How to Smell a Rubens

If it takes discretion, judgment, finesse and expertise to run a first-rate art museum, it should take no less of those qualities to run a first-rate art auction house such as Christie's of London. Consider last week's strange case of the "discovered" Rubens.

The case began last spring when a frail, 82-year-old lady named Eva Savage consigned a batch of 35 presumably undistinguished paintings to Christie's to be auctioned. Her husband, who died 15 years ago, had been a picture framer whose practice was to buy old frames which he would then regild and use. Often the pictures in the frames went with the deal. On one such occasion in 1933, Mrs. Savage recalls, her husband bought a wagonload of frames at an average price of 10 shillings each from a dealer in York, who for good measure happened to throw in a florid baroque painting of a traditional mythological subject, The Judgment of Paris.

Scent on the Hill. When Paris came in the auction-house door, judgment apparently flew out the window. Christie's director, David Carritt, was on vacation, and his evaluators, incredibly, attributed the work to a mediocre 17th century copyist named Lankrink, appraised it at $280, and placed it in the July 28 auction catalogue. Then it was hung in "the Hill," a long, sloping corridor where a few specialists are allowed to browse among works soon to be sold. There it was that Oliver Millar, deputy surveyor of the Queen's painting collection, paused and pondered one day last July. As he surveyed the two plump goddesses surrounding Paris and Venus, Millar now recalls, "I smelled a Rubens."

According to standard art-market plots, Millar should have kept mum, sent an unknown agent to the auction and picked up a six-figure painting for a three-figure pittance. But as a public-service scholar and a proper servant of the Crown, he says, his only ethical course was to get the painting properly identified. Besides, as he somewhat testily adds, the Crown collection "already has a great number of Rubenses." Millar sought out Christie's Carritt, diffidently asked: "Isn't that a rather important picture you've got in your sale?" Carritt took a quick stroll through the Hill, cast an eye at Paris, exclaimed, "My God!" and withdrew the work from the sale.

Like Brer Rabbit. He left it hanging in the Hill, though, and somehow a tantalizing rumor spread through the art market that there was something up at Christie's. Soon everyone in the trade was haunting the Hill and sniffing the air, each desperately trying to look at the painting without being caught looking at the painting. Indulging in a price-piquing little auction-house charade, Christie's directors twice escorted London's National Gallery director, Sir Philip Hendy, past the painting, slyly watched his reaction. Said one later: "He just sat tight like Brer Rabbit and said nuffin'." Hendy was thinking plenty, though. During a silverware sale, a red baize screen was placed just below the picture. While every head in Christie's was presumably turned, Hendy says, "I slipped in behind the screen and spent the entire morning looking at the picture. It was terrific. I thought we had a cinch."

Meanwhile, Christie's experts were at work. With the help of Millar and Rubens Authority Michael Jaffe, they uncovered a Rubens pen drawing that almost certainly is a preliminary sketch for the figure of Paris. By meticulous study of the treatment of draperies, fabrics and modeling, they established to their satisfaction--and certainly to Christie's satisfaction--that the unsigned work was probably painted by Rubens around 1600 when he was appointed court painter to the Duke of Mantua. By week's end such buyers as Multimillionaire J. Paul Getty and the National Gallery were preparing their auction strategy. Probable sale price: around $250,000. will also deprive me of the possibility of being right."

With his protege, Conductor Robert Craft, Stravinsky is writing a series of prickly books about himself and the music world. The latest, Themes and Episodes (352 pages; Knopf; $6.95), contains program notes on Stravinsky works, but readers will hurry through these to get to the old master's targets for the day. They are all bull's-eyes.

Battling Britten. For example, Stravinsky feels that Benjamin Britten's lavishly praised War Requiem (TIME, Dec. 20, 1963) is overrated. He turns to the music, with "Kleenex at the ready, feeling as though one had failed to stand up for God Save the Queen." There he finds a "cinemascope epic in an idiom derived in part from Boulanger-period Stravinsky," patterns rather than inventions, and "an absence of real counterpoint." The panegyrists call the work an overwhelming success, he writes, "but then, nothing fails like success."

Nor is he impressed by Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Last Savage: "It is 'farther out' than anything I have seen in a decade; in the wrong direction, of course. The latter two-thirds of this score should have been composed by feeding the first third to a machine."

Another victim is Conductor-Composer-Pianist Leonard Bernstein: "I would not be surprised to hear of his conducting several concerts at the same time, giving an opening downbeat in Carnegie Hall, then flying off to lead the first measures of another concert in Lincoln Center, and so on, while subordinates--for he has become a department store--rush in and bring the various pieces through to the end. But how dull New York would be without Leonard Bernstein."

Farewell to Fallopians. As for the new technological "conductors," the recording engineers, Stravinsky complains that they replace natural sound and "endearing" human errors--such as the cracked horn notes heard in concert halls--with "a super-glossy chem-fab music substitute that was never heard on sea or land, including Philadelphia. A recording nowadays has been so thoroughly 'corrected' technically that it is as unlike a live performance as a painted corpse in a Hollywood mortuary is unlike a living human being."

Looking to see what directions the avant-garde is taking, Stravinsky offers an ironic farewell to festivals that feature "each year's crop of new Japanese and Polish geniuses with half-minute pieces for several hundred percussion instruments and featuring the Fallopian tubes." He sees a trend in a John Cage opus that consists of nothing but four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

"We may expect his example to be followed by more and more silent pieces by younger composers who will produce their silences with more and more varied and beguiling combinations," Stravinsky says. "I only hope they turn out to be works of major length."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.