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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art ..................

Jon Koplik — 1/27/2024 4:42:53 PM

WSJ -- What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art .............................

WSJ

Jan. 27, 2024

What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art

Working at the Guggenheim showed Bianca Bosker that reading labels makes it harder to see what’s actually in front of us.

A visitor looks at a work by artist Refik Anadol at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 2023.

By Bianca Bosker

In 2019 I applied to be a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. According to the job description, I’d need to tell people that flash photography wasn’t permitted, but I was also expected to make conversation about the art and invite people to share their questions. By this point, I’d spent more than a year immersed in the art world trying to develop my “eye,” after getting fed up with my abject failure to appreciate art. I loved the idea that I’d get to discuss paintings with members of the general public who, like me, might have spent a lot of time wandering through exhibitions feeling befuddled. I also wondered how being around art for hours each day, with no ability to escape, would affect me and my relationship with art.

As a guard, I hovered like a coiled jack-in-the-box ready to spring. I’d seize on the flimsiest excuse to draw you into conversation, which was part of my job description, after all. If you took a photo with flash, I’d be on you faster than the speed of light to say “Please don’t,” then ask you what drew you to that piece. People’s responses moved me more than anything I read in the wall labels. “Looking at art is like looking into the future,” said one visitor who couldn’t tear himself away from an Agnes Martin painting of a gray grid on a white expanse. A man stood in front of a Wojciech Fangor painting of a brilliant olive-green circle surrounded by a halo of sky blue, and I watched as his face broke into a huge smile. “Wow. Wow. Wow…It’s, like, pulling you into another dimension. It’s opening to another world,” he said.

Visitors at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where the author worked as a guard.

I started to imagine how I’d lead my own tour. You’d meet me in the rotunda, just outside the ticket desk, and we’d begin by settling on some ground rules. One: You don’t have to look at everything. Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes. Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text -- the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks. Lots of guards agree with me on this. Artists, too: Looking at a painting while reading the wall text “is like trying to have a conversation with the work and someone keeps interrupting,” an artist friend told me once.

I know it’s hard to resist: I read the wall text too. Occasionally it’s helpful, and for years I thought it was downright rude when museums and galleries didn’t offer an explanation of each work. But now, more often than not, I wanted to tear all the labels down. The wall text hovers just to the side of art, like the answer key at the bottom of a word search, its definitive tone sending the message that there’s only one right answer to the art.

Guarding at the Guggenheim made me see that art historians could be unreliable narrators. The Richard Serra sculpture “Tearing Lead,” which consists of a wrinkled rectangle of lead surrounded by four piles of squiggly lead strips, got confused for trash so often that guards were given a Touch Tally -- a clipboard with a photo of the sculpture and instructions to “Please indicate where the piece was touched with an X,” so a conservator could reposition the little tangles of lead to match the picture.

Richard Serra, ‘Tearing Lead’ (1968).

But a conservator I talked with told me that the sculpture was meant to have the metal pieces arranged haphazardly. When the current show came down those lead ribbons would get tossed into a big box, and whoever installed “Tearing Lead” next time would throw them randomly on the ground. The work looks different every time it’s shown -- not that you’d know it from the wall text.

Paintings are constantly shape-shifting too. The blue splotch that an art critic obsessed over in the 1970s might look green to you, and not only because the light is different in the gallery. Van Gogh painted his famous sunflowers with a yellow paint made from then-brand-new lead chromate pigments, which were later discovered to be “fugitive colors” that caused his bright yellow petals to fade to brown, just like real flowers rotting in a vase. In the 1960s, Frank Stella painted geometric abstract canvases featuring jittery stripes of fluorescent colors, like Day-Glo orange and caution-tape yellow, which are already starting to fade. Left un-restored, one conservator warns, they’ll wind up “milky-colored ruins.”

That’s tragic. And magnificent. It’s another reminder to have faith in your own eyes. These works are not immutable. They spoil, rot and sag. You know the work better than the wall text does, because you’re looking at it right now -- in this moment, in this light, in this day and age, on this tour.

Which isn’t to say your eyes don’t need practice. As you follow me up the ramp and into the gallery, I just want you to keep in mind that we’re less-than-objective judges. Research has found that our fondness for certain Monet, Manet and Degas works can be explained by the exposure effect -- a scientific term for our tendency to like things just because we’ve interacted with them more. We’ve seen these works over and over and thus are convinced they’re good. Research also shows that we like a painting less when it’s hung below eye level, prefer the bigger version of two identical paintings, and have a weird fetish for originals. In one study, 80% of participants said that if the “Mona Lisa” was destroyed in a fire, they would rather see the painting’s ashes than a perfect replica.

Constantin Brancusi, ‘Miracle (Seal )’ (ca. 1930-32).

For all these reasons and more, I’m going to insist that you don’t look at the little label beside each artwork. That label -- officially called a “tombstone“ -- includes the artist’s name, the work’s title, the date it was made, what materials it was made with and who gave it to the museum. When I guarded a Brancusi sculpture, I tried to stand in front of the wall label so people couldn’t see it, and I heard their interpretations go wild. They saw a middle finger, a woman giving birth, a graph, a Kurosawa character, a cannon, a dolphin, a nose, a fish. But when their eyes darted to the wall label and scanned the title -- I’ll come clean: the piece is called “Miracle (Seal )” -- they gave up. “Yes! I KNEW it was a seal!” one visitor said, then walked on.

If I learned one thing as a guard, it’s that sometimes being forced to look at an artwork, even when you don’t want to, is life-changing. I’m going to leave you alone with a piece. Challenge yourself to notice five things. If you get stuck, move: Get closer, walk backward or go around it. Notice the most obvious things, the most surprising things, the things that grab your eyeballs despite yourself. Fight the urge to see what you expect to be there; focus instead on what is there. Maybe ask yourself how you’d describe the piece. Or let yourself wonder what it was made with. I’m not concerned with whether you think it’s good. Just watch the thing in front of you.

This essay is adapted from Bianca Bosker’s new book “Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See,” which will be published Feb. 6 by Viking.

Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Three Years Ago, Her Art Sold for $400. Now Fetches Up To $1.6 Million .....

Jon Koplik — 6/20/2022 1:19:13 AM

WSJ -- Three Years Ago, Her Art Sold for $400. Now Fetches Up To $1.6 Million ...............................

