Leslie Hindman must feel as if she has been hit with her own auctioneer’s hammer.
Hindman, the head of a leading Chicago auction house that bears her name, is in the middle of a dizzying dispute involving the authenticity of three paintings, all purportedly by major 19th Century French artists, that she auctioned in October 1991.
On the one hand, she is being sued by the sellers of the paintings-members of the Kohler family of Wisconsin, the clan that gave the world plumbing fixtures and its home state two governors-for allowing one high bidder to return a painting he believes isn’t an authentic Theodore Rousseau. On the other hand, she is suing New York art dealer Mark Borghi for refusing to pay for two paintings, a Jean-Francois Millet and a Eugene Delacroix, that he bought at the auction but wants to return because he believes they’re not authentic.
Hindman says the difference in the cases is that she has come to accept the opinion of a noted expert that the Rousseau isn’t authentic, but hasn’t accepted that of another recognized expert that the Millet is, as they say in the art world, “bad” or “not right.” Borghi hasn’t yet provided Hindman with an expert’s opinion on the Delacroix.
Hindman has little sympathy for Borghi and suspects he is just trying to weasel out of paying. But she still holds the Kohlers in high regard, the lawsuit notwithstanding. “I think the Kohlers wish it were a Rousseau, but it’s not,” says Hindman, from her office at Leslie Hindman Inc., 215 W. Ohio St. “I’m sorry it’s not, but it’s just not.”
People who believe that buying art is a crapshoot can’t be comforted by instances in which art sophisticates and scholars can’t agree over the authorship of works. It should be noted that no one has accused the Kohlers or Hindman of purposely misrepresenting the works in question or knowingly selling bad art. The issue is whether they took sufficient pains to verify authorship.
Auction houses have in-house experts, but none has experts on every major artist. And when it comes to older artworks, authenticity can be a slippery concept, subject to change with the latest scholarship or advances in testing techniques.
Unlike Hindman, auction world giants Christie’s and Sotheby’s conditionally guarantee authenticity but only on works created after 1870, when art cataloging and documentation generally became more reliable and complete. (The Kohler paintings in question were all dated pre-1870.)
Yet the big houses make mistakes. Earlier this year, Christie’s had on the cover of its auction catalog a picture of what it identified as a Fernando Botero painting that turned out to be fake. Botero, very much alive and kicking, wasn’t amused.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington recently reassessed some of its Rembrandts and reattributed them to students of that old master. Other museums and galleries have downgraded attribution-employing terms like “school of,” “circle of” and “after”-when new findings about an artist are published. Such works aren’t necessarily “fakes,” a term usually reserved for modern forgeries intended to deceive.
Cloud over `The Plains’
Asked about the cases involving Hindman, lawyers who have represented auction houses and dealers say suits involving the authorship of works are fairly common. What they find unusual and puzzling is that a consignor-a person who retains an auction house as a sales agent-would try to penalize the agent for refusing to complete the sale of a possibly inauthentic or fake work.
The consignors in this case, brothers Peter and Walter Kohler, are not just seeking the $90,000 that the purported Rousseau painting, “The Plains of Meudon,” fetched at the auction, which was more than double Hindman’s pre-auction sales estimate for the painting. In a breach-of-contract suit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago in October, the Kohlers also seek punitive damages of $1 million from Hindman, claiming that her actions have “cast a cloud upon the authenticity of `The Plains of Meudon’ and have rendered it unmarketable in the future.”
The suit also names as a defendant and seeks $90,000 in damages from Richard Thune, a Connecticut collector who was the high bidder for the Rousseau. In a defensive move, Thune filed a cross-claim against Hindman, seeking to have her reimburse him for any amount he might have to pay the Kohlers.
To make matters more confusing, the Kohlers’ confidence in the Rousseau and Hindman’s in the Millet and Delacroix seem to be based largely on the works having been bought 60 or so years ago from the venerable Vose Galleries of Boston. Vose, a highly respected house that dates from 1841, was the place at the turn of this century to find works of French landscape artists, especially majors like Rousseau, Millet and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.
Too many Corots
But that confidence may have been somewhat misplaced, as was the confidence two long-dead Voses placed in some buying agents.
Robert Vose Jr., 82, now retired from the gallery and busy writing its history, reveals a sad family secret. His grandfather, Seth, and father, Robert Sr., unwittingly bought some questionable American and European paintings from three agents, men who Vose says were bad judges of art or just bad characters.
He says one agent made 29 trips to France for Seth Vose in the 1880s and returned with crates of paintings, including 165 Corots. (Corot was all the rage among rich Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and the French were eager to satisfy their New World cousins. It was said later that Corot painted 3,000 pictures and all 6,000 of them are in America.)
The agent was respected and didn’t create any suspicion until his last voyage, when, according to Vose, he got drunk and gambled away $100,000 of Seth Vose’s money. The agent brought back paintings that were obvious fakes. Vose says that after his grandfather demanded an explanation, the agent went home and committed suicide.
“It pays to keep your nose clean,” Vose says.
In the past 30 years, some bad works that Seth Vose didn’t winnow out and later sold in good faith to collectors have come back on the market to haunt his descendants. Vose says his gallery has repurchased about 45 such works, repaying what it originally charged for them.
