Really Bad Optics
Marc Chagall, "The Eiffel Tower," (l) and Jacques-Louis David, "Saint Jerome," (r)
The Globe and Mail and now the Toronto Star have published updates on the National Gallery of Canada’s decision to sell one of its two paintings by Marc Chagall at auction. It turns out that the “important work that is a part of our national heritage” which the gallery wants to purchase with funds from the sale is indeed by an international artist, the French neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David.
David’s 1779 painting “Saint Jerome Hears the Trumpet of the Last Judgment” was donated to a Quebec City church in 1938, and is currently on loan to the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. The gallery wanted to keep its negotiations with the church and the proposed acquisition secret, for the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Musée de la civilization in Quebec City thought that they had the right of first refusal to jointly purchase the painting. The secret negotiations between the church and the National Gallery must have gone on for some time, for we now know that the gallery made the decision to de-accession the Chagall late last year.
The optics of the gallery’s end run around its Quebec counterparts are really bad. Many Quebecois will see this as evidence of federalist hegemony and meddling. Furthermore, the decision to de-accession a painting by a celebrated Jewish modernist to purchase a painting intended for a Catholic church might be construed as evidence of conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism. The difference hardly matters if the effect is the same. Beyond that, who’s going to donate heirlooms of any stripe to public galleries if an undeclared threat of future de-accession hangs over them? It’s possible that the National Gallery will lose more in future patronage than it gains in prestige from acquisition of the David.
The church’s threat to sell the David to a well-heeled gallery abroad is a canard, for export would have been blocked, and federal or provincial funds would almost certainly have been released to keep the painting in Ottawa… or Quebec.
