Met Reject, Listed as "Follower of Rubens" and Estimated at $20,000-$30,000, Sells for $626,500 at Sotheby's

Is this portrait of a young woman by Rubens?

A Metropolitan Museum reject, which was estimated to sell at Sotheby's for between $20,000 and $30,000, was auctioned off today for $626,500 (including premium).  Sotheby's listed it as by a follower of Rubens, but given how much the portrait sold for, it appears that some bidders may have thought otherwise.

In the first half of the 20th century, the painting was considered a Rubens, but scholars in the second half, including heavyweight Julius Held, disagreed.   The Met's own Walter Liedtke, curator of Dutch and Flemish art, thought the painting a copy of a work by Rubens.  It's been suggested that the subject is Rubens' daughter.

The portrait was one of sixteen paintings the Met consigned to Sotheby's to raise money for its acquisitions fund.

Photo from Sotheby's.  Text (c) Copyright 2013 Laura Gilbert

Metropolitan Museum Dumps 16 Old Masters at Sotheby's

Pedro Sanchez I, Christ Before Pilate (estimate: $120,000-$160,000)

The Metropolitan Museum is cleaning house again, this time deaccessioning sixteen Old Master paintings.  Truth be told, some of them you wouldn't want to hang in your own house, and most you wouldn't expect to see at a magnificent institution like the Met.

But there are a few I wish the museum would retain, especially the devotional triptych of Christ before Pilate by Pedro Sanchez I, a Seville artist active in the second half of the 15th century.  That it's survived intact is remarkable enough, but it also appears to be in excellent condition.

More important, it's an arresting image by an artist of great talent and compositional flair.  Look at Christ covered in blood from being tortured, wrapped in shroud-like drapery, and framed by individualized heads -- to say nothing of the rapidly receding floor.

I challenge anyone to name a single painting in the Met's European paintings galleries by a Spanish artist before El Greco.  Here's a prime example -- it doesn't fit the old-fashioned canon of "progress" in art as exemplified by the Italian Renaissance and Early Netherlandish painting, but it's marvelous.

Out of the Met's storerooms and onto the walls of Sotheby's

Text and photos (c) Copyright 2013 Laura Gilbert

They’re Back: Two Small Portraits by Hals Join the Big Boys

Hals, Anna van der Aar, oil on wood, 1626

Two small, magnetic portraits by Frans Hals that have been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum since 1929 are at last on permanent display.

Hals, Petrus Scriverius

In the museum’s huge, 228-work “Age of Rembrandt” show in 2007, these roughly 9-by-6.5-inch paintings of Petrus Scriverius and his wife, Anna van der Aar, were unexpected standouts – unexpected because they are so darn beautiful yet were hardly ever on view.

At the time, I asked curator Walter Liedke when we might see them again, and he said, “The small works will be back.”   When the Rembrandt show was taken down, though, and the Dutch galleries rehung, these two were nowhere to be seen.

Four years later, they were stars again, this time in Met’s Frans Hals show.

Again I asked Liedke about them, and he said they would soon be on permanent view in a freestanding display case in the Rembrandt-Hals gallery.

And now they are, holding their own among some of the most famous Dutch paintings in the Met’s collection, including Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.”

The Hals portraits newly installed

The two portraits are on one side of the case.  On the other is a small night scene, "An Evening School," by Gerrit Dou.

Images:  First and second from the Metropolitan Museum website.
Text and third photo Copyright 2012 Laura Gilbert

Restitution Fears, or Lost Opportunity? "Transition to Christianity" at the Onassis Cultural Center and the Absent "David Plates"

Head of Aphrodite, with eyes gouged out and a cross carved into her forehead

Is it fear of a claim for restitution, or just a lost opportunity?

All nine parts of a seminal, 7th-century work -- a masterpiece of Byzantine art -- are now on view in New York, but for reasons unknown they are being displayed at two separate institutions.

The David Plates, a set of nine, various-sized silver plates – magisterially made with a sophisticated understanding of classical sculpture and an intricate attention to detail – cry out to be shown together, as they were some 1,400 years ago.

Detail, David and Goliath plate, at the Met

They depict scenes from the life of the biblical David, and were probably made for the Byzantine emperor Heraclius.  They are commonly included in surveys of what used to be called the “Dark Ages.”

