DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711140063

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E10  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  163 lines

MISLABELED ART RAISES THORNY ISSUE

IS THE Winslow Homer painting from the Tweed Museum collection now on view in Williamsburg really a Homer?

The label says it probably is.

But a scholar who wrote the book on the Tweed's collection claims it is not.

The upshot is far less dramatic than what might seem at first like intentional fraud, involving a clerical mistake and incomplete files on the artist. But the incident brings up thorny issues of attribution, or the accurate pegging of artist to artwork - an process that requires a vast amount of research time, months and years that staff-shy art institutions find hard to come by.

Here's how it played out.

Last Sunday, J. Gray Sweeney, professor of art at Arizona State University in Tempe, led a public tour of several dozen works from the Tweed's 19th and 20th century American painting collection, a traveling exhibit, which recently went on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. The Tweed Museum of Art is part of the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Aware that Sweeney had written the definitive catalog on the collection, Muscarelle officials booked the American-art historian to lecture in Williamsburg.

He arrived 45 minutes before his talk, quickly scanned the show, then candidly shared his surprise with the 50 art lovers who came. He explained how his painstaking research in the late 1970s and early 1980s discredited numerous paintings, and yet he found several of those same works displayed and, in his opinion, mislabeled. (He later stressed that the uncertain attributions are no reflection on the Muscarelle's integrity.)

``Watching the Sea,'' labeled as the work of Homer, is a moody, gray scene of a woman seated on a rock and looking out to sea.

When Sweeney first encountered the work in the late '70s, he told the group, ``it didn't really ring true to the Homers I knew. Yet no one scholar can know about all of these artists' works all of the time.''

So he showed the work to three experts on Homer. The trio concurred: ``Very nice, impressive painting, but not by Homer.''

Also, Sweeney's catalog, still used by the Tweed Museum, states that ``a work donated as a Winslow Homer was shown to be a forgery when, at the request of (former) Director William Boyce, the signature of Homer readily wiped off during treatment by the conservator.''

When he came upon a large oil on canvas by William Merritt Chase, ``Sand Dunes,'' Sweeney told the group he was ``astonished to see it here.''

He said that during his research on the Tweed's American collection, conducted from about 1978 to 1981, he had shipped the work to the leading Chase expert, Ronald Pisano of New York.

``And he said, `Don't think it's by Chase. Nice painting. Ball's in your court.' ''

Yet ``Sand Dunes,'' an atmospheric, almost abstract painting of a seashore scene, was labeled in Williamsburg as the work of Chase, even though the catalog states that ``recent scholarly observation by Ronald Pisano indicates that all of the Chases in Tweed's collection are either forgeries or highly improbable as the work of Chase.''

At that time, Pisano pronounced two other Tweed paintings bearing Chase's signature to be clear-cut forgeries. Those works are displayed in Williamsburg, too.

One is ``Conversation in the Park,'' a small canvas with loose and vigorous brush strokes by Annie Traquair Lang, among the first women to become part of Chase's circle. Lang's signature was written in pencil on the back of the canvas.

Chase's forged initials remain on the canvas front as evidence of what is presumed to have been an art dealer's attempt to make the piece marketable at a time when women's art just didn't sell. Such fakery regarding women's art was not unusual, he said.

While Sweeney praised many of the Tweed's paintings, he quibbled with several. During his research two decades ago, he found a painting of a moonlit forest scene now labeled as by Clara Fairfield Perry to be questionable. When he first saw it, ``Moonlight'' was signed ``W. Keith '79.'' A conservator found the signature too easy to remove; beneath it emerged a second signature, ``F.C. Perry.''

``The painting may well be the work of Clara Fairfield Perry, about whom virtually nothing is known,'' Sweeney wrote in the catalog, adding that ``Clara Perry's style was strongly reminiscent of the dreamy tonalism of Charles Warren Eaton.''

Last week, Sweeney said, ``My own feeling is that it is a Charles Warren Eaton.''