June 18, 2022

Three Years Ago, Her Art Sold for $400 at the Beach. Now It Fetches Up To $1.6 Million at Auction

Anna Weyant, a new art star whose work evokes a millennial Botticelli, was discovered on Instagram.

She’s also dating her dealer, Larry Gagosian.

Anna Weyant in her New York home-turned-studio. TESS AYANO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By Kelly Crow

On the night artist Anna Weyant’s work debuted at Christie’s, the 27-year-old painter was too nervous to attend or even watch the livestream. Instead, Ms. Weyant holed up in her small Manhattan apartment and listened to a calming app on her cellphone until a friend texted with news.

“Summertime,” Ms. Weyant’s portrait of a woman with long, flowing hair that the artist had sold for around $12,000 two years before, resold for $1.5 million, five times its high estimate.

It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Ms. Weyant -- and far from her unassuming start in Calgary, Canada. Spotted on Instagram three years ago and quickly vouched for by a savvy handful of artists, dealers and advisers, Ms. Weyant is now internationally coveted for her paintings of vulnerable girls and mischievous women in sharply lit, old-master hues. Imagine Botticelli as a millennial, whose porcelain-skin beauties also pop one leg high like the Victoria Beckham meme or sport gold necklaces that read, “Ride or Die.”

Ms. Weyant’s oeuvre of roughly 50 paintings has already filtered into the hands of top collectors such as investor Glenn Fuhrman and plastic surgeon Stafford Broumand. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently exhibited her work in a group show, and former Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami said he predicts she will make her own Biennale appearance soon, which would be another career milestone.

Anna Weyant sold this 2020 portrait, ‘Summertime,’ for $12,000. Two years later, the buyer resold it at Christie’s for $1.5 million.

PHOTO: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2022

As is, demand for her art outstrips her supply: The waiting list to buy one of her paintings, dealers say, is at least 200 names long. And last month she teamed up with the biggest art gallery of them all, Gagosian.

Ms. Weyant is grateful for the attention. But she is also aware that artists seeking lifelong careers tend to thrive by building a clientele who pay them and their galleries steadily rising prices over time. If prices jump too dramatically at auction, young artists fear their initial bench of collectors won’t be willing or able to keep pace with huge price leaps. This can gut demand if wealthier collectors at auction pivot to other artists. Just as in music or the movies, no visual artist wants to wind up a one-hit wonder.

“People kept congratulating me,” she said, but the Christie’s sale didn’t put her at ease. “All I felt was pressure.”

Last month, each of New York’s three major auction houses included one of Ms. Weyant’s works in their high-profile evening sales for the first time -- a sign that collectors on her gallery’s waiting list and beyond were ready to pay a premium at auction instead. All three works surpassed their auction estimates by multiples. Ms. Weyant didn’t get a share, she said, as artists in the U.S. don’t automatically get royalties on auction resales of their work.

Her record is a 2020 portrait, “Falling Woman,” that sold at Sotheby’s for $1.6 million, eight times its high estimate. The painting was consigned by Tim Blum, Ms. Weyant’s former dealer at Blum & Poe with whom she has since fallen out, according to the artist. Mr. Blum declined to comment on the consignment.

Looking ahead, Ms. Weyant’s task will be to focus on painting amid the market frenzy.

“The art world loves to devour its young,” said art critic Jerry Saltz, an early admirer of Ms. Weyant. “It can be difficult to paint with another voice in your head whispering numbers and prices, but maybe she can.”

‘I’m just trying to protect her from the big bad wolves’ As she ascends the art world, Ms. Weyant has powerful help. But it’s complicated.

Dealer Larry Gagosian and Anna Weyant were spotted in July 2021 at a dinner at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

PHOTO: BERTRAND RINDOFF PETROFF/GETTY IMAGES FOR LOUIS VUITTON

For the past year, the artist has been dating Larry Gagosian, the 77-year-old founder of arguably the most powerful art gallery network in the world. Precedence exists for such art-world romances: New York dealer Gavin Brown is married to artist Hope Atherton, though he said he never represented her. But Ms. Weyant and Mr. Gagosian’s May-December relationship is being scrutinized in art circles.

Martin Smick, Ms. Weyant’s painting professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, said he recently defended her against some artists who “were being snarky and jaded” about the preferential treatment she might get by joining her boyfriend’s gallery. “I feel protective of her,” Mr. Smick said.

Ellie Rines, owner of the New York gallery 56 Henry, which gave Ms. Weyant her first New York solo show three years ago, said anyone who factors the artist’s dating life into her odds of success is being misogynistic.

For his part, Mr. Gagosian said he has never dated an artist of any kind before. The pair even wavered on whether she should join the gallery because of the optics, they both said. He said he feels his gallery can help get more of her pieces into museums than auction catalogs, though, and when it comes to discussions about her career, he said, he treats her the same as his other artists.

“She’s intelligent and has this Midwestern reserve, and she doesn’t speak all the art lingo,” he said. “I’m just trying to protect her from the big bad wolves.”

Ms. Weyant said she welcomes his gallery’s market expertise, calling it a comfort.

The artist is also trying to stick to her familiar routine.

Although she increasingly travels in Mr. Gagosian’s jet-set circuit, she still lives and works in the one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that she moved into in 2017. She pulls the curtains shut in her living-room-turned-studio when she works, her King Charles spaniel snoring beside her. The environment is hermetic, though her disposition is bubbly. When visitors come, the artist said she likes to bake chocolate-chip cookies.

Anna Weyant pulls the curtains shut when she paints in her Manhattan home-turned-studio, surrounded by brushes and books.

PHOTOS: TESS AYANO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL(2)

‘A lot of potential’Growing up, Ms. Weyant didn’t know anyone who chose a life in art. The daughter of a lawyer and a provincial court judge, she said the only paintings in her childhood home were her grandfather’s flea-market finds.

She signed up to attend college at RISD mainly because it was the closest school to New York that accepted her. She didn’t immediately declare a major, but by her first winter there she had gravitated to its painting classes. Emulating British painter Lucian Freud’s impasto style, she entered an art contest held by the National Gallery of Canada the summer after her freshman year -- and placed in the top three.

Her sophomore year, she started painting women and girls who looked lost in forested fairy tales.

“Being new, confused and homesick in a new country, I was just scared,” she said. “I remember thinking that if I could transfer my fears to the woman I was painting, at least I had another person in the conversation with me.”

Anna Weyant says she’s trying to stick to her familiar routine, painting in her small Manhattan apartment.