Six of the plates, including the largest (19.5 inches across) and most magnificent, are displayed in a nondescript corridor of the Metropolitan Museum. The other three are now on temporary loan from the Cyprus Museum, and can be seen through May 14 at the Onassis Cultural Center, where they are the culmination of its “Transition to Christianity” exhibit.

Marriage of David, at the Onassis Center

Scholars think the plates were originally displayed in the shape of a symbol that refers to Christ, with the medium and small plates placed around the large one. But for some as-yet-undisclosed reason, this configuration will not be recreated here.

Goodness knows when, if ever, all nine plates be in the same city again.

The plates were discovered in 1902 by laborers looking for building stone in the ruins of the Byzantine town of Lambousa, Cyprus.  The Cypriot authorities confiscated three of them but, the story goes, the others were smuggled out of the country, sold to a Paris dealer, and bought by J.P. Morgan.  Morgan’s heirs donated them to the Met in 1917.

Why aren’t all the pieces of what the Met describes as “exceptionally important” and "a masterwork of Byzantine art" being shown together?  The Met loaned several other items to the Onassis Center show, but the plates didn’t make the 30-block trip south.  The Onassis exhibit’s curator did not respond to inquiries, and no one at the Met was available for comment.

Six David Plates on view in a corridor at the Met

The word from an art history veteran is that Cyprus would like the Met’s plates returned to Cyprus, and it even made some fuss about it in the 1970s.

Derek Fincham, an expert in cultural heritage law, said that Cyprus “probably would not have success on a legal claim” – it would fail on statute of limitations grounds alone, he said -- but it might have an ethical claim to the plates “as an important piece of Cypriot heritage” that it could pursue as a public relations matter.

The Met might not want to loan the plates to the Onassis Center, Fincham suggested, because “the Met wouldn’t want people to make the connection.”

(How and when the plates got to Cyprus is unknown -- because of their high quality, it is thought that they were made in Constantinople -- and if Cyprus were to claim that the Met plates are part of its heritage, further evidence might be needed.)

Personification of April

The David Plates, in any event, could well be Exhibit A in any argument that “dark ages” is a misnomer for describing the 3rd through 7th centuries, and this is one of the themes of “Transition to Christianity.”  It presents this period, under the rubic “late antiquity,” as a time of innovation and change from paganism to Christianity.  The process took centuries, during which the two both coexisted and were in tension, and were sometimes at war.

The crucial figure, of course, was Constantine -- in 313 he established tolerance for Christianity with the Edict of Milan, and in 324-330 he moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople.  Much activity in the visual arts followed the emperors to the East, and in this exhibition it is in the art from the East, mainly Greece, that we follow the cultural changes.

A direct effect of the emperors’ adoption of Christianity -- only one emperor after Constantine was not Christian – is shown in a display of gold coinage.  An image of the emperor consistently appears on the front, but the mythological or historical scenes on the back gradually give way to a cross or an angel.

Mummy portrait, 1st century

Conflict between ideologies is made vivid with the Christianizing of classical sculpture:  a first century head of Aphrodite has her eyes gouged out and a cross carved on her forehead, for example.  Still, the beauty of this sculpture (the photo at the top doesn't do it justice) and a defaced portrait of a Roman boy is breathtaking.

The exhibition is particularly effective in demonstrating that even after Christianity became dominant, its imagery was deeply rooted in Greek and Roman art.  Whether Christian or pagan, the motifs are often the same.  Philosophers of classical art are models for Christian apostles. A man carrying a lamb, a standard motif in pagan bucolic scenes, is the basis of the Good Shepherd trope of Christianity.  The forms of Egyptian mummy portraiture produced under Roman rule, facing front with overlarge eyes, reappear as an icon of Christ’s face.

Icon fragment

The three mummy portraits and the icon are highlights of the show – the former for their beauty and the latter for its rarity.  Most icons on panel, like this one, were destroyed in the 8th-century iconoclastic movement against visual art.

“Transition to Christianity” is an engaging exhibit.  It could have been historic had the David Plates been reunited.

“Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd-7th Century A.D.,” Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Ave. at 51st St., through May 14.

Addendum:  Four days after my initial inquiry to the Met, asking why all nine David weren't being shown together, its vice president of communications, Elyse Topalian, chose to respond by email.

