The Round-Up: Looted Art Exposed in House Listing, Jeff Koons Back With His Ex, and $13M For 'Conan' Cover Art

0:03Your mega gallery says, hey, come on back. Like, that's probably a relief, right? Yeah.

0:08The Art Angle Hosts:Yeah, for sure. Well, this 1966 painting Man Ape is a slightly lower price point, but it is a record holder now.

0:20I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:30We are back with our monthly roundup on the heels of our first live edition that was held at Independent 20th Century in New York last month. As usual, we're taking a look at some of the big art world headlines. Today, we are going to talk about a remarkable story out of Argentina, where a couple has been charged with concealing Nazi-looted art. Then we'll get into art star Jeff Koons, who's again on the move with a gallery representation. And finally, a work of fantasy art that sold for$13.5 million. I'm joined by my co-host Ben Davis. Hey, Ben, how's it going?

1:00The Art Angle Hosts:I'm great. I'm sad you're back in Germany, Kate, but happy to be talking to you again. Me too. And we are both very pleased to have our art market mind, Aileen Kinsella with us. Welcome back to the podcast, Aileen. Great to be here. You've been really busy the last few months with our executive producer, Sonia, working on a podcast series for Artnet. Do you want to tell us a bit about it? Yeah. Yeah, we're really excited to introduce this. It's called Art World Infamy. We're going to look at the case of Inigo Philbrick, which I reported on extensively. The first episode drops next Thursday, and then it's followed by three more that will be released each following Tuesday.

1:36So definitely tune in. We're excited about it. Very cool. Fantastic. Philbrick, for those who've been under a rock as a convicted fraudster and former art dealer who was convicted of wire fraud, you covered that very well over the years. So I'm looking forward to that. But you were also just in Chicago. Yeah. What's going on over there? So it's called Chicago Exhibition Weekend, and it was the third annual edition of the event. I mean, it's really a great, lively look at the art scene. It's spearheaded by Abby Pucker. She also founded GERDY, which is a salon that puts on exhibitions. It was basically like a citywide, you know, event with galleries participating, institutions participating.

2:15Sort of serves a dual purpose of everybody coming together without the costs of an art fair. And a lot of supplementary events and talks, dinners, a lot of energy in Chicago right now is really fun to see.

2:26The Art Angle Hosts:So it's like a Chicago gallery weekend kind of, but better promoted, better organized? Yeah. Also with the participation of institutions and quite a few, Everything from like the Art Institute of Chicago to some of the smaller institutions throughout the city. A new show on the Chicago Architectural Biennial opened at the Cultural Center. A lot of kind of like crossover promotion with galleries and institutions. You see anything cool? See anything good? There's a great show at the space called Over My Head. And it looked at like the importance and the significance of conceptual art in Chicago.

3:00Over My Head is kind of a joke to like Chicago being a quote unquote flyover city. maybe sometimes not getting the recognition it deserved.

3:07The Art Angle Hosts:Conceptual art joke out of the Midwest. Yeah. I mean, it was an interesting mix of names. Everything from Dara Birnbaum to Rushie Johnson, Martin Puryear, Rosemary Trockel. It's a great space. It's a former architecture photography space that has been taken over and is really wonderful. Nice. Cool. What about you, Ben? What have you been doing since I left? Oh, well, actually, I've been traveling a little bit too, although much closer than Chicago. I went down to Philadelphia over the weekend for the opening of Calder Gardens. Have you heard about this project? Yeah. So basically, the Alexander Calder Foundation has been working on, I guess, a museum in Philadelphia, which is where Alexander Calder is from and his dad and his granddad, who are both artists as well.

3:58The Art Angle Hosts:It's right on Museum Mile. It's actually not called a museum. They're calling it Calder Gardens, which is an interesting choice because, you know, you can't really see what it's all going to be right now because the gardens have yet to grow. It's this beautiful space you can enter. And then there is a building full of calders with all these interesting, foldy little galleries. It's a Herzog and Demeron building. They're famous museum builders. and this weekend was the debut. Philadelphia had a parade for it. It was really nice. Nice. Cool. A Calder themed parade? It was, I guess, a Philadelphia artistic innovation themed parade.

4:44The Art Angle Hosts:It's actually Sunrod's orchestra performed. Oh, wow. That's cool. There were tumblers. It was great. It was great. It was really very, very festive. Yeah, I've been seeing some pictures on Instagram, and it looks like a very Herzog installation of the art. Yeah, yeah. What I would say about the building is it's really nooky. There are a lot of nooks in it. I'll be interested to hear what the architecture press has to say about it, you know, because it's really designed as a series of moments, you know, where you come down the stairs and you find, like, an interesting little cave with a calder installed in it, And then you go down and there's like big galleries with big calder pieces and then littler galleries with little calders nestled in them.

