Snap Judge

The red-draped galleries of the Hotel Drouot bulged last week with the world's top connoisseurs of modern French painting. Some 700 had come to bid at Paris' most important art auction since the war, and incidentally to get a look at the shrewdest judge of them all. Looking like a plump old Napoleon, Art Expert Andre Schoeller sat where everyone could see him, just below the auctioneer's dais. On the block were oils by Degas, Pissarro, Braque, Modigliani and Matisse. Schoeller's presence was enough to guarantee that every one of the paintings was genuine.

Because war and the Nazis did such a thorough job of scrambling European art, Schoeller's bear-trap assurance in identifying modern masters, his prodigious memory and reputation, make him a more valuable asset than ever at art sales. Schoeller's ice-blue eyes are the final authority on French painting of the past 150 years. He has little need for the X-ray machines and chemical tests used by most experts and generally detects forgeries in one bright glance. Says he, the "language" of a painting is the thing to look for: painting is as crammed with personal quirks as handwriting.

Beginning with Buddha. Schoeller, now 68, made his first right guess before the turn ot the century. On his desk stands a little bronze Buddha he picked up for five francs when he was 13. Today it is worth 2,000. Schoeller has since appraised and verified thousands of art works. Usually he has disappointing news for people who bring him "masters," and he has made plenty of enemies. But his enemies say they know of only two errors he ever made: he wrongly suspected a genuine Courbet, and once had to withdraw a "Toulouse-Lautrec" he had certified for auction. It was a fake.

He lives and works on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in a large apartment. His office has somewhat the same clinical elegance as that of a Park Avenue surgeon. As many as 30 people a day come to him with suspect masterpieces. His habit is to breeze silently through a collection of paintings, nodding his pink pate yes or no. It looks casual, but there is no appeal. His decision, say dealers, can remove all doubt on the authenticity of any French painting since David and Delacroix.

The Real Smell. The only modern painter Schoeller refuses to certify is Primitive Henri Rousseau (too easy to forge). Other favorites with forgers: Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Gauguin. Most difficult to fake:

Cezanne--"you can smell the quality of the real ones a mile off."

Schoeller's hypersensitive smeller makes him as highly respected in his field as Florence's more scholarly "B.B.," Bernard Berenson (TIME, Feb. 17), is in the field of Renaissance Italian art and Amsterdam's Max Friedlander on Dutch, Flemish and German painting. But he is sometimes challenged.

Schoeller likes to tell about the collector who brought him a forged Daumier and flew into righteous rage when he rejected it. It seemed the collector had a certificate from Schoeller saying the painting was genuine. But, adds Schoeller with a chuckle, of course the certificate too was a forgery, "a very good one."

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