The Flee Market

Like many Europeans, Juan Antonio Gaya-Nuno, director of Madrid's Velasquez Institute, becomes outraged whenever he thinks about the steady flight of European art treasures to the U.S. But he does not put all the blame on the Americans. Says he, in the French magazine Connaissance des Arts: It is selfish and dollar-mad Europeans who have really done the damage.

The only art treasures that are safe, says Gaya-Nuno. are those in the big museums: the best of the private collections seem "irretrievably destined to emigrate to the U.S.. if not in this generation then during the next." The great museums of Europe themselves are already developing serious shortcomings in the thoroughness and quality of their collections. The Prado may still be the "indispensable museum" for Spanish art of the 16th through 18th centuries, says Gaya-Nuno, but for Spanish Gothic art, one must go to America.

"For Italian artists, let us take Sassetta: since Berenson gave him his present prestige, he has enjoyed such a success among the collections of America that it is there and not in Europe that one must study his work." The Louvre has 58 Delacroix; but there are 66 in the U.S., while France's neighbor Spain does not have one. Daumier is far better represented in Washington or Boston or Baltimore than in his home town of Marseille.

"American cities," continues Gaya-Nuno, "which 50 years ago were little more than a set for a western--a street, some bars, horses and cowboys--now have museums far superior to those in Amiens or Pisa." At the same time, the big museums, such as Manhattan's Metropolitan, "are just about to surpass definitively the great museums of Europe, just as the small ones surpassed their European counterparts a long time ago."

As for architecture, the European need only visit the Cloisters on the Hudson to see what has happened. There, in one "arbitrary hodgepodge," are the Saint-Guilhem cloister, the chapter house of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, woodwork from the House of Francis I in Abbeville, the cloisters of Cuxa and Bonnefont. Concludes Gaya-Nuno: "The whole of Europe is nothing but a Flea Market that waits, full of anxiety and emotion, for the arrival of the nouveau riche."

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