PHOTO: TESS AYANO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

After graduating in 2017, she spent seven months painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and she credits the city’s sepia-tone terrain with influencing her signature muted palette. Her thick brushstrokes started to smooth.

Ms. Weyant’s big break came when she moved back to New York in the spring of 2018 and began assisting Cynthia Talmadge, a pointillist painter. Ms. Talmadge promoted her assistant by posting some of Ms. Weyant’s work on her own Instagram, including a young woman lounging in a bathrobe with one leg popped skyward, “Reposing V.”

Ms. Talmadge also introduced her assistant to her dealer at 56 Henry, Ms. Rines. “I saw a lot of potential in her,” Ms. Rines said.

Group shows started to follow. That next summer of 2019, Ms. Rines laid out Ms. Weyant’s drawings on a beach towel at a Hamptons art fair and sold some for around $400 apiece.

That same summer, the young artist received an unsolicited -- and critical -- voucher from the art establishment: Mr. Saltz, the critic, posted nine examples of her work on his Instagram that he said he had found by googling her, attracting 4,352 likes. He doesn’t own any work by her; he said later he merely found her work gripping.

By September 2019, buzz was mounting for Ms. Weyant’s first New York solo show, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” at 56 Henry. Her paintings of somber young girls summed up the agonies of early adolescence, including one who had stuffed tissues into her gaping bra. Every piece in the show sold out for between $2,000 to $12,000 apiece.

After that, collectors had to get creative to get access to her work. Canadian collector Lorin Gu commissioned Ms. Weyant to paint a work he unveiled at his family’s Recharge Foundation in Singapore. The piece, “Dinner,” shows a girl whose face has planted onto her plate, her blonde hair spilling luxuriously over the table. In Los Angeles, designer Justine Freeman and her lawyer husband Ben Khakshour enlisted art adviser Adam Green to secure Ms. Weyant’s self-portrait, “Aw,” from a group show at Anna Zorina Gallery.

Anna Weyant paints vulnerable girls and rebellious women including, from left, 2020’s ‘Wit of the Staircase,’ 2019’s ‘Some Dolls are Bigger Than Others,’ and 2020’s ‘Falling Woman.’

PHOTOS: ANNA WEYANT

PHOTO: ROB MCKEEVER COURTESY GAGOSIAN; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 56 HENRY; ANNA WEYANT COURTESY GAGOSIAN

Private dealer Joe Sheftel managed to help his client buy another work, “Summertime,” after first giving it pride of place in a group show he organized in Provincetown, Mass. Mr. Sheftel confirmed he helped the same client resell it two years later at Christie’s.

Around this time, Bill Powers of Half Gallery also introduced the artist’s work to Mr. Gagosian, at one point holding up his cellphone to scroll past images of a dozen artists’ works. Mr. Gagosian later said Ms. Weyant’s work in that batch stood out as “refined and imaginative,” adding, “I loved the clarity and moodiness of it.”

Mr. Gagosian went to 56 Henry and bought Ms. Weyant’s “Head,” an up-close painting of a woman whose blonde hair is cascading down her naked shoulders. It’s hanging in his house now, he said.

‘I feel like I have my footing now’ By the spring of 2021, Ms. Weyant was on the ascent. Prices for her paintings were approaching $50,000. Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe, by then exclusively representing her, let people visit her first solo show with the gallery in March by appointment -- including Mr. Gagosian, who invited the artist to dinner at his house in Beverly Hills.

“She wanted to know if I had any gin,” he said. “That’s one of my favorite things to drink.”

Soon enough, tabloids started spotting the couple in Paris and Saint-Tropez. Her works, meanwhile, were increasingly impossible to find on the primary market. When Ms. Rines tried to help one of her biggest collectors buy a work from the Blum & Poe show, she said, dealer Jeff Poe told her that the artist had a long waiting list. “I know,” she said she told him. “I built the waiting list.”

Mr. Poe, reached through the gallery, declined to comment on Ms. Rines or Ms. Weyant.

‘Chest’ from 2020 is headed to the auction block at Phillips Hong Kong on June 22 with a low estimate of $64,100.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF PHILLIPS

Ms. Weyant remains friendly with Ms. Rines and others who showed her early work. But she declined to discuss the wind-down of her relationship with Blum & Poe because she was unhappy with how things ended. The artist entered into a confidential settlement agreement with the gallery earlier this year.

According to a friend who said Ms. Weyant confided in her before she shifted galleries, Ms. Weyant felt unsettled after she allowed gallery staff members to buy three paintings and a drawing from her Los Angeles show. Ms. Weyant’s friend said that the artist later told her the dealers held onto these works even as they told significant collectors that her show was sold out.

Blum & Poe co-founder Tim Blum declined to comment.

The artist said she sold Mr. Blum her “Falling Woman” for $15,000 -- half the going rate collectors were charged by his gallery for other works in her spring 2021 show. A year later, he consigned it to Sotheby’s where it sold for $1.6 million. Traditionally, dealers don’t auction off their own artists’ work, preferring to resell works to their collectors at price levels they can closely manage. It’s unclear in this case whether Mr. Blum still represented Ms. Weyant when he consigned the painting. He declined to discuss the painting.

For her part, Ms. Weyant said Mr. Blum’s alleged consignment proved to be the last straw. Once she found out that three of her works were headed to auction, Ms. Weyant announced that she had officially moved to Gagosian Gallery.

Now, she’s trying to focus on her upcoming solo show at her new gallery this November. Already, the women she paints appear to be changing, taking up bigger canvases and sporting ruby lips and ponytails, “like evil cheerleaders,” she said. She might be channeling the vixens and victims of the Lifetime channel movies that she said she’s been watching lately for research.

“My fear, maybe it’s transitioning into something more theatrical,” she said. “I feel like I have my footing now.”

© 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] 11/17/15 Bloomberg Businessweek on : Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art ...........

Jon Koplik — 4/6/2016 11:41:16 AM

11/17/15 Bloomberg Businessweek on : Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art ......................

November 17, 2015

Iran Has Been Hiding One of the World’s Great Collections of Modern Art

We went to Tehran to see the secret Warhols.