It stated:  "The six David Plates in the Met's collection have long been scheduled to be highlights of the upcoming exhibition 'Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th Century),' which will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum from March 14 through July 8, 2012.  Because the exhibitions will overlap for two months, the works of art can't be on view together in a single location.  But these exhibitions do provide a terrific opportunity to see the nine plates, all during one period of time, in New York City."  (Emphasis is mine.)

This seemed to beg the question:  Why couldn't there be a short-term loan between institutions during the two-and-a-half months before the Met show opens?  That's what happened recently at the Bode Museum, which showed Leonardo's "Lady with an Ermine" (as part of the Renaissance portrait show now at the Met) for some weeks before sending it to London to hang in the National Gallery's Leonardo exhibition.

After the holidays, I asked the Onassis Cultural Center's director, Amalia Cosmetatou, if it had asked the Met to lend the plates to its "Transition to Christianity" exhibition.  While not answering the question directly, she said the Met's David Plates were on permanent display there, and that "because of the two exhibits, perhaps it wouldn't have been possible anyway."

(They are on permanent display, except when the Met loans them out.)

But why not a short-term loan so we could see them as they were intended to be viewed?

Cosmetatou paused and then said, "That would have been a good idea."

Had the institutions tried to work something out so all the plates could be seen together?

"I don't know," she said, but promised to get back to me.

Perhaps there's no one to admonish here unless a request by one or the other institution was made and turned down.  Could neither one have thought of it?

Photo of six David Plates at the Met, © 2011 Laura Gilbert

Other Photos: Head of Aphrodite and Personification of April, © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism; Marriage of David, © Cyprus Museum; icon fragment, © Benaki Museum; detail of David and Goliath from Metropolitan Museum website; mummy portrait from Walters Art Museum website.

Text © 2011 Laura Gilbert.

"The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini" at the Metropolitan Museum

Desiderio da Settignano portrait bust

Described by the Met as “a landmark exhibition,” this comprehensive exploration of 15th-century Italian portraiture -- 160 artworks from some 60 institutions and private collections -- sounded like a sure winner.  And it is.  It's magnificent, often in unexpected ways.  It opens tomorrow.

Filippo Strozzi by Benedetto da Maiano

The Met and Berlin’s Bode Museum, the co-organizers, have used their combined heft to obtain substantial loans, from Donatello’s reliquary of St. Rossore, which, putting contemporary features on a long-dead saint, laid the groundwork for the Renaissance portrait bust, to one of the most famous 15th-century portraits, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s portrait of an old man and a boy.

Attr. to Uccello

A rarity for the museum-goer these days, there’s a lot to take in.  It’s hard to believe anything could be more splendid than the array in the first gallery of three paintings of men in profile -- one by the revolutionary Massaccio (the only portrait solidly attributed to him), one attributed to Paolo Uccello, and one attributed to Domenico Veneziano -- until you enter the second gallery, with its lively marble portrait of a young woman by Desiderio da Settignano, and then walk on to encounter Verrocchio’s terracotta of the haughty Florentine bigwig Giuliano de’ Medici, a fierce, screaming face on his armor.

The curators have organized the show by both geography and subject – Florentine women and men shown separately, the powerful Medici family, court portraits, Venice.

The organization is brilliant. For painting it reveals -- in the century when Italy was discovering the autonomous portrait and exploring what creates identity – how limited and persistent portrait types were, and how difficult it was for artist or patron to conceive a change, let alone a transformation.

Mantegna, Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan

We see idealized portraits commemorating marriage, where all women are young and beautiful, and others commemorating the dead; and aggrandizing portraits of the already powerful -- even a cardinal is depicted as a Roman emperor, in a great painting by Andrea Mantegna.  With few exceptions, it’s image projection at the expense of personality.

A new twist that worked might be seized upon. In mid-century, for example, Andrea Castagno hit upon what became a new formula – a man with a defiant expression who looks at the viewer, his face in three-quarters, dressed in red, and grasping his cloak. All around the Castagno are other paintings that in some way mimic it – the defiant expression, the three-quarter view, a red garment, a grasping hand.

Mino da Fiesole, bust of Niccolo di Strozzi, with Castagno painting

Sculpture, too, has its types and image projection – men with ennobled shoulders, for one – but displaying sculpture and painting together reveals the latter as almost invariably more animated (hard stone is no obstacle) and artistically leading the way. The contrast between the sculpture that seems to breathe and the paintings that seem stylized is vivid nearly everywhere you look.