5:30The Art Angle Hosts:And, you know, 2D calders, a little nook of like family work. It feels like it's a little trick box full of surprises. It sounds intriguing. It's going to be an interesting place to cool your feet when you're in Philadelphia. What about you, Kate? Yeah, back in Berlin, I came back and ran right into Berlin Art Week, which is 300 events, 100 plus exhibition openings. So I have no like comprehensive summary of that. I was moderating a couple panels on this museum symposium that was really interesting. And Catherine Wood from Tate and some other museum directors were in town. So that was really great.

6:07I did get to see some art, but not as much as normal. But I did see the Mark Leckie retrospective at Julia Stoshek Foundation. Mark Leckie being a British artist, you know, best known for his video works on like pop culture and subcultures. And there was a lineup down the block. It was insane, but it was also very good art inside and a good overview of his practice.

6:26The Art Angle Hosts:Did you discover anything new about him or was there one that stood out for you? I mean, his famous work is called Fiorici Made Me Hardcore from 1999. And that's nice to see in big screen because it's available on YouTube, but it's not to the same effect. But I guess my learning was that I don't love his new object-oriented art as much as his video works. But it was just interesting to see the full breadth of his practice altogether. Anyhow, let's get into it. We will rove right over to Argentina to start. Our colleague Brian Boucher was covering this story. Recently, in the beginning of September, an Argentine court charged Patricia Kajan, the daughter of a Nazi financial officer, and her husband was concealing stolen art.

7:06They say their holdings included 22 works or more. But the case began when a Dutch journalist spotted an 18th century painting by Giuseppe Gislandi in a real estate ad for their house, which I guess they had put up for sale. It's very strange. And actually, he was there anyway. he went knocking on their door because it was the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and Kajan was a known figure to have absconded with works of art, and they didn't answer the door. But because he was there, he noticed that the house for sale and ended up just by chance noticing this real estate listing. It's quite a wild tale.

7:45The Art Angle Hosts:Well, obviously the hook, or the big thing about the story, is the fact that it was discovered when this painting was glimpsed in this real estate listing. That is just such a funny thing. I mean, it's a serious story because the question of Nazi loot is very serious, but the photo itself is very funny. Don't you think the photo is funny? It is this sort of, I don't know what to call it, stately painting. And it is depicted above this hideous green couch in this room. And it is way too big for the wall it is on. Like if you were sitting in this couch, you could easily like put your head back into this, through this woman's body.

8:28The Art Angle Hosts:And just the fact that they found it that way is very, very funny, I think. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. What do you make of it? I mean, it made my head spin because I've covered a lot of Nazi loot and restitution stories and people go to such great lengths to conceal like an image of an artwork or the existence of it. Or like sometimes they try to hide things on the paper trail. And it was just like probably one of the most blatant and obvious cases of like, you shouldn't have this. It was ill gotten gain. I've seen many cases where there's a little bit of a gray area where it's like, was it taken under duress?

9:03Was it sold under duress? Was it stolen? But in this case, the family members are direct descendants of an officer that worked with Herman Goering, notorious art thief and brutal Nazi officer. And So just left little to the imagination about how they got it and why it was on their wall. Yeah. Yeah. Just to add to the weirdness of it all, then they hid the painting. So when the investigators finally got access to the house, they had swapped it out for a tapestry, according to the media reports.

9:30The Art Angle Hosts:A large rug with horses and some nature zines, which I love. So, you know, we'll see what transpires in the court proceedings, but it seems like why would they hide it? But then they have said now that they claim they didn't know its provenance and they have filed in court to keep the painting. But this is a high profile case because the Jewish art dealer who the painting was looted from, Jacques Goudsteker, there's been lots of restitution cases surrounding his collection. Aileen, you probably read about this too over the years. Right. He was a Dutch dealer and he tried to flee during the war in the rough times and apparently was trying to flee but fell on a ship and died.

10:07I've heard his name numerous times. But one thing that I thought maybe would be worth mentioning is that in many of these cases, there is no direct path to the restitution. Like it made me think of the whole story about Woman in Gold, you know, that famous Gustav Klimt painting that became the subject of a movie. The woman who owned it actually did will those paintings to the Belvedere. But then, you know, then 1938 and Kristallnacht, everything else happened. And so, so many other things happened in between that her heirs had to like go back and prove like, no, eventually these paintings were stolen under duress.