By Peter Waldman and Golnar Motevalli

Photographs by Ali Kaveh

Inside the rotunda of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, a circular walkway spirals down from the street level, like an underground version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York. A series of galleries branches out from there, giving up astonishing secrets from one of the finest—if forgotten—collections of 20th century art in the world. A show this fall included abstract expressionist paintings by Kandinsky, Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko, and Stella, to name just a few from the museum’s vault. Sculptures by Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, and Moore are on permanent display in the garden. The corkscrew-shaped foyer wraps around a giant Calder mobile—its playful red shapes glinting in midair beneath the stern glares of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei in portraits above.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
On a crisp day in late October, the museum is an island of calm in downtown Tehran, a metropolis of 16 million people choked by traffic, smog, and rampant construction. The galleries are a ghost town, except for a dozen photography students who, for the $1.50 price of admission, have Jackson Pollock’s 1950 masterpiece Mural on Indian Red Ground all to themselves. The 9-foot-by-8-foot scarlet canvas, splattered with white, gray, and black streaks, one of Pollock’s largest paintings in his drip style, is regarded by many as his best. It was valued by Christie’s at $250 million five years ago. Down the ramp, the students arrive at a pair of wall-size Mark Rothkos, each valued at $100 million to $200 million. Their professor bids them to ponder a quote from the painter printed nearby: “A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.”

As Iran lurches toward reengaging with the world after the end of years of sanctions, a crown jewel waits in history’s shadow. Built by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, just before the 1979 revolution, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art amassed the greatest collection of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America—and dropped off the map. Now it’s reemerging. The museum is following up its big abstract expressionism show with a mixed exhibition of Iranian and Western art opening Nov. 20. In October it signed a tentative agreement with the German government to send 60 artworks from Tehran—30 Western and 30 Iranian—to Berlin for a three-month show next fall, which would mark the museum’s first exhibition overseas. A larger show could follow in 2017 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington if political and legal circumstances allow, says the Hirshhorn’s director, Melissa Chiu. “This is one of the great unseen collections of postwar European and American art in the world,” she says. “We haven’t seen these works in 40 years.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power railing against “Westoxification,” his notion that Western moral and sexual depravity had infected Muslim nations with a disease that could be cured only with strict rule by Islamic clerics. He banned Western films, music, and many books, forced women to wear the hijab, and castigated Iranian elites for being infatuated with foreigners. “With a European hat on your head,” he wrote, “you would parade around the streets enjoying the naked girls, taking pride in this ‘achievement,’ totally heedless of the fact that the historic patrimony of the country was being plundered.” As revolutionary mobs protested in the streets in January 1979 after the shah and his wife fled, the museum spirited its 1,500 works of Western art into a basement vault.

“Art can be a bridge between Iran and the West, but with some exceptions”
When armed militiamen showed up a month later, Mehdi Kowsar, the museum director, made the commander sign an inventory list showing the prices the empress had paid for every piece. Ten days later, Kowsar, a former dean of arts at Tehran University, flew to Italy with his family. He’s never returned. To avoid questions at the airport, he left the list behind at his Tehran apartment. He hasn’t seen it since. “It was a very dangerous situation,” says Kowsar, 79, a retired architecture professor living in Rome. “I was hoping that if they signed something official, no one would steal anything.”

The collection remained remarkably intact, minus an Andy Warhol portrait of Empress Farah, slashed years ago at one of her former palaces by a knife-wielding zealot, and a Willem de Kooning nude, sold to David Geffen in 1994 as part of a three-way trade on the tarmac of the Vienna airport for some 16th century Persian miniatures owned by a Clinton White House operative. More on that later.

The collection’s survival is part of the larger Iranian paradox—the struggle of one of humanity’s oldest and most refined civilizations to overcome an historic spasm of fundamentalism and xenophobia. Yet it’s also the story of a simple man who had no idea what art was before joining the museum in 1977, and who made protecting the Western treasures his life’s work.

Firouz Shabazi Moghadam, the museum’s keeper.
If you follow the museum’s snail-shell ramp to the bottom, slip past the velvet rope, go right at the industrial vacuum cleaner, and skirt by the Styrofoam-packed picture frames against the wall, there are two doors. The steel one on the right has a doorbell and a blue sign that says “exhibition services.” It leads to the vault. The door on the left says “photography” and opens into a dimly lit room with concrete walls, a torn couch, and the cozy feel of the super’s office in the basement of a New York City apartment building.

Firouz Shabazi Moghadam sits at a corner desk, below a high window that just clears ground level. He went to work for the museum two weeks before it opened, first as a driver and then, for 30 years after the revolution, as custodian of the vault. His official title: keeper. Still lanky at 63, with dark eyes that squint when he smiles, Shabazi came out of retirement two years ago to help catalog the museum’s extensive holdings of Iranian art and photography, in addition to the Western collection, which he knows by heart.

One of his first jobs back in 1977, after being hired away from the company installing the museum’s linoleum floors, was chasing down crates of unopened artwork all over Tehran. Many of the acquisitions of American art were made by the museum’s founding director, Kamran Diba, the empress’s cousin, who’d studied architecture at Howard University and designed the museum. At the same time, the empress, who’d studied art in Paris and preferred European works, hired her own buyers. They were forbidden from telling anyone what they were up to, says Donna Stein, who moved to Tehran in 1975 and spent two years buying art for the empress. Stein’s now with the Wende Museum in Los Angeles. “It was wonderful, but very stressful,” she says.

During the 1973 oil crisis, global art prices fell, and Iran got very rich selling oil. In 1976, David Nash, who ran Sotheby’s impressionist and modern painting department in New York, flew to Tehran with a box of slides of paintings for sale by the Los Angeles collector Norton Simon at “ludicrously high prices,” Nash says. He had to wait a week for a promised appointment with the empress’s court chamberlain, who proceeded to spend the meeting lecturing Nash on an obscure copyright dispute Iran was having with Sotheby’s at the time. He left the slides behind and went home, certain the trip had been “a complete fiasco.”

A few days later, the chamberlain’s office asked Nash for advice. What should it bid on at Sotheby’s coming auction, the estate sale of Holocaust survivor Josef Rosensaft? He suggested a few works; Iran bought the entire lot. The haul included Paul Gauguin’s 1889 Still Life With Japanese Woodcut, which cost $1.4 million, a record at the time for the artist. Nash says it’s worth $45 million today. Majid Mollanoroozi, the museum’s director, says Japanese collectors have offered “a blank check” for the painting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Gabrielle With Open Blouse, 1907, worth an estimated $8 million, and Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Woodcut, 1889, worth an estimated $45 million.
Shabazi took control of the vault after Kowsar and the other art professionals fled. Only a high school graduate, he read books to learn about art, as he tried to identify several Western paintings whose paperwork was lost. He grew to love the works. After the gunmen occupied the building for several days, the regime appointed a 20-person committee to run the museum who had no idea what was there. Shabazi took the revolutionaries into the vault two by two to show them that nothing untoward was going on. They were shocked at the childish pictures they found.

