When the Artist Is Sketchy

One day in 17th century London -- probably -- a painter stepped into a studio with a palette full of pigments, a canvas 7 feet high and a naked woman. Maybe she was his mistress, maybe not.

Either way, the result was “Andromeda Chained to the Rock,” credited for more than 150 years to the Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck. The Ahmanson Foundation acquired it in 1985 as a 20th birthday present to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which put it up right away.

“It sends chills up and down my spine,” said Scott Schaefer, then LACMA’s curator of European paintings, welcoming the work to the collection.

But these days, “Andromeda” is all but invisible. Although it probably cost about $1 million, it hasn’t been hung in a public area for several years, and the museum has never announced a reason. The answer is there, however, for those who dig into LACMA’s online collection database: In July 1998, the museum decided it wasn’t a Van Dyck after all.

“It’s a casualty of art history,” says J. Patrice Marandel, who took over as LACMA’s curator of European paintings in 1993. “We’re not hiding it. We’re not ashamed of it. Perhaps we’re sorry, but I wouldn’t even go that far.”

In the art world, this is called a “re-attribution” -- sometimes a painful event, sometimes a happy discovery, often a test of institutional candor. The story of how this “Andromeda” fell from grace is a lesson in how curatorial wheels grind when names such as Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck are at stake, and a reminder that for all the technological advances of the last century, many of the most important questions in art history are still a matter of argument among experts squinting at old brush strokes.

“I still, quite frankly, believe in this picture,” says Schaefer, who is now curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Whether you embrace “Andromeda” or reject her, he says, “depends on experience, emotion, feelings, hunches, impressions -- all the very things that are impossible to quantify.”

Marandel leads a visitor down into LACMA’s dim storerooms and plays a flashlight beam across “Andromeda.” Set in a massive and ornate golden frame, the painting seems larger than 4 feet by 7 feet, and Andromeda looks like an Amazon.

“This is not a fake. It’s a painting of the period, a painting that has some quality,” Marandel says. “But the painting, when you start looking at it, is full of these awkward moments.... That body is, to me, awkward. The head is hopelessly small, compared to the huge vastness of torso, which is rather unpleasant.”

And the belly button, which is placed dead in the middle of the composition, “is the biggest belly button in the history of belly buttons,” Marandel says.

Marandel and Schaefer, believe it or not, are friendly. It’s mysteries like this, both say, that offer a big part of the joy in their jobs. No major museum ever stops studying its own collection, especially when a new curator arrives, and every new possibility is fuel for daily drama that museum visitors might never notice.

Still, it’s more fun to find a Van Dyck than lose one. For this and other reasons, the way museums handle attribution questions varies widely -- sometimes outright refusals to acknowledge doubters, sometimes public explorations of open questions.

The Amsterdam-based Rembrandt Research Project, a group of scholars convened by the Dutch government in 1968, has suggested that half of the paintings attributed to Rembrandt, including one apparent self-portrait at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, were actually by Rembrandt’s students and others. The project’s findings are disputed by many museums, including the Norton Simon, and sometimes complicated by internal disagreements as well. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995 staged a “Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt” exhibition.

In local history, the best-known re-attribution may be the Getty kouros, an arresting marble sculpture of a young man bought by the Getty in 1985 for an undisclosed amount estimated at about $10 million. The Swiss seller of the piece said it had come from a private collection after first appearing on the market in 1930, but many experts voiced doubts, saying its condition was suspiciously good and that it seemed to incorporate stylistic elements from several regions, perhaps a hint that a forger had combined elements from other surviving works of the era.

With questions lingering, the museum in 1992 shipped the work to Athens and sponsored a colloquium on the subject and published the results -- still inconclusive -- the following year. Today the Getty Villa displays the work with text saying, “Greek, about 530 B.C. or modern forgery.” But in many other disputed cases, there’s no modern skulduggery suspected, just murky history.

“We have in our basement five attempts by Mr. Getty to buy a Rubens. In each one he failed,” Schaefer says. The Getty may have failed with Rubens yet again in 1992, when it paid several million dollars for “The Death of Samson,” an oil attributed to the artist. In 1997, two years before Schaefer’s arrival, the museum ever-so-subtly demoted the work, classifying it as “attributed to Peter Paul Rubens” and admitting it may have been painted as many as 10 years after the death of Rubens in 1640.

