Art: Controversial Collection

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When auto-rich Art Collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr. presented a show called "The Controversial Century: 1850-1950" at his own Chrysler Art Museum in Provincetown, Mass., last summer, it included, predictably, some magnificent works from his impressive if erratic collection. But where it was bad, it was very, very bad—and the doubts of New York's gossipy art world went beyond questions of taste to questions of authenticity. "It was hard to believe that the artists could have been that bad," explains one Manhattan dealer.

This week the doubts went down on paper. After traveling to Ottawa, where "The Controversial Century" is on exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, New York Times Art Critic John Canaday concluded: "Within this large and fine exhibition there is secreted a second and smaller one in which pedigrees are nonexistent or dubious, and attributions are arbitrary to such an extent that, the stylistic evidence being what it is, one must question them."

Questioned Canaday: "Why should a pleasant but not at all exceptional sketch of a young girl, a sketch with no signature, no date, shaky pedigree, and so far as I can see no direct kinship to a Degas, be offered as a Degas?" Why should "an only moderately proficient painting called Le Trompeur and a pleasant but unexceptional still-life, without dates, signatures or certifications, be offered as Manets when the best you can say for them with certainty is that in a weak way they share certain characteristics of Manet's art? And when a painting is recognizable as a variation on a self-portrait by Van Gogh, yet is not above the technical level of an average copyist, can it really be defended as an original on no other documentation than its acquisition from 'Jean Neger, 1953'?"

"Nobody is sure of such things," says Manhattan Dealer Harry Yotnakparian. who sold Chrysler some of the questioned pictures. "Is it a Van Gogh or not a Van Gogh? I don't know. I wasn't there."

Collector Chrysler was more certain. He insisted: "I'm satisfied with all the pictures. I don't make any claim for their being the greatest examples of each artist; but we can't look at masterpieces all the time. I think that would be rather dull."

But dullness was hardly the issue.