“They’d say, ‘What is this? I could do better than that,’?” Shabazi says. “I’d tell them it’s a Picasso, and they’d say, ‘So what if it’s a Picasso!’?” As chaos engulfed Tehran’s streets, Shabazi spent most of the next two years locked in the vault with the artwork and the keys. “I didn’t want anything to happen,” he says.

The main galleries of the museum reopened as an exhibit hall for revolutionary propaganda, cheering martyrdom and resistance during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. Occasionally people showed up at the vault with official letters demanding to borrow paintings for a cultural center or one of the shah’s opulent palaces, which had been converted into public amusements. Shabazi refused to unlock the doors, suspecting such loans would never be returned. “Only God knows where I got this courage from—I who am normally so afraid,” he says, with tears in his eyes. “With this vault, with this museum, I am like a lion.”

Andy Warhol’s Maos.
It wasn’t until 1999, a decade after Khomeini’s death and 20 years after the shah fled, that the museum mounted its first postrevolution Western show—a pop art exhibit featuring works by Hockney, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Warhol. An uneasy détente has settled in, mirroring the seesawing ascendancy of reformists and hard-liners in Iranian politics. Since 2013, technocrats in the economic and cultural ministries, appointed by President Hassan Rouhani, have tended to push the revolution’s boundaries against conservatives in the security and judicial establishments, which are controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At the museum, that means the directors, who report to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, hang a few dozen Western pieces each year for several weeks. They’re careful—usually—not to rile government conservatives with racy images, or bait them with the idea that the museum’s most significant portfolio is its world-class collection of post-World War II works by Americans, many of them gay or Jewish. The role of Empress Farah, now 77 and living in Washington and Paris, remains publicly unmentionable.

The vault holds a small treasure trove of artwork that Iranians will never see, at least while the current regime is in charge. It includes nudes by Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch; a large canvas by Andre Derain, called Golden Age, depicting 11 unclad women frolicking in nature; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Gabrielle With Open Blouse, a beguiling portrait of a bare-chested young woman with her shirt unbuttoned to her navel.

Francis Bacon’s 1968 triptych, Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants, worth an estimated $75 million.
In 2005 a provocative museum director named Alireza Sami Azar exhibited Francis Bacon’s 1968 triptych, Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants. The figures, as a museum guard quickly noticed, are naked men, each reposing on his right side. The guard alerted the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which ordered the image taken down. Sami Azar demanded the decree in writing, stalling for time so the British ambassador and other dignitaries expected that evening at the show’s opening could see the Bacon piece.

“I said ‘Look, they’re male figures, they’re not female, and they’re semi-abstract. It’s not obscene. They could be brothers,’?” chuckles Sami Azar, who now lectures on art at a Tehran gallery. “They said, ‘C’mon, we know they are homosexuals, they’re sleeping in bed. This creates a scandal for us, just when conservatives are coming to power and looking for excuses to bombard us.’?”

The ministry’s written order didn’t come until after the guests arrived. They got to see the complete triptych on their way in, and a nail where the panel with the sleeping men had hung on their way out.

“Art can be a bridge between Iran and the West, but with some exceptions,” explains Hossein Sheikholeslam, one of the student radicals who occupied the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and went on to serve in several prominent positions in the revolutionary government. “Nudity and homosexuality are not acceptable in Iranian culture,” he says.

Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Ground, 1950, valued by Christie’s at $250 million.
You can’t hear the doorbell ring from outside the double gray doors of the vault, but the slam of a deadbolt signals someone is coming. Inside is another doorbell and another steel door, this one about six inches thick with a black combination lock above the handle. It creaks open, revealing a long concrete room with 32 floor-to-ceiling sliders—wire-mesh slats framed in steel—pushed against the wall on both sides. Only two paintings are visible: a dour portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini on floor blocks to the right and Picasso’s 45-square-foot masterpiece from 1927, The Painter and His Model, on the far wall, acclaimed as “one of the supreme achievements of his career” by art historian Jeremy Melius of Tufts University.

Starting next to the Picasso, Shabazi and his handpicked successor pull the sliders screeching on their tracks into the center of the room for viewing, oldest paintings first. It looks like a poster store, with images hanging by the dozen on each metal fence. The collection starts in the late 19th century with works by Monet, Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Rodin. Toward the mid-20th century, one slider alone holds 10 Picassos (of the museum’s roughly 30), two Marc Chagalls, a Georges Braque, and a Diego Rivera.

The bulk of the collection, from after World War II, is found in the vault just past the air-conditioning duct. There are about a dozen Jasper Johnses and Robert Rauschenbergs each and at least 15 Warhols. Among them is a Warhol Mick Jagger, a Marilyn Monroe, and a series of 10 Maos. Most valuable is his 1963 acrylic of a man jumping off a building, called Suicide (Purple Jumping Man). Another of Warhol’s rare Death and Disaster paintings sold for $105 million in 2013.

Shabazi’s favorites: the Rothkos, he says, pulling closed the heavy vault door behind him. “I’ve had a lot of problems in my life, and they always calm me down.”

Pablo Picasso’s The Painter And His Model, 1927, worth an estimated $30 million.
The museum gets frequent offers to buy its paintings, most recently from a Monaco foundation that wants to buy Bacon’s triptych for €103 million ($110.7 million). But nothing’s for sale, not even the works deemed unpresentable, says Mollanoroozi, the director. “If we sell them, what would we buy instead worth that much?” he asks. He’s hoping revenue from the overseas shows will fund the museum’s first acquisitions in 40 years, as well as needed improvements such as new lighting and carpets and waterproofing to protect the vault in a flood.

About 12 years ago, Sami Azar hired Christie’s to value the nudes, hoping to use the proceeds from a sale to update the collection. Then-President Mohammad Khatami approved the idea but said parliament should make the final decision. Sami Azar decided not to risk it. Selling the art is easy, he says. Getting the money back from the government to buy more could be treacherous.