Antonello da Messina

Judging from this show, it was mainly in Venice, which came to portraiture late, where personality was explored in painting.  A beautiful example is the portrait of a young man by Antonello da Messina, a tiny 8-by-6 inches that makes a huge impression.

Some other highpoints in this exhibition filled with them:  the jowly marble sculpture of  Niccolo di Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole; the excellent terracotta portrait of Filippo Strozzi, wonderfully introspective, placed next to the more formal marble bust of him, both by Benedetto da Maiano; and a cast of the death mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

And for those interested in portrait medals, there are a mess of them by court artist Pisanello, a famous artist in his time who should perhaps be on more people's lips today.

Donatello reliquary bust

Cast of death mask of Lorenzo de' Medici

Verrocchio, armor detail

"The Renaissance Portrait," Metropolitan Museum, 5th Ave. and 82nd St., through March 18, 2012



Benedetto da Maiano and Antonello photos from Bode Museum website.  Other photos and text Copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert.

Unicorns and Winged Serpents in the Cervera Hebrew Bible: On View at the Met for Only Three More Days

Cervera Hebrew Bible, details

On view for one week only – that’s both the difficulty and the pleasure that comes from the Met’s turning the pages of the Cervera Hebrew Bible. Visitors can take in two new pages beginning each Tuesday until January 16, when this 800-year-old Bible will be whisked back to Lisbon’s Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.  (Read more about the exhibition here.)

This week it’s opened to brightly colored pages whose corners are decorated with unicorns, serpent-like creatures with human faces, and animals on their hind legs playing musical instruments.

French medallion

They seem to reflect a mix a traditions.  The diamond and scalloped linear patterns seem almost Islamic, and the unicorn often symbolizes purity in Christian art.

The Met is showing these pages in the context of contemporaneous French medallions – the illuminator of the Cervera Bible was Joseph the Frenchman – that are made up of similar fanciful creatures.

This delight is on view only through Sunday.

 Text and photos Copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert

The Cervera Hebrew Bible at the Met: Not What You Learned in Sunday School

Cervera Hebrew Bible (click to enlarge)

A beautiful medieval Hebrew Bible officially goes on display tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum, and it just might get you re-thinking what you learned about Judaism’s rejection of figural imagery. 

The Bible was written and illustrated in 1299-1300 in Cervera, Spain, and is on loan until January 16 from Lisbon’s Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.   It’s the second in a series of Hebrew manuscripts that the Met is borrowing from public institutions around the world, a way of making up for the dearth of Jewish art in its own holdings.  The pages will be turned once a week.

Signature page and grammatical compendium (click to enlarge)

Right now it’s opened to the end of the book.  On the left the entire page is given over to the signature of the illuminator, Joseph Hazarfati, or Joseph the Frenchman -- remarkable, considering that the names of most illuminators are unknown.  In Hebrew it says, “I, Joseph Hazarfati, illustrated and completed this book.”  But look closely, and you see that the letters are actually composed of fanciful animals.

Signature page, detail: Hebrew letters as fanciful animals (click to enlarge)

On the right page is a grammatical compendium, with two six-pointed stars at the top and a couple of fierce lions at the bottom. Within the two stars are a lion and a castle, the symbols of the Kingdoms of Leon and Castile in Northern Spain, where, the curators suggest, the unknown patron may have lived.  The scribe is identified as Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan.

Aaron, from a French church

There’s plenty to delight and surprise in this exhibit – the Bible is the centerpiece in a display of Christian Bibles and precious objects from the Met’s collection, and the whole is flanked by large limestone statues of Moses and Aaron that were once part of a New Testament scene on a church in France.  All the objects date from roughly the same period and many shed light on the artistic traditions Joseph Hazarfati drew on.

The Second Commandment, of course, has an injunction against depicting “any likeness that is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth,” and it’s often taught that Judaism interpreted this prohibition literally -- despite visual evidence to the contrary.  In the Cervera Bible, for example, there are pages with people, cities, animals, and even narrative stories like Jonah and the whale.

