Brian Sewell Exposes Thyssen Fake But Not Norman Rosenthal
It is a well-known fact that within the money-obsessed art market, exposing fakes is rarely going to make you friends and certainly little in the way of a profit, which is the main reason why my questioning of many of the paintings in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has been met with such deafening silence; particularly in Spain.
It was thus somewhat reassuring when Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard’s legendary art critic, recently took it upon himself to not only expose a painting from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection claimed to be by Edward Wadsworth as a fake, and question Tate Modern for including it in their ‘Futurism’ exhibition (until 20 September), but also to reveal the reason for such dishonesty. Unfortunately, he didn’t question Norman Rosenthal, veteran Exhibitions Secretary at London’s Royal Academy of Arts and now ‘freelance curator to international museums and galleries’, who has been a member of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid for some 8 years. How could Rosenthal let ‘Wadsworth’s’ ‘Vorticist Abstraction 1915’ be included in the Tate Modern exhibition? Was it done because its inclusion might ‘give (the painting) respectability’, as Brian Sewell suggests? It seems clear that Rosenthal is a man who may be sailing dangerously close to acting as both poacher and game-keeper. Indeed, he raised more than a few eyebrows with an article in The Art Newspaper of December 2008, where he advocated the introduction of a statute of limitations on the restitution of Nazi-looted art. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-time-has-come-for-a-statute-of-limitations/16627 My letter to the editor of The Art Newspaper has remained unpublished; until now: ‘8 December 2008 http://www.lootedartrecovery.com/looted-art/looted-objects/pending.htm
|
Tags: Art Restitution, Brian Sewell, Camille Pissarro, Cassirer, Edward Wadsworth, Norman Rosenthal, Tate Modern, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Posted in The Thyssen Art Macabre, Thyssen Art Comments Off on Brian Sewell Exposes Thyssen Fake But Not Norman Rosenthal