Nelson Mandela sues former lawyer over sale of prints
The statesman says unauthorised works are being sold in his name at exorbitant prices

LONDON. Nelson Mandela is suing his former lawyer over a bitter dispute involving the sale of art prints. The revered South African statesman claims that he has been betrayed by Ismail Ayob, who represented him in the 1970s when he was imprisoned by the Apartheid regime on Robben Island. For many years Mr Ayob remained one of Mr Mandela’s closest confidants.

Until recently, it would have come as a surprise to learn that the South African statesman had turned his hand to art, but Mr Ayob encouraged Mr Mandela to agree to the production of lithographic prints based on his “artworks”. The idea was to raise funds for homeless children and AIDS victims.

Mr Mandela’s side now claims that unauthorised prints are being marketed which bear false signatures. It is argued that these sales are worth millions of dollars. Mr Mandela’s prints typically sold for over $10,000 each until last month.

Now that the case has gone to court, it seems that Mr Mandela’s role as an artist may well have led to the final legal battle in his long political career. As the 86-year-old anti-Apartheid leader explained in papers filed with the Johannesburg high court on 10 May, “having regard to my age, I want to ensure that my affairs are in order”.

The lawyer leading the case for Mr Mandela is George Bizos. He told The Art Newspaper: “Mr Mandela feels strongly about the issues and wants to protect his name, protect the public, and protect the reputation of his philanthropic organisations.” Mr Bizos says that “none” of the money due to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and the Nelson Mandela Foundation has yet been paid.

Activist-turned-artist

The story begins in 2001, when it was suggested to Mr Mandela that he should produce simple works of art which could be turned into lithographic prints to raise funds for charity.

The deal was arranged by Mr Mandela’s then lawyer, Mr Ayob, and papers were signed transferring intellectual property rights to Tinancier, a company controlled by Mr Ayob. Two other companies were also involved in marketing the prints.

Mr Mandela explained to the court: “Ayob has acted in a mala fide manner, leading me to believe that he would comply with my wishes and requests, while pursuing a separate and secret agenda”. He argues “the agreement is invalid because it is so vague and ambiguous as to be all but incoherent”. The former South African president says he was unaware of the legal implications of what he was signing.

Mr Mandela’s personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, commented on the nature of his earlier relationship with his lawyer. “Generally, Mr Ayob would give a short explanation to Mr Mandela about the documents for which he sought his signature. Mr Ayob would say: ‘Chief, this is about this or the other project’. Because of the trust Mr Mandela had in relation to his attorney’s integrity, he would sign documents presented to him by Mr Ayob without difficulty.”

By December 2003 Mr Mandela had become concerned that the limited-edition prints were being sold on a large scale and he therefore withdrew his endorsement, refusing to sign further examples.

Mr Ayob and his business associate, publisher Ross Calder, are now accused of handling “mechanically and photographically reproduced innumerable copies which are being sold at exorbitant prices”. So far up to Rands 40 million ($6 million) is said to be “not accounted” for.

Mr Mandela argues that the “unlawful and illegal activities” surrounding the sale of his lithographs “deceive and mislead unsuspecting members of the public to spend substantial amounts of money on artworks and merchandise in the mistaken belief that I have been involved in their creation”.

The South African statesman is therefore asking the court to rescind the contract and for Mr and Mrs Ayob to be removed from their positions in the Nelson Mandela Trust, the NRM Family Trust and the Mandela Trust. He also wants audited financial statements of the money that went into the trusts and companies that sold the prints. In addition, he wants Mr Ayob and publisher Mr Calder to halt further marketing efforts.

Rebuttal

Those accused by Mr Mandela have not yet made a formal response, but Mr Ayob dismisses the charges against him as “vague and unspecific”. He has also said that “at no stage have I benefited or done anything improper”. Mr Calder, the publisher, has promised to “defend everything in court”. He added, “They’ve told their story, but soon it will be my time”. Formal responses were expected late last month.