Observers in the museum’s vault in front of Andy Warhol’s Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), 1963, worth an estimated $80 million.
In four decades, the museum has parted with just one Western piece, the de Kooning, exchanged in 1994 for the remnants of a renowned 400-year-old book of miniatures known as the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp. The Shahnama, or Book of Kings, was owned by the Houghton family, heirs to the Corning Glass Works fortune, who’d offered it to Iran before the revolution for $28 million, says Mehdi Hojjat, a former deputy culture minister who engineered the exchange. The shah balked, but in 1991, Arthur Houghton III, a U.S. diplomat working in the White House on the war on drugs, reopened negotiations through an art dealer in London. Houghton hid the secret arrangements from his bosses while shielding his identity from the Iranians, who he thought might get spooked if they knew where he worked. “I couldn’t be exposed,” he says.

The deal took three years to negotiate. At first, the intermediaries demanded five paintings for the Shahnama, including the prized Pollock, a Miró, a Picasso, and Renoir’s revealing Gabrielle With Open Blouse. Hojjat took the matter up to Iran’s Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council for a decision, providing photographs of each of the works. In the end, the Iranians would give up only the de Kooning, which depicted a grotesque, misshapen woman without any clothes on.

Shabazi remembers loading the painting onto the jet at dawn in Tehran. Hojjat, worried the U.S. government might try to seize the work as compensation for other disputed assets, arranged to have it whisked away from the Vienna tarmac to an art dealer in Switzerland. At the same time, the Shahnama was loaded onto Hojjat’s plane and flown to Tehran. The de Kooning was sold to Geffen in California for an estimated $20 million. The Houghton family received $10.5 million of those proceeds for the Shahnama, much of the rest going to middlemen. Geffen resold the de Kooning in 2006 to hedge fund magnate Steven Cohen for $137.5 million.

Hojjat recalls the most surprising comment he got during the long talks over what Iran would or wouldn’t exchange for the Shahnama. One of the religious authorities on the supreme revolutionary panel was quite adamant about Gabrielle With Open Blouse, a portrait of the woman who worked for the Renoir family as a nanny. “This Renoir painting is very exquisite,” the man said. “Do not give it away.”

Copyright © 2015 Bloomberg L.P.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Art Dealer’s Woes Put Scrutiny on High-End Storage Facility ................

Jon Koplik — 9/21/2015 8:53:50 PM

WSJ -- Art Dealer’s Woes Put Scrutiny on High-End Storage Facility .............................

Sept. 21, 2015

Art Dealer’s Woes Put Scrutiny on High-End Storage Facility

Fraud allegations against Swiss entrepreneur Yves Bouvier have cast a shadow on Luxembourg’s Le Freeport, a high-security, low-tax warehouse for art

By John Letzing And Max Colchester

SENNINGERBERG, Luxembourg -- Last year, David Arendt stood in a reinforced concrete warehouse at Luxembourg’s airport and welcomed wealthy collectors to his “fortress of art,” complete with high security, minimal taxes and discretion. Mr. Arendt warned that it would fill up quickly.

The 237,000-square-foot building, known as Le Freeport, opened its 10-ton doors, joining a global network of impenetrable warehouses where taxes are suspended and art can be stored and sold away from prying eyes.

As the international art market has boomed, so has demand for such discreet storage, particularly for costly art picked up as an investment and never intended for a living room wall. But a year after Luxembourg’s Le Freeport opened at a cost of nearly $60 million, the Monets and Picassos have been slow to arrive.

The reason: the protracted public-relations disaster of Le Freeport’s biggest investor, Swiss entrepreneur Yves Bouvier. Mr. Bouvier was briefly jailed in Monaco earlier this year, after he was accused of selling paintings to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev at inflated prices.

On Sept. 14, Mr. Bouvier faced new charges. He was questioned in France by authorities investigating allegations by Catherine Hutin-Blay, the stepdaughter of Pablo Picasso, that works in her collection were pilfered and sold to Mr. Rybolovlev. Mr. Bouvier was freed after posting a €27 million ($30.5 million) bond.

In a statement, Mr. Bouvier denied the allegations in France and said the pieces in question were properly purchased on behalf of his Russian client. Some were meant for the walls of a chalet owned by Mr. Rybolovlev, while others, including the Picasso painting “Espagnole à l’éventail,” were deposited in a freeport in Geneva, he said. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Geneva earlier this year, Mr. Bouvier also denied the allegations of defrauding Mr. Rybolovlev.

Mr. Rybolovlev’s attorney said authorities were free to examine works in his collection believed to have been stolen. Mr. Rybolovlev hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

The legal issues have amplified the challenges facing Luxembourg’s Le Freeport, which was already contending with a chorus of critics who say the opaque nature of freeports makes them susceptible to illicit activity such as money laundering or harboring stolen goods. Earlier this year, lawmakers in Luxembourg responded to those concerns by bolstering the country’s anti-money-laundering laws to specifically apply to firms operating at Le Freeport -- which now have a heightened legal responsibility to know what they are putting into storage and for whom.

Mr. Arendt, Le Freeport’s managing director, said the facility has safeguards to prevent illegal behavior and that he is confident Le Freeport isn’t used for money laundering. He also said the facility can adapt to the legal change -- and perhaps even use it as a selling point for “honest art collectors.”

But Mr. Bouvier’s travails have hurt business. “We’re behind on our objectives, as a result of all of this mess,” Mr. Arendt said in an interview in May, as he sat in an empty showroom at Le Freeport. On Wednesday, Mr. Arendt sounded hopeful that the bad publicity had faded. “We’re more or less on track,” he said, though “we’ve had a lot of explaining to do.” Mr. Arendt said Mr. Bouvier has no role in running the freeport.

In the art market, “reputation is pretty much all you have,” said Harco van den Oever, who runs London-based Overstone Art Services.

About 60% of Le Freeport’s storage space has been rented to the firms that deal directly with collectors and store their art at the building, according to Mr. Arendt. The biggest of those firms, FineArt Logistics Natural Le Coultre SA, which accounts for roughly half of that rented space, is Mr. Bouvier’s company, and has so far only filled about 15% of its available square footage.

Freeports are an outgrowth of bonded warehouses, where commodities like grain in transit across borders could be stored, without incurring taxes. There are dozens of such warehouses around the world.