Some scholars think that the presence or absence of Jewish figural imagery, at least in the Middle Ages, is less a matter of belief than of artistic tradition, and the Met exhibit seems to adopt this view.  In Southern Spain, one might expect a Hebrew Bible to be decorated with colorful patterns, reflecting the Islamic tradition there.  But in Northern Spain, artists drew on French figural traditions, and the Met has surrounded the Cervera Bible with items from France.

The labels are terrific, pointing out similarities between Joseph Hazarfati and his Christian counterparts in representing knights and fantastic animals and their common decoration of margins.    It might be argued -- though the labels don’t go this far -- that the idea that Judaism prohibits figural imagery is more recent than the Cervera Bible itself.

Top two images Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.  Bottom images and text Copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert.

Met’s $3 Million Splurge on Perino del Vaga Goes on Display September 27

Last January the Metropolitan Museum set records at Sotheby’s two days in a row when it bought a drawing by Perino del Vaga (1501-1547) for more than $700,000 and a painting by the same artist for more than $2 million.  

Two million dollars, by the way, is the amount of the Met’s expected shortfall for fiscal year 2011 -- a shortfall, the museum’s chief spokesperson told reporter Lee Rosenbaum in June, that in part led to the Met’s increasing its recommended admission from $20 to $25.

Both works are finally going on display beginning September 27 in a small show devoted to Perino that will include drawings from the Morgan Library and private New York collections in addition to the Met’s own stash. 

Perino, hardly a household name, was a student of Raphael’s in Rome.  There are only a handful of panel paintings attributed to him. 

The Met’s painting, “The Holy Family with St. John the Baptist,” is a “newly discovered” work and has been described as atypical of the artist. 

Apparently, though, the museum had a lot of company in accepting either the attribution or the painting’s intrinsic worth.  Five buyers, one of which was reportedly the Louvre, bid it up from its $300,000 to $400,000 estimate.

The drawing is a study for a tapestry, the specialty of Met director Thomas Campbell. 

It’ll be a homecoming of sorts for the guest curator, Linda Wolk-Simon, who was formerly a curator at the Met and is now head of prints and drawings at the Morgan.

Frankly, when I saw the painting at Sotheby’s auction preview I wasn’t too impressed -- it looked like a dingy old thing.  Maybe we should be relieved that after cleaning and restoring it the Met did not announce it had discovered yet another Velazquez. 

Photos:  Top, pulled off the internet; bottom, from Sotheby's catalogue.

Text copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert

"Frans Hals" at the Met: Museum Rearranges Furniture, Renews Old Promise

Does the Met’s Hals show -- almost entirely works from its own collection – tell us anything new? 

No.  The Met has pretty much just rearranged the furniture, taking down paintings already on permanent display and rehanging them in a special exhibition gallery.

But a private loan, Hals’ stunning yet small “Portrait of Samuel Ampzing” (above), is one of the best paintings in the exhibition and one that the Met should be begging for, borrowing for long-term display, or stealing.  In 2007 it sold at Sotheby’s London for more than $9 million, a high price for an Old Master.

Show curator Walter Liedtke revealed to this reporter that two miniature Hals portraits on wood (below, of Petrus Scriverius and Anna van der Aar) – which were highlights of the Met’s massive “Age of Rembrandt” exhibit a few years ago – will be on permanent view once the Hals show ends.  They’ll be in a pedestal display case in the Rembrandt-Hals gallery.  (Actually, the Met made the same promise during the Rembrandt show, too.)

 

“Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum,” 5^th Avenue at 82^nd Street, through October 11.

Photos: Top, Sotheby's catalogue; others taken at preview.

Copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert

Superstar Koons' Sideline: Loaning Old Masters to the Met, Including the Dreadful. Meantime, 51 of His Own Holdings Appear Online

Jeff Koons personally collects Old Masters, many of them recently purchased and some for record-breaking auction prices.

He's getting plenty of wall space for them from the Metropolitan Museum, which, as any serious collector knows, generally gooses up their value.

I found four of them there last week, including a sort of a dog of a painting that may be a workshop production instead of by the master on the label.  All are identified as from an unnamed "private collection."

What's going on?  Neither Koons nor the Met is talking.

The most recent Koons-owned loan, hung within the last few weeks with the "private collection" tag, is surely the most problematic.  It's a bust-length Christ the Met labels as a Quinten Massys, the leading Antwerp painter of the early 16th century. (Enhanced camera technology makes the image I took, right, appear far superior to the actual painting.)