He concluded his talk by telling the group, ``I'm glad I came here, because I have already begun to draft my letter to the Tweed Museum.''

The next day, Peter Spooner, the Tweed's curator and organizer of the touring exhibit, addressed Sweeney's claims.

After digging into his museum's files on Homer, Spooner said there was ``nothing really conclusive'' about the work. It had been given by Alice Tweed Tuohy upon her death in 1973. Her first husband, George Tweed, made his fortune in the early 20th century in iron mining and banking, and began collecting American and European paintings in the 1920s. He died in 1946.

Likewise, with the Chase, he said, ``there is no conclusive decision, one way or another'' regarding its authenticity.

To reflect doubts about the Homer and Chase paintings and a third work by Ralph Albert Blakelock, a painting on extended loan to the Tweed, the checklist of works in the traveling exhibition lists them as ``Attributed to.

The institution did that, he said, ``even though we're pretty sure it's a Chase.''

Sotheby's, the fine arts auction house, defines ``attributed to'' as meaning ``in our opinion, probably a work by the artist.'' Use of the term denotes that enough uncertainty exists not to label it as by that artist.

The Tweed show's checklist is printed on a brochure, available at the reception desk by the Muscarelle's entrance.

Ann Madonia, the Muscarelle's curator, said the labels installed by each painting were printed by her institution. In the process of revising the labels three times, responding to the Tweed's changes, the phrase ``Attributed to. . . '' got left off the final versions, she said.

The labels were corrected on Tuesday. ``We will apologize to Peter'' Spooner, she said. ``On one list, it did have `attributed to.' On another it didn't.''

Spooner said he believes the Clara Fairfield Perry painting is accurately pegged. ``This painting is very similar to works known to have been done by her.''

Attribution is an never-ending process, he said. ``It's never completely written in stone.''

``Those works I've seen by Perry were thought to have been done around the same time period, so it's fairly certain. And it's very unlikely that anyone is going to forge an unknown woman's artist signature to a work, at least for commercial purposes.''

How does he account for the reversed initials? The work is signed ``F.C. Perry.''

``The transposition of the initials doesn't bother me much,'' he said. The point is to ``settle on the most likely attribution.''

For the most part, he said, ``you can never be 100 percent certain. You still have a variety of opinions out there, scholars who will say `Yes, it is', `Maybe it is,' `No, it isn't.' ''

Still, Spooner said, ``We don't want to attribute something that may be in dispute.''

Tweed collected most of these paintings in the 1920s, when there was less emphasis on scholarship, particularly that dealing with American art, Madonia said.

Newly rich individuals such as Tweed bought art that they liked, and worried little about issues of authenticity. The museum's files on art he collected are somewhat thin, since his widow destroyed many papers when the Internal Revenue Service tried to investigate her claims of appraised cash value.

Apparently, Tweed had paid token sums for the works, many of them at prices ranging from $10 to $100, Sweeney said on his tour.

Some of the mysteries might have been solved through the lost files.

Meanwhile, Sweeney feels aggravated that he spent several years as an art detective, and some of his work may have been in vain.

The Chase painting, he said, ``is not in my catalog. It didn't pass muster.'' So it shouldn't be labeled even as attributed to Chase, he asserted.

Same with the Homer. ``If there had been any chance it was a Homer, I would somehow have managed to squeeze it in.''

A lapse in institutional memory, perhaps? ``I would say it's more an issue of not paying attention. The ethical thing was long ago when these dealers sold these things. There's no fraud here. The fraud happened many years ago, when Tweed bought these pictures as Homer and Chase.''

If it were up to Sweeney, he would attribute ``Watching the Sea'' to: Artist Unknown. ILLUSTRATION: Photos

``Watching the Sea,'' part of an exhibit in Williamsburg, was

labeled the work of Winslow Homer. A scholar disagrees.

``Sand Dunes'' was incorrectly labeled as the work of William

Merritt Chase. Both paintings are part of the traveling Tweed

collection.

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