10:42But it wasn't until like archives in Austria were opened in the early 2000s that the way was paid for it to go back, which is all to say that even though, as I said, it's a blatant case of, yeah, this was stolen, the path to restitution, there's going to be legal hurdles. You mentioned the couple already went to court to say, this is ours and we're not returning it and it's disappeared from the wall. So there's probably going to be a process before anything gets returned or goes back.

11:10The Art Angle Hosts:So the AFP reported they have been charged now. They hid the painting when the police showed up after this Dutch paper first reported on this. They've had a long and running investigation into Nazi loot and were looking into the specific painting, kind of suspected this family had it. And so we're watching their real estate listings. They went on to go back through their Facebook photos and find another missing painting. It's not exactly clear if it's Nazi loot, but they posted just another still life that is known to be missing on Facebook that people are looking into now. And according to the AFP, when they did the raid, the police opened an investigation and conducted multiple raids in search of the painting, only to find 22 works from the 1940s by Matisse and others whose origins have yet to be determined.

12:01The Art Angle Hosts:So I just think that's very funny that they chose to have this painting, which is rather dour instead of a beautiful Matisse above their couch. I mean, come on. And you're trying to sell the house. I mean, which looks better? Could you shortly describe the painting? Because it is not the most beautiful work of art. It is a painting of the Contessa Caglione from 1710. It has a dark background and, you know, a fairly, you know, distinguished looking woman in quarter profile looking out at you. It just doesn't do a lot for me, to be honest. But it's actually, in a way, an interesting thing. The Jewish Museum some years ago did a show of art restituted from the Gudestekker collection.

12:52The Art Angle Hosts:and they're not all hits. You know, this is the thing about the restitution is that, you know, it's just the art that was stolen from an art dealer, which could include very good works and lesser works. I have no idea where this kind of homely painting to me sits in that. The Argentine press says it's worth$50 ,000, which all told is not that much for an old master. There was another article from a different paper that now is saying that it might be worth$300 ,000 and an expert is now saying that they might be by a different artist. It just seems that we're going to be hearing a lot more from this story.

13:29This is going to be an ongoing legal drama. I'm sure the experts are all about to descend and examine this painting. But we should move on to talk about something a little bit lighter. Jeff Koons' light feat in the gallery world, he's always moving around between galleries every few years. He just left Pace a little while ago and now he's back at Gagosian. Aileen, what's been going on with Koons? Yeah, I mean, he's moved around a lot over the past, I guess, decade, and he's back at Gagosian. He had a four-year stint with Pace Gallery, another mega that took him on exclusively in 2021. Not the height of the pandemic, but the immediate aftermath of it.

14:10And I think the goal was always to kind of corral his market because he's been notorious for like really expensive production costs and some of the galleries that he's been with in the past actually, you know, sold works to people before fabrication even began and then, you know, ran into problems with things not being delivered on time. Some very wealthy collectors got angry and sued both him and his gallery. So the idea with Pace was to like corral this, right? Like get it all under control, not sell things that hadn't been fabricated yet. I've heard some rumblings that costs ran up again and now he's back at Gagosian, which in a way it's kind of unusual because Gagosian was one of the galleries that was dealing with the lawsuits that came from these things not being delivered on time.

14:56And I don't know what happened with Pace. I mean, I'm assuming that things didn't work out if he's gone after four years. But at the same time, you know, I also have seen that sometimes when artists are like so big and so kind of successful that they can kind of write their own ticket. Like back in 2013 he was showing at both gagosian and david zwerner that's right those gazing ball

15:18The Art Angle Hosts:sculptures that were very famous absolutely dreadful and you know the thing that makes me laugh a little bit is kind of like say what you want like whether you like him or you don't like him i'm not a huge fan but there's always an incredible buzz around anything that he does and i was thinking back to this past may at freeze when gagosian showed these incredible Hulk sculptures and they're all playing different instruments. I heard that one sold for three million, but the booth was just packed. It was like, I don't know, maybe it's this like, you know, comic fantasy. It like stirs up something like nostalgic and people for the Hulk in particular, but the booth was just packed.

15:55The Art Angle Hosts:I mean, we talked about that. We did a previous podcast about that. We talk about this guy too much. Do you think we talk about him too much? Is he a big deal to people? I mean, he's really in the late stage of his career. He's been working on this series of, I think, porcelain inspired, inspired by old timey porcelain figurine sculptures. I think Pace, maybe after they got representation of him, maybe showed one of those at an art fair, kept promising that there would be a show of them. And to my knowledge, that hasn't happened. He's a famous artist, but he seems to have performance issues. Well, Eileen, you covered, I remember back in, I think it was 2021, you wrote about his market and it was trending downwards at that time.