The Kohler collection
It remains to be seen whether the Rousseau, the Millet and the Delacroix will prove to be part of that bad lot. Vose says the Millet in question, “Flight Into Egypt,” was highly prized by his grandfather.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Peter Dings, a Chicago oilman and banker, and his daughter, Dorothy, bought many works from the Voses. After Dings died in 1938, his collection passed to his daughter, who lived in Kohler, Wis., with her husband, Carl Kohler, an executive there with the Kohler Co. plumbing fixtures firm.
Carl’s father, Walter Sr., and brother, Walter Jr., were Republican governors of Wisconsin. Carl concentrated on business, but he and Dorothy were active in GOP politics. Carl died in 1960 at 55. Dorothy died in 1989 at 85.
Mrs. Kohler’s two surviving children are Walter, 61, and Peter, 59. They own Kohler-General Corp., a machinery manufacturing firm based in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., and not affiliated with Kohler Co.
In August 1991, they signed a consignment agreement with Hindman, making her agent for the sale of art, furniture and other items from their mother’s estate. Hindman was to get 10 percent of proceeds from the sellers as well as a 10 percent auctioneer’s commission from the buyers.
On Oct. 13, 1991, effects from the estates of Dorothy Dings Kohler and two prominent Chicago women, Gertrude Ziesing Kemper and Jean Angus Watkins, were auctioned together in Chicago. Hindman recalls that the Sunday afternoon sale drew 500 people to her auction house, the bidding was spirited and all three estates fetched more than pre-auction estimates.
“She did a good job in general. Our disagreement is over one item that didn’t turn out well,” says Walter Kohler, referring to the Rousseau. He says he wasn’t aware of the Hindman-Borghi dispute until a reporter called to ask him about his own suit against Hindman.
The consignment agreement required Hindman to send proceeds of the sale, minus her commission, to the Kohlers within 30 days after the auction. In early November, she says, she sent them checks totaling $446,000, which included $35,725 she expected to receive from Borghi for five paintings he bought. It didn’t include the $90,000 Thune bid for the Rousseau.
Suspicion under the grime
According to court documents Thune filed, a representative of his examined the Rousseau before the auction and found it too dirty to verify. Thune claims he had a “side agreement” with Hindman allowing him to bid and take possession of the painting but to withhold payment until he got an opinion from a Rousseau expert.
Thune says he had the painting cleaned and shipped to France, where Rousseau expert Pierre Miguel in March 1992 opined that it wasn’t authentic. Convinced by Miguel’s stand, Hindman allowed Thune to return the painting, and she then shipped it to the Kohlers, without any money changing hands.
Two years after the auction, the Kohlers sued Hindman and Thune. They claim the “side agreement” was unauthorized and that, as a result of that improper arrangement, title to the painting transferred to Hindman.
Walter Kohler says he believes the Rousseau is authentic, but the painting is now Hindman’s responsibility and she can authenticate it or not.
But Hindman says her consignment agreement allows her to withdraw from auction or cancel the sale of items of dubious authenticity. For example, she withdrew from a March 1993 auction three questionable pictures from the estate of Dr. Richard Perritt, a prominent Chicago eye surgeon. Last October, the estate sued Chicago gallery owner Richard Love for selling those works to the doctor.
Hindman says auction houses live off their reputation for art expertise and for ferreting out questionable items. But Borghi, who runs the Borghi & Co. gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, believes Hindman didn’t do sufficient research on two of the five works he bought from the Kohler estate.
In March 1992, Borghi sent Hindman a letter from Millet expert Alexandra Murphy stating that “Flight Into Egypt,” for which he bid $28,000, wasn’t authentic. Borghi also believes Delacroix’s “Five Studies of Lions,” for which he bid $5,000, is “not right,” but he hasn’t yet obtained a formal opinion.
“Leslie is trying to sell paintings at New York prices, but she doesn’t want to stand behind the artwork,” he says.
Hindman hasn’t allowed Borghi to return the Millet and the Delacroix and hasn’t cashed a check he sent for the three other works. On March 27, 1992, she sued him in Cook County Circuit Court seeking the $35,725 he bid on the five works, plus her $3,572.50 commission, or a total of $39,297.50.
Hindman says Borghi knew she paid the Kohlers for those paintings, yet he ignored her demands for payment and didn’t contact her until months after the auction. She says she suspects he can’t or doesn’t want to pay, and she trusts other authorities who say the Millet is authentic.
Borghi disputes her version of events and says he is able to pay.
Millet expert Murphy, a former curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and now an independent scholar, sees a moral in this dispute for ordinary consumers: Do your homework before buying art, and buy what you like, not necessarily what a dealer tells you is important.
“You should buy by eye,” she says, “not by ear.”
6 DEGREES OF CERTAINTY ABOUT WHO PAINTED WHAT
In studying older artworks, experts often hedge on the artist’s identity. These examples of attribution are from an auction catalog of Chicago-based Leslie Hindman Inc. The artist is 19th Century English painter John Constable.
John Constable: In our best judgment, the work is by the artist.
Attributed to John Constable: Based on the style, the work can be ascribed to the artist; however, there is less certainty as to authorship than in the first category.
School of John Constable: In our best judgment, a work by a pupil or follower of the artist.
Circle of John Constable: In our best judgment, a work of the period of the artist and in his style.
Manner of John Constable: In our best judgment, a work in the style of the named artist and probably of a later period.
After John Constable: In our best judgment, a copy of the work by the artist.
