Anatomy of an Acquisition

The Third in a Series of Interviews with Art Expert Eugene V. Thaw

How did you learn the tricks of the art trade?

I thought I was a clever art dealer—until someone taught me how to be a clever art dealer. And that someone was really something: Dr. Rudolf Heinemann, an enormously fat man who walked with two canes, thanks to a condition I had never heard of—arthrosis of the limbs. He was a legend as a private dealer— highly instrumental in the formation of the Thyssen collection, for instance. A mutual friend had talked me up to the great man, and there came the day when we actually exchanged visits; he looked at my Tiepolo drawings and I looked at his Tiepolo drawings. After that, we began buying paintings together to sell—I was able to bring a lot of important material to him, and he for his part would help to create the sale.

What exactly did he know about selling that you didn’t?

Well, let me give you an example. At that time—this was around 1965—my office was on 78th Street off Madison Avenue. One day I wandered over to see my distinguished friend Alexandre Rosenberg, whose gallery was just a block away on 79th Street off Madison, and after we’d been chatting for a bit, he brought out a spectacular figure painting by Corot, from 1872—a beautifully dressed woman on a garden path with a little girl in tow who was also dressed in period finery. Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter, it was called. He said, “This picture has a story, a couple of stories really.” It turned out that Alexandre’s father—old Paul Rosenberg, a very important dealer—had bought it in the early 1900s from the child in the painting, by then a grown woman, who upon relinquishing it had asked him to have a very good copy made for her to hang in her château. This, by the way, was something that dealers frequently did for clients who wanted the decorative aspect of the room that the picture had been hanging in to stay the same.

Do you think she wanted the copy in order to be reminded of the original or in order to pass it off as the original?

It was evidently so good that decades later it fooled the Philadelphia Museum of Art—they were on the verge of buying it. But because this copy had by then assumed the Rosenberg provenance, Henri Marceau, the museum’s chief curator, stopped in to see Alexandre at the gallery and asked him to verify it. At which point Alexandre waved to an attendant to bring in the one and only Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter. This of course resulted in Philadelphia’s spurning the copy. But then—incredibly—unaccountably—they didn’t buy the original, either!

Maybe they were just spooked by the whole thing.

In any case it was their loss, since the picture was later invited to be in a show of Corot figure paintings at the Louvre. It was around this time—1962, I believe— that a man burst into the Rosenberg gallery— into the very room where Alexandre was now telling me this story—waving a pistol in the air. The man was shouting, “I have the ‘other version’ of Madame Stumpf. I’ve got all the money I have in the world tied up in it, and unless you get the Louvre on the phone immediately and tell them you’re withdrawing your painting from the exhibition in favor of mine, I’m going to blow my brains out right here in front of you.”

At least it was only himself he was threatening to shoot and not the painting.

Now, Alexandre Rosenberg was not a man who was easily ruffled. He’d been, after all, the leader of the Free French team that stopped the train in its tracks that was transporting to Germany some of the treasures the Nazis had looted from the collections of Jews in France. He managed to save all the art, and among the masterpieces he found on board were Braques, Légers, Matisses and Picassos that he recognized from his own father’s gallery. There was a movie about all this—a 1965 John Frankenheimer vehicle called The Train, with Burt Lancaster. And incidentally, this Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter had also been confiscated by the Nazis and stored at the Jeu de Paume, where Hermann Goering saw it and selected it for his personal collection. It was returned to the Rosenbergs after the war.

So anyway, Alexandre had a lot of aplomb, and he said to the intruder, “My dear fellow, my heart goes out to you, but even if you shoot yourself, it’s not going to make your picture the Corot.” The man pondered that piece of logic for a minute and then fled. Poor wretch—he must have bought the copy from whoever had offered it to Philadelphia and panicked when it wasn’t invited to be in the figure show.

So all of this tale Alexandre was regaling me with was a way of saying that this wonderful picture had a jinx on it. Without the slightest hesitation I told him that I’d like to buy it. He said, “I’d love for you to have it—give me $45,000 and it’s yours.” That was a very good buy at the time; it was still money, mind you, but consider that this was the largest Corot figure painting that I had ever seen for sale—41 inches high—and that Madame Stumpf had on the most ravishing blue dress.

You weren’t scared off by the jinx.

Not at all—I had it delivered to my office on 78th Street the very next day. Now this is where Dr. Rudolf Heinemann enters the picture. I was still busy ingratiating myself with him and all of that, so when he said he wanted to take a half-share in the painting—he liked to be in every great picture he could as a partner—I said fine. And then later when he asked to have it sent over to his apartment without telling me why, that was fine, too—we trusted each other completely. But the next thing I knew, he was on the phone informing me, in his rough Germanic voice, “Hope you don’t mind—I sold a third of the picture to Sir Geoffrey Agnew for $40,000. So we’re gaining a little bit on our investment.” Thomas Agnew & Sons, in London, was the firm that he worked most closely with—he never wanted to do his own selling; he preferred to be the éminence grise, masterminding everything. Well, I certainly considered this a betrayal: Thanks to him, I now owned a third share in the picture instead of a half. I was just livid and I said as much—or as much as I dared say to Rudolf Heinemann, because, remember, I was a relative newcomer in his orbit. And he said, “Let me tell you, Thaw, you don’t take a picture from 79th Street to 78th Street and make a profit. This picture’s going to London.”

Would you call that the “Heinemann Maneuver”?

Why not? You see, everyone in New York was familiar with the painting; it was nothing new—that was Heinemann’s point—but on the Continent it would be a fresh thing, a discovery. And sure enough, within a couple of months, Geoffrey Agnew had sold the picture to Ailsa Mellon Bruce, at the suggestion of the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, John Walker, who was visiting London that June. The major museum directors, when they went to Europe, would make a point of calling on Agnew, so he had been in a very favorable position to bring out this long-neglected Corot. Mrs. Bruce paid $275,000 for Madame Stumpf; and my third of that represented a helluva profit. And when she died, three years later, in 1969, she bequeathed it to the gallery. It’s one of their star Corots.

Why hadn’t you tried to sell it to john walker yourself?

He would never have bought it from me. I was a youngish dealer, whereas Agnew at that time was a grandiose figure, with the power to get full value for the painting. What Heinemann taught me with that deal was this: The picture remains the same, the quality remains the same, but everything depends on who has it—that is, on who has it for sale.

But the rosenbergs were also powerful dealers—why hadn’t they been able to unload it during all that time?

The answer to that is that, somehow or other, in their inventory it was stale. And that staleness was spilling over even into my inventory, because I was only a block away. Heinemann had the savvy to see that there was not enough mystique in the distance between two New York City blocks—the picture had to go clear across an ocean to come back as a star. That was a lesson I’ll never forget.

Eugene V. Thaw will next address the problem of forgeries in the art world.