GAUGUIN AND BONNARD FOUND ; THE PAINTINGS BELONG TO THE WORKER THAT BOUGHT THEM AT AUCTION

The legitimate ownership has been recognized to the worker, holder of the paintings for forty years, and therefore the two precious paintings have been redelivered in compliance with the disposition of the assistant Prosecutor Dr. Cascini, of the Public Prosecutor's office in the court of Rome, after being guarded for a few months by the Nucleus for the Protection of Artistic Heritage of the Roman Police that had introduced them to the world in the press conference of April the 2nd, presided by the Minister Franceschini.

Therefore, the notorious case of the paintings of the two great masters, is concluded in favour of the Sicilian metalworker, found after forty years following a fortunate intuition.

Investigations and verifications have allowed to reconstruct in detail the incredible story of the two paintings that have been found left on a train from France, but not recognized, and therefore auctioned in lost objects in the Turin station.

Therefore the regular and in good faith purchase from the FIAT worker, passionate of the art and the auctions, has been verified.

The two paintings, after the finding, have been internationally subject of great interest.

"La femme aux deux fauteuils" by Pierre Bonnard is a painting made in 1909 and represents an example of his notorious intimistic environments with a ricurrent subject in his works, his ladylove Martha, on this occasion seated on a wicker armchair in a garden.

As Henri Matisse had prophesied in 1948, Pierre Bonnard is nowadays considered one of the most celebrated and rediscovered artist both from the criticism and the market of the art.

"Fruits sur une table ou nature morte au petit chien, a la Comtesse de N." by Paul Gauguin, even if it appears to be as one of the least representative paintings of the artist  to the less experts, however it boasts a high-level pedigree since it has belonged to important collections such as; Bignou, Thompson Biddle, Adeanne, Marks-Kennedy, many exhibitions and, in at least two occations, it has reached record sale prices (35million of francs in 1957 and 45.000 pounds in 1961) so as to arouse, for the figures of purchase, not a little attention to the not only specialized press.

Two committees of experts nominated by the Office of the Superintendent export of Rome have established the free movement and the free export and sale of the two paintings, after a procedure of eighty days, started on the 11th of November 2014.

Today the Sicilian worker has the freedom to sell or lend freely the two paintings to museums around the world.

Sales negotiations are underway for a long time, after many collectors from around the world have made their bid.

Office press releases "GAUGUIN BONNARD FOUND BLOG"

http://gauguinbonnardfound.blogspot.it/

Gauguin, going, gone

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/gauguin-going-gone-9264931.html

JOY LO DICO

Published: 17 April 2014

Updated: 17:23, 17 April 2014

It’s an art thief’s ultimate dilemma: you’ve snaffled that million-pound painting, but where do you put it? Do you hide it under a mattress, as was Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at the end of the 19th century, or stuff it in a Swiss vault, like a lost Leonardo sketch found last year? Or do you send it careering through the underworld as trade in drug deals? Those were the kind of leads Interpol and insurance companies would have been following in the search for a Gauguin still life stolen in 1970 from the family of a Marks & Spencer heiress. Where they did not look was a kitchen wall in Sicily.

To the art market, the value of the Fruits on a Table or Still Life with a Small Dog is as much as £20 million, say experts. ‘It is one of those works that finds its place in a museum,’ says Dr Karen Serres, Schroeder Foundation curator of paintings at the Courtauld Institute, which amassed its Gauguin collection in the 1920s. ‘It was from a crucial year in his career.’ To the Italian Fiat factory worker, who had bought it, along with a Bonnard (a French artist painting prolifically around 1900) painting of a woman in a garden, in a railway lost property auction in 1975, it was worth £20. No one could make out the signatures on the paintings.

In the world of high-end crime, the Gauguin is unusual for both the accidental nature of its discovery and for something the art world dares not admit: the arbitrariness of monetary value. That it ended up in such a humble location has a certain justice to it. Rather like the 17th-century Dutch painting that is tended to by the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch, it was in the hands of someone who loved it without caring about its worth. 

Gauguin painted the apples and dog in 1889, aged 41, while staying at Le Pouldu, on the Brittany coast, with barely two francs to rub together. It was two years before he headed out to Tahiti, which marked the high point of his career, and he was staying at a guesthouse, paying for his board by painting. Also holidaying there was a woman who signed the register as Comtesse de Nimal, of whom very little is known. Gauguin spotted a chance. The countess claimed to know the finance minister, a possible route to patronage. Gauguin wrote to a friend that there was ‘another countess who is enamoured with me’ and the painting is signed flirtatiously not with Gauguin’s name but with the face of a dog and a dedication to ‘la comtesse de N’.

The Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini with the Gaugin

Her affection for him didn’t last long. She sold it to the dealer Étienne Bignou, and soon the painting began to move through the bloodstream of the regular art market, through the industrialists and old money, accruing value until it ended up in a sale at Sotheby’s in New York in 1962.

Gauguin was not the only man in need of patronage. Terence Kennedy was an American in Paris in 1949, a broke ballet dancer with a dodgy knee and literary aspirations, when he met the heiress Mathilda Marks. A year later they married. ‘Millionairess Mathilda Marks, 16st and 54, has married Terence Kennedy, a 42-year-old writer,’ said the Daily Mail. The implication was as heavy as Mathilda.

Marks was the daughter of Michael Marks, the Belarusian immigrant pedlar — slogan: ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’ — whose business grew rapidly into Marks & Spencer, the most successful retailer of the age. The Mail did not mention the other rumour about Kennedy — that he was homosexual. The late publisher Anthony Blond, whose father had married another of the Marks sisters, was not so reticent. ‘Tilly enjoyed years of married life in a ménage à trois, tended and indulged, petted and cared for by an intelligent, charming and witty husband and his boyfriend,’ he wrote in his book Jew Made in England.

This odd couple flashed their wealth. Stories appeared in the American gossip columns about trips to New York where her luggage included £200,000 worth of jewellery, a Rolls-Royce and a £14,000 mink coat, and Kennedy on her arm. It was on one of these trips, in 1962, that Mathilda bought a Gauguin at auction for £45,000. She liked dogs, and expensive objets d’art.

Good recovery: the Fiat factory in Turin where Nicola, the 70-year-old purchaser of the paintings, worked in 1975 when he bought them at auction

Two years later, Mathilda died on a trip to Montecatini, a spa town in Italy, and Kennedy inherited her £2m estate, which had included their Lutyens house in Sussex, to the horror of her family. ‘Her possessions were without exception very valuable, and her widower was the principal beneficiary,’ noted Blond. You might call it the heist of an heiress. 

In 1970, the widower had moved from Mayfair into the Regency splendours of Chester Terrace, NW1 — the whereabouts of the boyfriend are unrecorded. He was away in June when the housekeeper let in three men, dressed as a policeman and two burglar-alarm installers. While she was in the kitchen making the tea, they got to work. It was a pre-planned heist, by someone who knew what lay behind the façade of Chester Terrace. When she returned with the tea, there were two empty frames where the Bonnard and Gauguin had been. Men and pictures were gone.

When a painting is stolen it typically follows certain routes, says Julian Radcliffe of Art Loss Register. After 25 years, around 20 per cent remain unrecovered. Thirteen paintings, including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 may soon fall into this category. Others are destroyed because they are too hot to handle, or end up being held by relatives of the original thieves. A treasure trove was discovered in the apartment of an art dealer from the Nazi era last year. Another 30 per cent return to the market through backstreet dealers, and around ten per cent, estimates Radcliffe, form part of gangland security, another idea Tartt plays with in The Goldfinch.

The heiress: The painting's former owner Mathilda Marks, who married Terrence Kennedy in 1950

The Gauguin and Bonnard, however, escaped all these fates. They were abandoned on a train travelling from Paris to Turin — the police have speculated that the thieves may have been spooked by a border control — and, with uncharacteristic Italian efficiency, sent to the lost property office. Had Interpol or the local police spotted them, they may have investigated whether they were heading to Switzerland to be put in a vault or into Italy where the Mafia had a sideline in art dealing. Or, considering neither painting was a showpiece, they were heading to a specific home.

As it happens, one of Italy’s richest men, Gianni Agnelli, was no doubt landing his helicopter on the rooftop of his gleaming Fiat building in Turin, while one of his factory workers attended a lost property auction at the city’s train station in 1975. The two paintings were offered as a job lot.

Their buyer, Nicola, now 70, declined to give his surname and kept hold of them, eventually taking them to his retirement home in Sicily where they hung on the kitchen wall. It was only when his son, an architecture student at Syracuse University, took an interest in the paintings that their provenance became clear. The signature that had looked like Bonnato turned out to be Bonnard. The sleepy dog in the Gauguin tallied with others that appeared in his paintings.

Anthony Blond, who was related to the Marks family, in 1966

The family contacted experts, who informed the Italian police and they took possession of the paintings while waiting to see if any Marks heirs came forward. As the unlikely couple had no children, there is no obvious line. The Marks’ extended family, who showed little interest in Kennedy, are a little more interested in the Gauguin. Anthony Blond’s brother Peter, a vintage car consultant at Sotheby’s, has indicated that moves are afoot. ‘It is in the hands of the police and there are insurance companies involved,’ he says. ‘I think to do anything at this stage would be premature.’

