Putting a value on art

What's the real value of art? How do you put a price tag on the subjective? Who determines "quality"? Surprisingly, another important question in this area is, Did the artist really create it? There's a major legal battle underway today over whether Andy Warhol actually created a piece of art that he signed. And as you can read in this piece by John Brewer in The National, even the great Leonardo da Vinci was the subject of great and complicated whodunit battles.

In The American Leonardo, a fascinating account of an epic 20th-century attribution battle, the cultural historian John Brewer shows that specialists – once known as connoisseurs – have played a vital part in shaping what we consider to be true and false in art throughout the modern era. More consequentially, however, he argues that this influence – long since largely taken for granted by the art world – has been fraught with conflicts of interest, controversy, and to a surprising extent, dubious and inconsistent reasoning.
The immediate subject of Brewer’s book is a legal battle that unfolded in the 1920s between the international art dealer Joseph Duveen and the Hahns, a young middle-class couple in Kansas who thought they owned a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. Remarkably, this unlikely confrontation drew in many of the major players of the early 20th-century art world, from the connoisseur Bernard Berenson and the German museum leader Wilhelm von Bode, to the Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry and the preeminent Italian art historian Adolfo Venturi. It also ended, unsatisfactorily, in something of a draw, making it for Brewer a riveting way to explore some larger questions about art connoisseurship and its checkered history.According to its original practitioners, connoisseurship was nothing if not “scientific”. Indeed, the 19th-century Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli (who is often credited with inventing the discipline) devised elaborate methodologies for identifying and classifying Old Master paintings – in part, it seems, to give aesthetic judgments the aura of analytical and scientific rigour then in vogue. (As Brewer observes, Morelli’s technique of examining small anatomical details in a painting to determine an artist’s hand were not dissimilar to forensic methods introduced by French police around the turn of the century.)
Moreover, the early decades of “scientific” connoisseurship did much to correct a spate of over-optimistic attributions: Leonardo’s oeuvre, for example, was whittled down from some 90 paintings in the mid-19th century to the dozen or so accepted today.