Meanwhile galleries marketing the prints, which were not involved in their production, are now having to consider whether to continue to sell them. The Natal-based Mark Gallery, one of seven around the world licensed to sell the prints, withdrew them from sale last month.

A similar decision was taken in London by Belgravia Gallery director Anna Hunter, who is one of the main European distributors. On 9 May the prints were still hanging in the Albemarle Street gallery, at prices of up to £12,500, but by the end of that week, Ms Hunter told us that they had been withdrawn, “until the legal situation is resolved”. Martin Bailey

[BOX]

Tutored by the granddaughter of Apartheid prime minister

Mandela’s first prints in 2001 were The struggle series, a set of lithographs depicting manacled and clenched hands. These were simple line drawings. Although presumably based on Mr Mandela’s ideas, he almost certainly had professional assistance. They were followed by Impressions of Mandela, a pair of works depicting his handprints (the second print was changed slightly to make the image of the African continent appear in the centre of his palm).

In 2003-04 there were two sets of colour lithographs with scenes from the prison where he was incarcerated, each with five images: My Robben Island I and My Robben Island II. A further set of prints which also involved the work of other artists was called The unity series. It was released in January this year at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Mr Mandela says he had no involvement with The unity series—and its release was a major factor behind the current law case.

Print runs were supposed to be limited and Mandela’s celebrity status means that prices were high. For instance, My Robben Island I was an edition of 500 (plus 50 artist’s proofs), and until last month it was being sold by the South African publisher at £49,000, or £75,000 for proofs.

Even before the latest legal row, questions had been raised about the extent of Mr Mandela’s involvement in the art. Belgravia Gallery director Anna Hunter responds that the Robben Island lithographs were made with the help of photographs taken by a professional under Mr Mandela’s supervision. Mr Mandela then drew simple images based on, but not traced from, the photographs. He is said to have coloured each of the seven separations on tracing paper. Production of the lithographs was done under Professor Stephen Inggs at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

The South African publisher admits that Mr Mandela was “tutored” by Varenka Paschke, the granddaughter of Apartheid Prime Minister P.W. Botha, who ultimately released Mr Mandela from prison in 1990. An examination of the prints suggests a professional hand at work: the colouring is bold and freely applied. Most amateur artists would have done the job more neatly, by adding the colour right up to the edges of the black outlines, although this would have been less effective.

It is difficult to believe that the aged and extremely busy statesman would really have been able to master a new skill when he was well into his eighties. But in lending his name to the prints, Mr Mandela was following a long artistic tradition of relying on a studio—this began in the 14th century and is carried on today by artists such as Damien Hirst. M.B.

  
   Friday, 10 June 2005

Il Giornale dell’Arte
Le Journal des Arts
Il Giornale dell’Architettura

Umberto Allemandi e C.  

The composer was certainly a genius, but he diverted music from elegant universality into tortured self-obsession

Dylan Evans
Tuesday June 7, 2005

Guardian

It’s Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 will have filled six days of airtime with every single note the composer wrote – every symphony, every quartet, every sonata and lots more besides. This coincides with a series of three films on BBC2 in which the conductor Charles Hazlewood tells us about the composer’s life, and three programmes of musical analysis on BBC4.
It’s good to see classical music getting some coverage on primetime TV, but the relentless focus on Beethoven is dire. Not all fans of classical music are members of the Beethoven cult. Some of us even think he did more harm than good to classical music.

Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music, but this change was a change for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven’s fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven’s original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.

This is not to deny Beethoven’s genius, but simply to claim that he employed his genius in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea. If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences.

It’s instructive to compare Beethoven’s morbid self-obsession with the unselfconscious vivacity of Mozart. Like Bach’s perfectly formed fugues and Vivaldi’s sparkling concertos, Mozart’s music epitomises the baroque and classical ideals of formal elegance and functional harmony; his compositions “unfold with every harmonic turn placed at the right moment, to leave, at the end, a sense of perfect finish and unity”, as the music critic Paul Griffiths puts it. Above all, Mozart’s music shares with that of Bach an exuberant commitment to the Enlightenment values of clarity, reason, optimism and wit.