The Teddy Bear Trust, originally called The Mathilda and Terence Kennedy Charitable Trust, still has a family connection through trustee Amanda Sieff, Mathilda’s great-niece, but has yet to add its interest. However, it may, in the final reckoning, belong to the Sicilian factory worker. ‘The man [Nicola] can claim it was valued in good faith, completely,’ says Radcliffe. On the Continent, courts are more likely to favour the honest purchaser, particularly after 40 years’ intermission, than the original owner.

And what of Terence Kennedy? Since the death of Mathilda, Kennedy slipped quietly away from the limelight. He kept up an interest in the arts — he donated money to a production at the Royal Opera House in 1985 — but thereafter there is little trace. He died in London in 1997 and the Probate Office has no record of his will, leaving open the possibility that he died with too small an estate to register.

As Tartt observes in The Goldfinch: ‘No one loves a piece of art because it speaks to mankind. What captivates is something subtler. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. “Psst, you. Hey, kid… I was painted for you.” ’ The Gauguin, on its grubby journey as a sycophantic gift, through financially angled marriages, and ambitious thefts, may have finally come to rest in the home of someone who appreciated it simply for what it was.

Claude Forthomme's Blog: Recovered Art: The Man Who Lived with a Gauguin 40 Years in his Kitchen : Recovered Art: The Man Who Lived with a Gauguin 40...

Claude Forthomme's Blog : Recovered Art: The Man Who Lived with a Gauguin 40...: We've all heard of the amazing story of the recovery of two famous paintings by Gauguin and Bonnard whose traces had been lost since a...

Gauguin e Bonnard ritrovati. Le tele appartengono all'ex operaio che le comprò all'asta

All'operaio, possessore per quarant'anni dei dipinti, è stata riconosciuta la legittima proprietà e a lui sono state quindi riconsegnate le due preziose tele in ottemperanza alla disposizione del Sostituto Procuratore Dott. Cascini, della Procura della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di Roma, dopo che per alcuni mesi erano state custodite presso la sede del Nucleo per la Tutela del Patrimonio Artistico dei Carabinieri di Roma che le avevano  ripresentate al mondo nella conferenza stampa del 2 aprile, presieduta dal ministro Franceschini.

Si conclude quindi a favore del metalmeccanico siciliano la famosa vicenda dei dipinti dei due grandi maestri, ritrovati dopo quarant'anni a seguito di una fortunata intuizione.

Indagini ed accertamenti hanno permesso di ricostruire nei dettagli la rocambolesca storia delle due opere che furono ritrovate abbandonate su di un treno proveniente dalla Francia, ma non riconosciute, e, per questa ragione, battute durante un'asta di oggetti smarriti presso la stazione di Torino. È stato accertato, quindi, l'acquisto regolare ed in buona fede da parte dell'operaio FIAT con la passione dell'arte e delle aste.

I due dipinti, dopo il ritrovamento, sono stati al centro di grande interesse a livello internazionale.

"La femme aux deux fauteuils" di Pierre Bonnard è un dipinto del 1909 e rappresenta un esempio delle sue famose ambientazioni intimistiche con un soggetto ricorrente nei suoi lavori, la sua amata Marta, questa volta seduta su una poltrona di vimini in un giardino. Così come aveva profetizzato Henri Matisse nel 1948, Pierre Bonnard è oggi considerato uno degli artisti più celebrati e riscoperti sia dalla critica sia dal mercato dell'arte.

"Fruits sur une table ou nature morte au petit chien, a la Comtesse de N." di Paul Gauguin, invece, pur apparendo ai meno esperti come uno dei dipinti meno rappresentativi dell'artista, vanta un pedigree di alto livello poiché è stato parte di importantissime collezioni, quali ad esempio Bignou, Thompson Biddle, Adeanne, Marks-Kennedy, numerose esposizioni e, in almeno due occasioni, ha raggiunto prezzi di vendita record (35mln di franchi nel 1957 e 45.000 sterline nel 1961) tanto da destare, per le cifre d'acquisto, non poca attenzione per la stampa, non solo specializzata.

Due commissioni di esperti nominati dall'Ufficio esportazione della Soprintendenza di Roma hanno stabilito la libera circolazione e la libera esportazione e vendita delle due opere, dopo un iter di ottanta giorni di studio, iniziato giorno 11 novembre 2014.

Oggi il proprietario siciliano ha la libertà di vendere o di prestare liberamente ai musei di tutto il mondo i due capolavori.

Sono già in corso da tempo trattative di vendita, dopo che numerosi collezionisti da tutto il mondo hanno fatto pervenire le loro offerte.