Sometimes re-attributions do go the other way. For decades LACMA held a 15th century painting, “Portrait of a Man,” once attributed to Petrus Christus but much challenged. Bowing to prevailing scholarly opinion, LACMA’s curators credited it to “Flemish school” -- but then in 1990, Christus expert and Metropolitan Museum of Art research fellow Maryan Ainsworth examined the picture closely and urged the museum to put the master’s name back on it. After further research, the museum did. Since then, the picture has won broad acceptance and has traveled for exhibition in Europe as a reconfirmed Christus.

As for “Andromeda,” there are more than a few questions.

Anthony Van Dyck, born in Antwerp in 1599, is one of the greatest and most prolific portrait painters in all of European art history. He had his greatest success in the 1630s as a court portrait artist for Charles I of England, though his powers faltered in the years before his death in 1641.

More than two dozen of his works are held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., another dozen by the Louvre in Paris. The Getty has three on display.

But it’s unlikely that Van Dyck laid hands on every painting that carries his name now. Like most Old Masters, he had perhaps dozens of assistants and students working in his London studio over the years, filling in the less demanding portions of his canvases, typically leaving the most sensitive areas to the master, who was renowned for his faces and fabrics.

Once Van Dyck got famous, the temptation grew for collectors, dealers and curators to attach his name to any work that more or less fit his profile. But that’s only part of what makes “Andromeda” a complicated case.

Though scholars generally agree that the unsigned work seems to date from the late 1630s, when Van Dyck was hard at work (and often leaving works unsigned), mythology was not his usual subject matter.

Only one unchallenged mythological painting of his is known to exist: “Cupid and Psyche,” thought to have been painted about 1638, now owned by the British royal family. And the LACMA work’s painter made some unorthodox choices: The imperiled Andromeda is enormous and very naked, while the sea monster that threatens her is a tiny figure in the distance. So is Perseus, her potential rescuer.

Those who believe Van Dyck painted it say the strange composition may be explained by the face of the voluptuous model. For both “Cupid and Psyche” and this canvas, they say, the model was the same woman -- Margaret Lemon, Van Dyck’s mistress in the late 1630s. Maybe, they say, the mythological theme was an excuse for Van Dyck to paint his girlfriend naked.

If it isn’t a Van Dyck, Schaefer says, “it is a very odd thing for someone to have done a naked picture of someone else’s girlfriend.” And when it comes to the quality of the painting, “to me, it appears that Van Dyck’s hand plays a very singular role in that picture.... It was painted when Van Dyck was becoming sick.”

Marandel shrugs off the mistress angle.

“It could be anybody,” he says. Sometimes, he adds, “they all look the same to me, those 17th century people.”

As with many works of that time, the picture’s first 200 years of existence are a mystery. After “possibly” being held in the collection of the artist in London, then “possibly” joining the collection of the earl of Pembroke, the work by 1834 had joined the collection of Britain’s earl of Dunmore.

From there it passed through another British owner, a Parisian owner, a Parisian dealer, then several New York owners. In January 1978, Christie’s in New York put it up for auction, then withdrew it. Then in 1984, a New York dealer named Christophe Janet offered the work to the Ahmanson and LACMA.

Schaefer thought the work showed both Van Dyck’s strengths and the weaknesses of his later years. And he sought opinions from “almost all of the major Van Dyck scholars, even though I don’t necessarily respect everybody whose opinion I asked.”

Most gave the painting at least a tentative thumbs-up, he recalls, including Christopher Brown, director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. And then there was Oliver Millar, surveyor emeritus of the queen’s pictures in Britain and perhaps the world’s top expert on Van Dyck’s years in London.

“I am sorry not to be able to write with any authority about your very exciting new purchase, because I haven’t seen it,” wrote Millar to Schaefer in June 1986. “It is a most fascinating work and I very much hope that I shall be able to see it soon.... It is hard to think what else it can be if not a late work from Van Dyck’s London year; but I never forget the dictum .... Never discuss a work you haven’t seen.”

The Ahmanson and LACMA trustees gave their approval, as did former LACMA director Earl A. Powell III, who now directs the National Gallery of Art. And so the museum brought the work aboard, and Schaefer hailed it as a rediscovered masterpiece. Though the Ahmanson Foundation declined to reveal the cost of the painting, its gifts to the museum at the time averaged roughly $1 million annually. One source close to the transaction said the purchase price was less than $1.5 million, another said it was less than $1.25 million.

“The painting had a big buzz around it,” recalls Marandel, who was working at the Detroit Institute of Arts at the time.

But doubts were afoot. In 1988, shortly after Schaefer left LACMA for a position at the auction house Sotheby’s, scholar Erik Larsen released a Van Dyck catalog that all but damned the LACMA “Andromeda.”