With Beethoven, however, we leave behind the lofty aspirations of the Enlightenment and begin the descent into the narcissistic inwardness of Romanticism. Mozart gives you music that asks to be appreciated for its own sake, and you don’t need to know anything about the composer’s life to enjoy it. Beethoven’s music, on the other hand, is all about himself – it is simply a vehicle for a self-indulgent display of bizarre mood swings and personal difficulties.

Hazlewood claims, in his BBC2 series, that music “grew up” with Beethoven; but it would be more accurate to say that it regressed back into a state of sullen adolescence. Even when he uses older forms, such as the fugue, Beethoven twists them into cruel and angry parodies. The result is often fiercely dissonant, with abrupt changes in style occurring from one movement to another, or even in the same movement. Hazlewood is right to describe Beethoven as a “hooligan”, but this is hardly a virtue. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.

I won’t be able to resist tuning in to Beethoven at times this week, but I’ll need to cheer myself up with something more optimistic and life-affirming afterwards.

· Dylan Evans is a senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England

www.dylan.org.uk

Sunday, June 05, 2005
Steven Litt
Plain Dealer Art Critic

At first, it was a joyous artistic discovery. Now it’s one of the hottest controversies in the art world.

Three weeks ago, with great fanfare, New York art dealer Mark Borghi announced the discovery of 32 hitherto-unknown paintings and studies by Jackson Pollock, the raging bull of 20th-century American art.

Cleveland art historian Ellen Landau, an expert on Pollock, added luster to the announcement by stating that the works are authentic.

“As soon as I took a look, I was amazed,” Landau said at the time, recalling the moment in August when Borghi first showed her the paintings. “The provenance is impeccable. When you look at these works, you know they’re by Jackson Pollock.”

Since then, however, Eugene Victor Thaw, a famous art dealer and highly respected expert on Pollock, has cast doubt on the paintings.

In comments published in The New York Times, Thaw said that at best, the paintings are works in the style of Pollock, possibly by the artist’s friend, Mercedes Matter, and/or her students.

And at worst?

Thaw made it clear he didn’t think the paintings were authentic. The Times, in promoting its article, employed the red-flag term “fakes,” which implies fraud as opposed to an innocent mistake in attributing authorship of a work of art.

In the article, however, Thaw was not quoted using the term “fakes” himself.

Thaw, reached at his home in New Mexico last week, declined to comment further.

“I have said all I’m going to say on this matter, and I really don’t want to be interviewed again,” he said. “Say what you have to say. I’m an old man now and not really interested in getting mixed up any further in this. Let these pieces be seen, and let the art world make its own judgment.”

Landau, reached at her home in Shaker Heights last week, declined to comment on Thaw’s statements.

A look

at the paintings

The dispute has cast a shadow, at least temporarily, over the paintings. And it has exposed a rift in the small, normally harmonious world of Pollock experts.

Landau is the author of a book on Pollock and has published a catalogue raisonne — or complete catalog — of the works of Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. She has worked cooperatively in the past with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a nonprofit organization formerly presided over by Thaw.

“I’m saddened,” Borghi said. “I wished this wouldn’t have happened. I think it’s unfortunate.” He called Thaw’s statements “prejudiced, biased and baseless. All one has to do is stand in front of these [paintings], and you see it’s baseless.”

In his gallery on East 76th Street in Manhattan, Borghi displayed two of the Pollocks in a private viewing 11 days ago.

One, titled “No. 9,” was a small galaxy of white swirls and droplets over turbulent undercurrents of black and silver. Flecks of reddish-orange sparkled across the image, like sparks of energy. The pigment rested on the surface of the painting in thick layers, with each rivulet creating its own ridge of paint.

