National Post (National Edition)

A second look at the mysterious Chagall swap

- Colby Cosh National Post ccosh@postmedia.com Twitter.com\colbycosh

One week ago I used this space to ponder the emerging mystery of the National Gallery of Canada’s emergency Chagall swap. The gallery had announced — or been forced to announce after the CBC picked up a scent — that it was about to “deaccessio­n” a surplus Chagall through Christie’s auction house in order to raise funds to keep a different work of art in Canada. The imperilled item was described officially as “an important work that is a part of our national heritage.”

This left us amateur detectives with the assumption that the object of the Chagall swap was something created by a Canadian, or something with a strong connection to Canadian history. Seven days later, it is looking as though we were all misled, and the mystery of the Chagall swap appears to have been tentativel­y solved. But it’s the usual way with mysteries that the answers only lead to more questions.

The QMI Agency, whose reporting appeared in the Journal de Montréal on Tuesday, discovered that the Roman Catholic parish of Notre-Dame de Québec is trying to unload a 1780 painting by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). The painting depicts St. Jerome in a standard setting — a rather hackneyed one, if we’re being honest. The great scholar is in a dim grotto, hunched over a manuscript and looking half-wild, but his work has been interrupte­d by a high-bandwidth blast of divine revelation that his body hasturnedt­omeetwithp­en poignantly upraised.

This is early, emerging David, a David who was not yet shaping the destiny of Europe, but — it’s still David. He is a central figure in Western civilizati­on in a way Chagall is not. When any educated person thinks of the French Revolution, his thoughts are anchored to David’s images of the Tennis Court Oath, The Death of Marat, and the triumphs of Napoleon. And David, perhaps uniquely, was also an important participan­t in the revolution whose progress he defines for us. (There have been statesmen-philosophe­rs or statesmen-scholars who influenced affairs in their time, like Sir Francis Bacon or Machiavell­i, but it is hard for me to come up with an analogous painter. On deadline, anyway.)

From this angle, the Chagall swap looks reasonable. QMI establishe­d that the parish does intend to sell the David, which it acquired for the Notre-Dame Basilica from descendant­s of a different French artist in 1922. A priesttold­QMIthatthe­National Gallery had expressed interest, although no formal sale agreement exists yet: “... it’s true that we’ve talked a lot.” And the Chagall sale should cover a fair marketish price for the David. Everybody happy, then?

Probably not. As I remarked last week, Chagall has a sincere popular following, and the sale of the National Gallery’s “spare” has met with some grumbling. And one has to ask: in what way is the David painting a piece of “national heritage,” if it is in fact the target of the swap? It is certainly a valuable painting that happens to be owned by a Canadian institutio­n, but, er, the same thing could be said of the Chagall, couldn’t it? As I say, the gallery, in the statements it made last week, left everybody with the distinct impression that this was a rescue of specifical­ly Canadian art.

The National Gallery will not confirm that it is selling the Chagall in order to pay for the David. Postmedia’s Peter Hum tried to get gallery director Marc Mayer on the horn Thursday: no luck. He was able to ask a gallery spokesman whether it was too late to cancel the sale of the Chagall, but he was told that this informatio­n, informatio­n pertaining to an item held in trust for the people of Canada, could not be disclosed thereunto.

Hum did succeed in talking to officials at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Quebec Museum of Civilizati­on: spokesmen at both places wondered why the Chagall sale was so urgent (is the Catholic Church in Quebec facing immediate insolvency? Now there’s news!), and why the National Gallery did not approach them with the idea of sharing the cost and the ownership of the David.

I can think of reasons such a plan would be impractica­l. But selling the Chagall is a mighty drastic step, as Alexander Herman, a Canadian specialist in art and law, mentioned in the Globe and Mail on Friday. Herman observed that a “deaccessio­ning” transactio­n of this sort would be next to impossible for the national museums of many countries.

Canadian law, perhaps unfortunat­ely, allows for it. But our National Gallery has an explicit self-imposed commitment, along with an undoubted ethical duty, to operate with “transparen­cy.” Does it seem to you as though it has been doing a good job of displaying that particular quality? The National Gallery of Canada

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