GALLERY PURSUES MYSTERY ARTWORK
Trying to sell Chagall piece to fund its purchase
Whatever it is, the mysterious work of art the National Gallery of Canada is pursuing sure is something.
What little is known reads like a message to a secret agent: An important work of Canadian heritage is at imminent risk of being sold overseas. There is little time left to save it. Museums around the world are clamouring to pay eight figures for it. Private buyers lurk. The government is involved through the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, but its powers are limited.
Here is what we know. It is a work of art, but not necessarily a painting. It is a single object, not a collection. It is an important part of Canadian heritage, but it is not necessarily Canadian. The owner is Canadian, and has offered the National Gallery right of first refusal.
Gallery director Marc Mayer said the opportunity is so urgent that it will sell a multimillion-dollar Marc Chagall painting of the Eiffel Tower.
“It’s a sacrifice that we think is worth making,” he said in an interview. “We have a better one (a more unusual painting of a goat, remembered from the artist’s childhood). It’s not a national tragedy.”
If the Chagall makes even the low end of its estimated price of US$6 million to US$9 million at a Christie’s auction next month, he says the purchase of the mystery piece can go ahead. If not, the mystery will linger.
Mayer told reporters that the gallery had approached both donors and the federal government for financial support to buy a work that he is refusing, for the moment, to identify.
“We’ve exhausted all of those other options that we had at our disposal and time is of the essence,” said Mayer. “Unfortunately, this is all that we have left.”
The distinguished art collector Bruce Bailey said he is prepared to help with a fundraising campaign to buy the mystery piece and save the Chagall, a “gorgeous” piece he said should be put on immediate display.
He said the Chagall “is a significant artwork that is of national importance to Canada — and indeed, of international importance to art history — and should not be sold by the NGC. I would suggest that the NGC negotiate a six- to eight-month fundraising hold on its proposed new acquisition and independently raise the capital required for the acquisition of the new work. If it is truly of ‘national importance’ after full disclosure and transparency to all Canadian taxpayers I am sure that the NGC can, with a specific acquisition fundraising campaign, secure funding for the proposed acquisition.”
Speculation about the mystery target artwork centred on Lawren Harris, whose Mountain Forms sold for more than $11 million in 2016. The great Quebec painters Paul-Emile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle do not attract that kind of money for single works.
Mayer’s secrecy leaves open the possibility that the work is not even Canadian in origin.
Buying American can cause controversy, even when there is a strong Canadian connection, as in the best known of the National Gallery’s acquisition stories, about the American painter Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, a simple, flag-like work commissioned for Montreal’s Expo 67. Its purchase for the permanent collection for $1.8 million in 1989 was as close to national scandal as it gets for Canadian fine art.
“Historically, many Canadian institutions have had a blind spot for artists of colour, Indigenous artists and female artists,” said Toronto art dealer Raymond McAuliffe. “And it’s high time that Canadian institutions remedy this omission. That’s why I think that the funds are being raised to save a work by someone who falls into one of those three categories.”
The National Gallery has an annual acquisition budget of $8 million used to support all of its departments, including Canadian art, Indigenous art, international art, prints, photography and more. “We have a lot of collections that we have to keep alive,” Mayer said.
Had the gallery allocated its acquisition budget entirely to buying mystery work, that decision “would pretty much put us out of business for a whole year and we couldn’t justify that for all the other collecting areas,” Mayer said.
Cyanne Chutkow, the deputy chairman of impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, said the Chagall “is being offered for sale at an ideal time in the market, when singular examples by Chagall are more in demand than ever.”