But is it a Massys?  It's the most lifeless painting in the Met's superb Netherlandish galleries -- in truth, it's conspicuous because it's so not up to snuff there. 

The museum, notably, has hung it a room away from the Massys works it actually owns -- fine or amazing paintings each.

Red Flags

The Christ was also represented as a Massys by Sotheby's in a 2008 auction, where it sold for $1.1 million and where Koons seems to have acquired it.
 
But Sotheby's presented it with big red flags.  It had no provenance, a huge caution.  And there's another version of the painting, signed, in the Prado -- are both by Massys?

Another warning appeared in the catalogue.  To authenticate the painting, Sotheby's had sent a photograph (a common auction house practice) to the highly respected art history professor Larry Silver, who penned the 1984 Massys catalogue raisonne.

Based on the photo alone, Professor Silver, according to the Sotheby's catalogue, considered the work autograph but "does not rule out the possibility of some studio participation."

This reporter contacted Silver last week to ask if he had ever seen the painting in the flesh -- he had in fact finally just seen it at the Met -- and we spoke about its authenticity. 

Silver told me that until Sotheby's sent him the photo, the work was "unknown" to him, a complete "surprise." 

When asked whether there was studio work here, he replied that "No one cares about studio work anymore except auction houses and museums."

(Further inquiry into this assertion has been delayed.)

He explained that Massys was at the "end of his career" when this work was made and possibly "losing his manual dexterity" -- the painting is dated 1529, a year before the artist's death.  So, Silver said, he believes there would be "increased participation" by the studio.

Was he suggesting it actually is a studio work?  Silver told me it was an "extremely fine picture" and better than the Prado version, which itself had at one time been "considered studio."

Is it naive to expect a museum -- an educational institution, after all -- to be more forthcoming about attribution when it displays such a problematic work, even if, as in this case, the lender is a famous artist who is becoming a force in the Old Masters market and whose own works the Met may one day want to own?

Balloon Dog and Big Bull

As it happens, Koons' "anonymous" loans apparently began in 2008, the year the Met showcased his own "Balloon Dog" and other sculptures in its prestigious "Art on the Roof" series.

That June, the Met needed to find a place for Koons' egregiously large "Hercules and Achelous" -- an eight-foot-wide painting -- by Cornelis van Haarlem.

This flat brown mass of cartoonish bull was bought for $8.1 million, reportedly by Koons -- an auction record for any Dutch Mannerist painting and a price that induced gasps in the bidding room -- but who was he bidding against?  The final players made bids by telephone.

Initially, the Met installed it in a gallery full of paintings by Rembrandt and Hals -- in a fit of insanity, perhaps.  It now hovers like an oversize cruise ship amid a sea of Dutch "little masters" (see installation view, above).

Let's not skip over the fact, though, that one of Koons' loans is glorious -- a St. Catherine wood statue by the great German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (left).  It had graced the Met as a loan before Koons bought it (for $6.3 million, a record for the artist), and now it's back on loan in the Medieval galleries.

Then there's Koons' loan of "Adam and Eve" by the talented 18th-century court painter Francois Lemoyne (below), a lovely oil on copper that Koons apparently picked up in 2009 for 1.3 million Euros, another record.  It went on view a couple of months ago as a pendant to an Adam and Eve by Lemoyne's student Charles-Joseph Natoire.

Meantime, 51 works apparently now in Koons' collection can be seen online (at least as of 9:00 a.m. today) at a website that doesn't identify what it is or who owns the works shown, or who even owns the site:  www.collectionnewyork.com.

This reporter believes it's a listing from Koons' collection.

Koons was photographed in his home with works posted there, including a Courbet, a Magritte, and a Dali.  He is known to have loaned another Courbet on the site ("Femme Nue," which at $3.1 million also set a record), and has acknowledged owning still other posted works, including the listed Fragonard.

Those familiar with Koons' creations won't be surprised to find, in addition, a work depicting comics character Dagwood Bumstead having at Blondie.

Phone calls and an email to the Met for comment on Koons' ownership of the works on loan, and on the purported Massys, were not returned by post time.  A phone call and an email to Koons and an email submitted to the collectionnewyork.com website yielded no response.

Photos:  Laura Gilbert

 Copyright 2011 Laura Gilbert