A few, like Le Freeport, are tailored to the needs of high-end art collectors. At Le Freeport in Luxembourg, artwork that remains inside its walls is exempt from value-added tax, which can be as high as 27% in Europe, and from customs duty. Art sales within the building are also tax-free. Art can remain in a freeport for years, through multiple transfers of ownership. Firms offering art-related services like restoration and financing set up shop on the grounds.

The value of the global art market reached a record €51 billion last year, according to a recent report published by the European Fine Art Foundation, the organizer of a major annual European art fair.

Nearly a third of art collectors and professionals surveyed last year by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. said they had used a freeport. Experts speculate that the freeport in Geneva, which traces its roots back to 1854 and is controlled by local authorities, may house the most valuable art collection in the world -- although its holdings are generally secret.

Proponents say freeports allow art to be moved around the world without incurring punitive taxes. Critics say the warehouses can invite fraud. “I can’t see any better way for people to launder money than to go through a freeport,” says James Palmer, founder of Mondex Corp., which specializes in recovering art looted from its rightful owners.

Someone interested in laundering money could arrange to use ill-gotten funds to purchase a painting inside of a freeport, Mr. Palmer said, and then resell the painting inside of the facility a few months later. Experts say it can be difficult for a customs official relying on a printed summary of a sale conducted inside a freeport to know for sure if the amount exchanged was appropriate, or if a painting that was purportedly sold was real.

U.S. authorities are also concerned. Authorities “really don’t know what’s being stored there and who really owns things,” said Daniel Brazier, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a panel discussion on freeports in New York in June.

Customs officers on site at Le Freeport open and inspect “almost every box” that arrives, Mr. Arendt says. Sylvie Atten-Liber, deputy director at the Luxembourg Customs Office, said officers at the facility check arriving artworks against databases of stolen pieces and have found no stolen items.

In Switzerland, the government has been urged by the Federal Audit Office to bolster the presence of customs officials at all of the country’s freeports and is expected to disclose plans by the end of this year. The new chairman at the Geneva freeport has a mandate for a “cultural revolution” involving increased transparency, said Patrick Baud-Lavigne, an official with the canton of Geneva’s department of security and economic affairs.

In 1995, Swiss authorities discovered a trove of smuggled artifacts, including Etruscan bronzes, in the Geneva freeport. In 2010, a Roman sarcophagus suspected of having been looted was discovered at the Geneva facility. A spokeswoman at the Geneva freeport didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Luxembourg, a tiny grand duchy surrounded by Germany, France and Belgium, has constructed an entire industry around privacy and low taxes. In 2008, consultants at Deloitte devised a plan to make Luxembourg “an art and finance cluster” built around a freeport, said Deloitte Director Adriano Picinati di Torcello. A Luxembourg government spokesman said the facility was intended to contribute to the “diversification of the economy.”

Luxembourg turned to Mr. Bouvier. The 52-year-old had transformed his family’s sleepy, Swiss logistics firm into a go-to outfit for shipping valuable art around the world. He had invested in Geneva’s freeport, and opened a Le Freeport in Singapore, in 2010, helping to earn him the moniker “the Freeport king.” That year, he got involved in the Luxembourg project.

In September 2014, Luxembourg’s Grand Duke and several local government ministers were among the guests mingling at Le Freeport’s opening ceremony. An orchestra performed a piece of music composed specially for the event.

But the mood soon turned flat. In February, Mr. Bouvier was arrested in Monaco. The previous month, a family trust tied to Mr. Rybolovlev, the Russian client, had filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Bouvier overcharged him for paintings, while acting as an art-dealing middleman.

Mr. Rybolovlev made his fortune by building Uralkali, a giant producer of potash, a key fertilizer ingredient. Mr. Bouvier said he sold Mr. Rybolovlev roughly $2 billion worth of art over the years, including Picassos and Rothkos.

Mr. Bouvier dismissed the allegations. “It’s the market that makes the price,” he said. His attorney, David Bitton, said his first court date in Monaco is this week..

A spokesman for Mr. Rybolovlev declined to make him available to comment.

Mr. Bouvier stepped back from his regular duties as a Le Freeport board member in April. He said that banks and investors are now hesitant to lend to him, and he said he has halted several freeport projects in locations including Dubai and South Korea.

Mr. Bitton said his client’s Le Freeport facility in Singapore, which opened in 2010, has also seen a “negative business impact” as a result of adverse publicity, though he declined to elaborate. Tony Reynard, Le Freeport Singapore’s chairman, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Write to John Letzing at john.letzing@wsj.com and Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com

Copyright © 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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[Jon Koplik] WSJ -- Cache of Nazi-Seized Art Discovered in Munich Apartment ....................

Jon Koplik — 11/6/2013 2:28:00 PM

WSJ -- Cache of Nazi-Seized Art Discovered in Munich Apartment ..............................

Nov. 4, 2013

Cache of Nazi-Seized Art Discovered in Munich Apartment

Works by Artists Including Matisse, Picasso Estimated to Be Worth About €1 Billion

By Mary M. Lane and Harriet Torry

BERLIN -- German authorities discovered a trove of about 1,500 missing works confiscated by the Nazis in the trash-filled apartment of an elderly Munich man, in a spectacular discovery of lost treasure that reverberated across the art world.

The works, by artists including Picasso, Matisse and Chagall, among others, are estimated to be worth about €1 billion ($1.35 billion), according to a preliminary analysis for authorities undertaken by an expert at Berlin's Free University.

Details of the discovered works remain unclear, but art historians said initial descriptions suggest that the cache is one of the most significant collections of prewar European art in the world. Determining the rightful owners of the works decades after they were either sold under duress or seized could take years, however.

German customs officials made the discovery in the spring of 2011 and have been trying to determine its provenance and value, according to German weekly Focus magazine, which reported the find on Sunday.

The apartment where the art was discovered was the residence of the son of a well-known, though long-deceased Nazi art dealer, the magazine reported. The son, identified by the magazine as 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, is under investigation for tax evasion, it said. Mr. Gurlitt couldn't be reached to comment. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office declined to comment.

The collection is thought to have been amassed in the 1930s and 1940s by Mr. Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand. The senior Mr. Gurlitt was a museum curator-turned-art dealer who, despite having a Jewish mother, was one of a handful of art dealers commissioned by Joseph Goebbels's Nazi propaganda ministry to rid German museums and galleries of "degenerate" art confiscated by the regime.