“It’s really dazzling,” Borghi said.

The other work, “No. 6,” featured streaks of yellow against a turbulent backdrop of black and blackish green.

The dealer also brought out photographs of a dozen other works from the discovered bundle. They included images of thick, red splotches of paint on a white background; large gray swirls on a yellow background; and a turbulent, jazzy composition of rich blues and violets painted in a dense thicket of splatters.

Studies done

in a New York apartment

Borghi said that filmmaker Alex Matter discovered the paintings in late 2002 or early 2003 in the Long Island town of East Hampton, N.Y., in a storage unit that had belonged to his father, photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter, a close friend of Pollock’s.

They were wrapped in brown paper, with a note scribbled by the elder Matter saying the works were experimental studies painted by Pollock in Matter’s Tudor City apartment in Manhattan, opposite the present site of the United Nations.

Matter had allowed Pollock to work in the apartment on and off from 1946 to 1949, years that coincide with his breakthrough as a painter of mural-size drip-and-splatter paintings. Pollock tacked large canvases to the floor of his barn in Springs, N.Y., also on Long Island, and used sticks and brushes to hurl paint from cans onto the surface.

Apparently, though, Pollock was working simultaneously in Matter’s apartment, making richly colored paintings with the same technique, but on a far smaller scale. The paintings saved by Matter measure from 5-by-7 inches to 15-by-18 inches.

A meeting

with Thaw

After discovering the paintings, Alex Matter approached Borghi, who was already representing the estate of Mercedes Matter, Herbert’s wife and Alex’s mother, who died in 2001. Alex brought small groups of works to Borghi, over many months, while Borghi advised him to take the works to New York art conservator Franco Lissy to have them cleaned.

“I was salivating,” Borghi said. “[Alex Matter] never really told me how many there were. I was at least 10 months into it before I understood what I was dealing with.”

In August, Borghi invited Landau to a private viewing. Together, they started to plan a national touring exhibition, to be organized by Landau, in which the paintings would play a central role. Borghi says at least half a dozen art museums are interested.

Two months before announcing the discovery of the paintings publicly, Borghi flew to Santa Fe, N.M., with five of the works. He wanted to show them to Thaw as a courtesy to one of the art world’s reigning experts on Pollock.

“When I met him, he looked at them for five minutes and just sat down to talk to me about them,” Borghi said. “The balance of the time was just discussing when we were going to publish them. He was curious about whether there were others.”

Borghi said he didn’t ask Thaw to authenticate the works, and Thaw didn’t offer to do so.

Then, as Borghi put it, “Mr. Thaw decided to weigh in and decide he was king” by debunking the paintings. The disagreement raises an age-old question about works of art: How do you tell what’s real?

In the case of the Pollocks, the facts are likely to emerge slowly. Borghi said he’s enlisting scientific experts to analyze the pigments in the paintings, which could prove whether they match the age and chemistry of other pigments Pollock used.

Matter’s scribbled note on the wrapping around the paintings indicated that Pollock had used an experimental paint developed by a Swiss manufacturer. The composition of the paint could provide a chemical fingerprint to prove authenticity.

Borghi was also recruiting artists who knew Mercedes Matter to offer testimony about Thaw’s contention that she could have painted the pictures stored on Long Island by her husband.

Graham Nickson, a former associate of Mercedes who has been contacted by Borghi, said he had no opinion on the authenticity of the paintings.

But he strongly doubted they could have been painted by Mercedes, a former friend of his. Nickson is dean of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, a job formerly held by Mercedes.

“She was very much unlikely to copy somebody else’s style,” he said. “She never made drip paintings.”

As for the works championed by Borghi and Landau, Nickson’s view is likely one shared by most observers.

“They should get the paintings out and let the sides be drawn and make some new educated observations,” he said. “The thing to do is to keep an open mind until it’s all sorted out.”