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February Issue
2010
Mint Museum
of Art in Charlotte, NC, Offers Exhibit on Mystery of Identity
Theft of Artwork
A new exhibition at
the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, contains the elements
of an art history mystery - a carefully crafted forgery, a persistent
art scholar and a lost painting - while taking the viewer behind
the scenes of museum life. The exhibition, Identity Theft:
How a Cropsey Became a Gifford, is on view through Mar. 27,
2010.
Identity Theft centers around one of the Mint's most important
Hudson River School paintings, Indian Summer in the White Mountains
by Sanford Robinson Gifford. For more than 50 years and despite
questions raised by art scholars, this painting was attributed
to Jasper Francis Cropsey and titled Mount Washington from
Lake Sebago, Maine, based on Cropsey's apparently original
signature and date in the lower left corner of the painting. Conservation
work in 2003 revealed a Gifford signature and a new date beneath
Cropsey's - a find that solved one mystery and uncovered another.
Identity Theft explores the story behind the painting's authorship and the various processes through which its reattribution was made possible, highlighting typically undisclosed issues, such as connoisseurship, conservation, archival research and the art market. The exhibition will bring together a dozen carefully selected works of art, including three of Cropsey's known paintings of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, as well as six of Gifford's known paintings of the same subject. By displaying paintings of the site by both artists - along with sketchbooks, photographs of the site, and other historical documentation - the Museum will provide its visitors with a thorough look at how it came to reattribute one of the key works in its collection.
The Gifford painting came to the Mint in 1945 when Charlotte resident Elizabeth Boyd placed the recently inherited work on long-term loan. The painting - a pastoral Hudson River School landscape - was signed and dated Jasper Francis Cropsey, 1871. At that time, scholarship on American art was still in its infancy, and there was no reason to question the attribution. The painting was subsequently included in the first major retrospective of Cropsey's work after his death.
In the 1970s, Dr. Ila
Weiss, a Gifford scholar, contacted the Mint Museum of Art to
voice her suspicions that the Mint's painting might, in fact,
be by Gifford. She argued that not only was the painting's aesthetic
much closer to Gifford's than to Cropsey's, but that Gifford had
also produced paintings depicting Mount Washington whose compositions
were much closer to that of the Mint's painting than the examples
by Cropsey. There even existed an identically-sized canvas of
Mount Washington by Gifford that had vanished in the late 19th
century.
All signs pointed to the Mint's painting as being the one that
had vanished, but when the area around the signature was examined
under blacklight, nothing indicated any overpainting. Thus, despite
compelling evidence, the painting remained tenuously attributed
to Cropsey.
In 2003, the painting
was sent for a routine cleaning and the conservator uncovered
a signature just below Cropsey's - a Gifford signature accompanied
by a date. It was decided that the Gifford signature and date
should be fully revealed and that the Cropsey signature and date
should remain as well, since they did not distract from the painting's
overall aesthetic and had indeed become a fascinating part of
its history.
Presented as a historical detective story, this exhibition not
only will allow visitors to see how issues such as conservation,
provenance and scholarship play out in the museum, but will also
give them a sneak peek into the behind the scenes aspects of museum
life. By bringing together strong examples of both Cropsey's and
Gifford's work, this show encourages visitors to carefully study
why a painting might be attributed to one artist or another, and
ultimately discover how the Mint's Cropsey "became"
a Gifford.
Identity Theft: How a Cropsey Became a Gifford was organized by The Mint Museum. The exhibition is supported in part by the Betty J. and J. Stanley Livingstone Foundation, a grant from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Curator's Circle for American Art and private donors. For a complete schedule of education programs surrounding this exhibition, visit (www.mintmuseum.org).
For further information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at
704/337-2000 or visit (www.mintmuseum.org).
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