Though Larsen had not examined the painting himself, he wrote, “it seems difficult to admit that this stiff, heavy and uninspired nude could be by Van Dyck.... [T]o compare this poor, mechanical and clumsy work to e.g., the master’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ appears simply incomprehensible to me.” Larsen labeled it an “erroneous attribution.”

This didn’t trouble Schaefer greatly, the curator recalls; he has frequently disagreed with Larsen’s judgments over the years, as have others.

But by the time Marandel joined LACMA in 1993, he was already an “Andromeda” skeptic.

“I looked at this painting, and I was not convinced,” Marandel says. “That was a gut feeling. I am not a Van Dyck specialist, but I had that feeling.”

In fact, Marandel says, he privately hoped that if the Van Dyck attribution didn’t hold up, perhaps it might be linked to another prominent English portraitist of the time, such as Peter Lely.

But that’s not how it went. When LACMA lent the work to a 1995-96 Van Dyck exhibition and symposium in Tel Aviv, Marandel says, there was a lot of chatter about “Andromeda” and Millar. Working as a collaborator with several other experts, Millar was covering Van Dyck’s London years in a new catalog that would supersede Larsen’s as the last word on the artist. Some thought Millar would smile upon “Andromeda,” others thought he’d scorn it.

In fact, Millar still hadn’t seen it -- but he had a daughter in Southern California who was due for a visit.

In late 1996, Millar came west to see her and paid a call on LACMA. He wore tweed, Marandel remembers, and was accompanied by his wife.

The three approached “Andromeda.” Millar, who was then 73, called for a ladder.

And then, while Marandel looked on, the historian climbed a few steps and stared closely at the nearly nude figure on the tall canvas.

“He wanted to look at the face very closely, and it’s pretty far up,” Marandel says. And then “he said to me, ‘I am very sorry.’ ”

On Oct. 26 of that year, Millar wrote to Marandel that “it was something of a relief to realize that you share my conviction that it is not by Van Dyck. Indeed I am afraid I found it also a rather distasteful work of art, unworthy perhaps of the fine company it keeps. A quiet dismantling of much that has been written about it is best achieved, I think, by ignoring it.”

Efforts to reach Millar, now 83, in England, were unsuccessful.

Marandel started the re-attribution paperwork. There was no public announcement, but when another painting arrived that he wanted to make room for, Marandel pulled “Andromeda” from public view. It hasn’t been seen in LACMA’s galleries since, and it’s listed as “imitator of Van Dyck” in museum records.

“You tend to show on your walls the things you believe in, because that’s our role with the public, to educate with quality, not with question marks,” Marandel says. “To this day there are people -- not many, but there are people -- who will defend the painting.”

Indeed, Ashmolean director Brown e-mails from Oxford: “I have always believed in this picture and continue to do so -- although I haven’t seen it for a few years. I believe it to be a private painting (that is, to be hung in a private room), which explains its unusually (for Van Dyck) erotic character.”

On a technical level, Brown adds, “It is indistinguishable from other paintings by Van Dyck. It is purely a matter of experts’ judgment, and mine is that the picture is by the artist.”

Given this schism among authorities, the “imitator” classification especially rankles Schaefer -- he thinks that implies “that it’s a fake” and would rather see “school of Van Dyck” or “follower of Van Dyck,” which rank higher in the nuanced pecking order of art scholarship. But Schaefer also holds out hope for an even greater turnaround.

“Another generation may reexamine all of this and find all of us -- all of them -- to be silly,” he says. “That may be wishful thinking on my part. Anyway, I won’t be around.”

Given the evolution of scholarship and art history, says Leonard E. Walcott, managing director of the Ahmanson Foundation, “it’s inevitable” to come across a case like “Andromeda” eventually. However, Walcott also notes that of more than 120 Ahmanson donations of art to LACMA over the last three decades, “Andromeda” is the only one to run into such an attribution debate.

“Hopefully,” Walcott said, “it doesn’t happen very often.”

As for the dealer who sold it to the Ahmanson and LACMA in 1985, he’s since moved to Paris; efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. Marandel says a refund demand would be in order if this were a modern forgery. But there’s no hint of things moving in that direction, nor is Marandel inclined to sell “Andromeda” in the foreseeable future.

Down in the LACMA storage rooms, the veteran curator turns from “Andromeda” to head back to his office. “We still don’t understand enough of what went on in those studios,” he says. “We probably never will.”