Red Faces at the Louvre

The predominant color at the Louvre this week: red. The cause: embarrassment. Since Sept. 24, some 20,000 people a week have streamed through the museum to see 102 impressive French masterpieces on cultural exchange from Russia's Hermitage and Pushkin collections. One of those people, Art Dealer Daniel Wildenstein, at 48 an eminent authority on painting, was not so impressed. In a tart letter to Le Figaro, he cited 15 paintings as "incontestably apocryphal," which is a polite way of saying fake.

"Some were not even painted during the lifetimes of the artists to whom they are attributed," wrote Wildenstein. Among others, he named two so-called Claude Lorrains, a Boucher, a Watteau (which he described as "flea market quality") and a Courbet. As for the portrait of Ingres by David, "It is not by David and does not represent Ingres"; in fact, in 1796, it was exhibited as a work by Constance Mayer. Says Wildenstein, who consulted his reference library of 300,000 books before speaking out: "The Russians are simply making fun of us with this exhibit."

The Russians have vociferously denied Wildenstein's charges, but French critics tend to agree with him. "The Russians boxed us in very neatly on this one," an art critic for Le Figaro said privately. "On est des cocus." (We've been cuckolded.) As for the Louvre's curators, they protested that they had merely accepted the show from Bordeaux, where it was organized by the Gaullist mayor, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, with the blessings of Culture Minister Andre Malraux. However, one curator admitted: "The first thing I did when I noticed--uh--certain things, was rewrite the catalogue."

Under the terms of the exchange, the Louvre had packed 52 top-quality French paintings off to the U.S.S.R. Getting a chance to examine those works, suggested Wildenstein, might do the Russians some good. "Russians probably know a lot about ikons," he said, "but I don't think they know much about French painting."

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