16:40And so I guess like just to tack on to Ben's question, in this new scenario of the art market, which, you know, we've also been talking about on the podcast, is Coons now again a safe bet after sort of falling out of favor market-wise? I mean, one of the things that I looked at when I was reporting that he was going back to Gagosian after four years at Pace was his overall sales. And they've dipped really sharply over the past couple of years. I should be clear that that's at auction. And I guess, you know, you could say, oh, maybe not a lot has come up. But when you look at like the fact that he's the most expensive living artist at auction and that's for that stainless steel rabbit, which sold for over 90 million dollars in 2019.

17:22Is it like, oh, because that's the Holy Grail and that was at the height of his career and that was the height of his production. That's like the bauble that every contemporary art trophy hunter wants. Yeah, that's still a fact that he's the most expensive living artist, but maybe some of that luster has disappeared as he's continued to, as Ben says, not produce or not fulfill some of these obligations. Is it like that was the height of his career and that's still a fact, but maybe things have dropped since? Not maybe, they have.

17:50The Art Angle Hosts:Well, I was more interested in this story because I wanted to talk to you about artists changing galleries, Eileen, because I think this is an interesting thing. most artists of course just have no gallery and then there are these some star artists who galleries are bargaining for and to a certain extent kunz is a unique figure because really he can only work with a mega gallery you know because only a mega gallery could possibly fund the things that he's doing which involve this tremendous amount of fabrication know-how and expense. And he's a huge perfectionist. He's bankrupted himself before.

18:32The Art Angle Hosts:He's a chancy person to work with. But on the other hand, there is this dynamic of galleries competing for artists. And I just, there's been some talk about that being a destructive spiral. So I wondered what you thought about those news stories. Yeah. I mean, also he's known for having a huge studio practice. I'm sure at some point we've reported on how many people he employs. And I know that they do a lot of the fabricating and the work. So that's another cost to consider. I mean, what I'm curious about is, you know, like I said, Gagosian has endured lawsuits from him. Like, what's their game plan going forward?

19:10Like, nobody has really told me about that. Like, when I talked to Pace back in 2021, they're like, we want to get his market under control, right? And you're completely accurate that only another mega gallery could afford to support these kinds kind of outrageous fabrication costs. What is the Gagosian deal going forward? Like, are they going to also stick to saying, like, we're not going to sell your work until it's actually fabricated? What do they hope to get out of it? And it's probably a good deal for him, right? He's being backed by his old former gallery that has given him a lot of love that sold his work at Freeze and, you know, created this huge buzz.

19:45The Art Angle Hosts:I mean, back when he left Gagosian for Pace, and people were reporting on that a few years ago, and they got a comment from Gagosian. It was a one-line text message. Gagosian said, it seems like a good fit, which was terse. And it very much sounded like, good luck to you, is what it sounded like. So they've got him back. And maybe they've got a new plan. Who knows? He hasn't had any shows announced with Gagosian yet, has he? No. No. Okay. It is a little bit of a mystery why he went back there. Yeah, yeah. It'll be interesting to see what they have planned for him and, you know, when the big debut, I guess it's not really a debut, but when the homecoming or the big return comes.

20:26I was just going to say one thing, which is that for Koons, it's probably a great deal, right? Like he's back at his mega. My question is what Gagosian gets out of it and what the deal is like going forward. But if you're a mega artist with these production costs and your mega gallery says, hey, come on back, like that's probably a relief, right? Yeah.

20:44The Art Angle Hosts:Yeah, for sure. Well, this 1966 painting Man Ape is a slightly lower price point, but It is a record holder now. So Ben, please tour us through this story. Sure, sure. Well, you know, I don't know. Jeff Koons is a artist who, you know, what's the tagline? He questions high and low taste. So in a way, it's a perfect transition into the last story we wanted to talk about, which is about the sale of this Frank Frazetta painting called Man Ape from 1966. It sold for$13.5 million at Heritage Auction House in Dallas, Texas. it is a painting that people associate with Conan the Barbarian. It was made to become the cover of a collection of Conan the Barbarian stories from the 1960s that became a big blockbuster and kind of defined the look that we think of when we think of Conan the Barbarian and indeed of swords and sorcery as a genre in general.

21:45The Art Angle Hosts:So an important painting in its category, Frazetta is probably one of the most famous fantasy artists, very specific genre of pop art. He has had numerous sales in the last few years in the millions of dollars. So he is definitely at this point closing in on being like a blue chip artist. And for those who haven't seen it, although I encourage you to look it up, the painting is set in a dungeon. You have this scary barbarian character, shirtless barbarian, wielding a dagger who's leaping into the air and throwing his legs like a wrestler around the neck of this screaming ape creature with a flowing, dramatic red cape.

22:41So they're locked in combat and it's dramatic.