive national treasure ever acquired in France’,99 she announced, delighted with the success of the sponsorship operation launched in 2005. The local press also highlight the scale of such an event for the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon: ‘It will be its most expensive work of art and the largest scale corporate arts sponsorship operation ever organized in France.’100 It is referred to as a ‘sponsorship operation unique in France’.101 Other similar sponsorship operations had certainly been mounted prior to this one, but mostly in connection with Paris museums and for works of art costing considerably less.102
A museum director with any degree of ambition always positions themselves objectively in the context of national posts, which means that for someone who started their career in Colmar, and who came to Lyon following the departure of the director (Pomarède) for the Louvre, the possibility of one day playing a role in Paris is on the cards. For that, she needs to be able to show she ‘understands the game’, in other words the sense of what needs to be done in order to respond to aesthetic issues in connection with the given state of a museum’s collection. Here, the issue was about completing the collection of seventeenth-century paintings with a Poussin, and not just any old one at that. But thanks to the sponsorship operation, Sylvie Ramond has proved she is a modern director who knows how to exploit the potential of the law on sponsorship to its full advantage. In a certain sense, by succeeding with such an operation which attracted full media coverage on a national scale (because of the sums in question, of the multiple partners involved, and because it was happening in the provinces rather than in Paris), she was able to get the most out of what the law allows (it is described as a ‘textbook case’). It is almost as though the law was simply waiting for someone to seize the possibilities it opened up. Being the first person to achieve that, in a provincial museum, with such a high price level, means meeting the expectations of the institution in an exemplary manner. And meeting the expectations of the institution over and above the hopes of the institution objectively amounts to playing a very good hand.
A few years later, the post of director of the Louvre became vacant, following the announcement that Henri Loyrette, the current director, was stepping down. After the unsuccessful application of internal candidate Vincent Pomarède, Sylvie Ramond was one of the final three potential candidates. These were respectively Jean-Luc Martinez (aged fifty-nine), head of the department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre (the final winner of this contest for the most prestigious post in France); Sylvie Ramond (fifty-three), Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon since 2004; and Laurent Le Bon (fortythree), director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Discussing the talents of the two most talked about candidates, Céline Piettre, journalist at Le Figaro, emphasized Ramond’s skills in the areas of private sponsorship and of international relationships: ‘The former has the advantage of knowing the museum very well having worked there since 1997. The second however, although a twentieth-century specialist, has the advantage of having set up private sponsorship in Lyon and of her links to the international museum scene as a member of Frame [French Regional and American Museum Exchange] – an association linking regional French and American museums.’103 And, of course, the acquisition of The Flight into Egypt was part of the heroic feats cited by commentators: ‘[At the MBA of Lyon], she was constantly injecting enthusiasm and enriching the collections by cultivating friends and sponsors. As a result, over the last few years, she has been responsible for acquiring Poussin’s The Flight into Egypt (in collaboration with the Louvre), three works by Soulages, and more recently, Aretino and the Envoy of Charles V by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.’104
The acquisition of an old master therefore meant that, simultaneously, a country, a city, a museum and its director could all increase their status through their association with a sacred object. If it is always particular, remarkable individuals who render such ‘expansion’ possible, they only do so, however, because their own interests, and prosaically their career interests, coincide with the collective interests of institutions, cities or nations. A rather too cynical and reductive vision of the social world would see here actors simply satisfying their personal desires and putting in place cunning strategies to achieve their aims. Such a vision would expose the collective and even universalist masks often worn by actors to hide their individual interests. However, these personal interests and desires are in fact only institutional interests and desires incorporated and individualized, and it seems equally important to point out the way institutions create desires in people and use them to serve their own ends. On the one hand, actors commit themselves, according to their abilities, to follow certain routes proposed by institutions; on the other, those institutions constrain actors both by censure and by encouragement. By proposing an analysis of practices which do not neglect either the logic of individual histories or that of more enduring collective histories, sociology provides the opportunity to those who are caught up in the urgency and the necessity of action, the chance to distance themselves in a potentially liberating way.