Because of Hildebrand Gurlitt's contacts abroad, the Nazis instructed him to sell the art overseas to raise money for the Reich. He was also involved in an effort to amass great works for a museum planned for the city of Linz, the Austrian city where Hitler had spent much of his youth and which he wanted to transform into the Reich's cultural center.

The senior Mr. Gurlitt's personal collection was thought to have been destroyed along with his house during a World War II bomb attack on Dresden, and he died in a car crash in 1956.

Observers both in and outside the art world criticized the German government for remaining silent about the discovery for so long, given the historic ramifications of such a discovery.

Rüdiger Mahlo, German representative for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany -- which seeks compensation and restitution for survivors of the Holocaust -- said the two-year silence about the trove "underscores [the fact that] a lack of transparency often accompanies the restitution of art and cultural treasures."

A person familiar with the investigation said the secrecy surrounding the probe and its discovery was necessary because it involved allegations of tax evasion. Under Germany's strict privacy laws, authorities are prohibited from disclosing the details of such investigations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's office was informed of the case months ago and has been assisting investigators in finding experts to evaluate the works, her spokesman said. Berlin's Free University, which is assisting in evaluating the art, acknowledged its role but said that it couldn't comment further.

A spokesman for the district attorney in the city of Augsburg, which is handling the probe, said the office didn't comment on ongoing investigations. A spokesman for the customs office in Munich declined to comment.

Meike Hoffmann, a Free University specialist in Nazi-condemned art who is the lead researcher involved in evaluating the trove, has for months been using the Art Loss Register, an international database used to track stolen and missing art, to begin the lengthy process of determining ownership of the works, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ms. Hoffmann didn't respond to requests to comment.

German customs officials stumbled onto the case by chance in 2010, following a routine check of Mr. Gurlitt's belongings on a train from Switzerland to Munich, according to Focus. During the check, they found €9,000 in cash. The sum was below the €10,000 threshold that travelers are required to declare, but the discovery prompted the custom authorities to investigate Mr. Gurlitt further. Months later, in the spring of 2011, authorities discovered the lost works in his Munich apartment.

Though German authorities seized the works, which the magazine said had been stored in trash-strewn rooms amid decades-old canned food, Mr. Gurlitt managed to sell at least one more work at auction after the discovery, according to the Cologne-based boutique auction house Lempertz, which managed the sale.

Mr. Gurlitt approached Lempertz with the "Lion Tamer," a work by the German Expressionist artist Max Beckmann, which he had kept hidden during the German government's raid several weeks before, according to the auction house.

"He said his mother had given him the work," said Carsten Felgner, the provenance researcher at Lempertz who worked on the sale.

As is common in potentially thorny cases involving work acquired during World War II, Mr. Felgner contacted the family of Alfred Flechtheim, the work's original owner who had been a prominent collector. Given the uncertainty over who had a legal claim to the work, the auction house reached a deal to split the profits of the €864,000 Beckmann work between the Flechtheim family, Mr. Gurlitt and the auction house itself, according to Mr. Felgner.

A person who coordinated with Mr. Gurlitt on the sale at Lempertz described him as "friendly and charming" and said no one at the auction house "suspected a thing." An employee who visited Mr. Gurlitt's house said nothing out of the ordinary was seen at his residence.

Auction managers were surprised to learn from news reports that Mr. Gurlitt was under investigation. "No one from the government ever came to us or alerted us about him. What does it say about the federal prosecutors that they didn't feel the need to alert the auction houses?" Mr. Felgner said.

Representatives from Villa Griesbach in Berlin and Vienna-based Dorotheum, two similar boutique houses that often sell German and Austrian works similar to the Beckmann, both declined to comment on whether Mr. Gurlitt approached them with work to sell.

According to Focus, around 300 of the works were among the 19,500 works labeled "degenerate" by the Nazi regime. Many of the other pieces, including works by the German painter Albrecht Dürer, weren't banned, but their provenance is unclear.

A complete catalog of the works in the trove hasn't been disclosed. But works by Picasso, Matisse and Chagall -- artists whose works Hitler, who was an amateur artist in his youth, derided -- were among them.

"Artworks that cannot be understood in and of themselves -- but first require a user's manual in order to finally find those intimidated people who patiently accept such stupid and impudent nonsense -- will no longer find their way to the German people," Hitler said of the term "degenerate," though even his own art historians had difficulty deciding what art to ban.

Such work was collected by German museums and prominent collectors in the 1920s and 1930s, said Olivier Berggruen, a New-York based art historian whose Jewish father, Heinz Berggruen, left Germany to become one of the world's most prestigious art dealers of Matisses and Picassos after the war.

"The vagaries of the war were such that a lot of Picassos, Matisses and Klees, too, changed hands many times," including some that also were looted by Russians, Mr. Berggruen said.

Because German museums owned many works by these artists -- and it is unclear whether they obtained all of them fairly or through coercion -- restitution could be a lengthy and ambiguous process.

Last year Munich's Neue Pinakothek held an exhibition of 16 sculptures of "degenerate" art unearthed by construction workers digging near Berlin's Rathaus, or city hall. Those works are now property of the German state, the conclusion to a "relatively quick" investigation by art historians, said Matthias Wemhoff, who directed the excavation and restoration of the works. Those works had been presumed lost, but had been well-documented, which doesn't seem to be the case for the newly discovered trove, he said, adding that it could take years for Free University historians to determine their rightful owners.

"It is so unclear who has the rights to these works," Mr. Wemhoff said.

Many of the works are most likely editions of prints or works on paper, which will make determining their values even more difficult, experts say.

Because of their popularity even before the war, most masterpieces by Picasso and Matisse are accounted for, Mr. Berggruen said.

The few top works by artists that have turned up, been restituted and subsequently auctioned off have consistently seen major -- often record-breaking -- success. In 2008, amid an otherwise crashing art market, "Suprematist Composition," a restituted 1916 work by Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich, was sold for $60 million at Sotheby's, setting a world record for Russian art.

A Christie's New York sale in November 2006 of four works by Gustav Klimt -- which had been involved in a legal dispute between the Austrian government and the family of their original owner -- totaled $193 million, including the sultry "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" for $87.9 million.

But even works with relatively modest value in terms of their artistic quality could fetch substantial prices at auction because of the story attached to their discovery, he said.

"It is a nice story, and a lot depends on the marketing ability of the people who sell it," he said. "If it's spun in the correct way by the auction houses, they could get a nice sum for them."

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com and Harriet Torry at harriet.torry@wsj.com

Copyright © 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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