For the first time in several years, Christie’s has *not* published a disclaimer from the artist when it brought a Cady Noland sculpture to the market. And boy, does it need one, so let me try:
In an atmosphere of rapidly trading artwork, it is not possible for Cady Noland to agree or dispute the various claims behind works attributed to her, such as that this 1994 work, barely bigger than a laptop, was donated by the artist and sold on 27 May 2008 at Sotheby’s, Milan, to benefit the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund.
Which would have been an important and remarkable moment in the corrected history of the artist’s, or C.N.’s, engagement with her artwork’s public presentation, seeing as how 2008 was also the year she, unannounced, produced a new artwork for the Walker Art Center, to replace one that had been donated to their collection, but which somehow did not meet C.N.’s approval.
And for an artist who, at the time, was wrongly believed to have withdrawn from the art world completely, to have donated a substantive work to a high profile benefit auction—in 2008! in Milan! at Sotheby’s!—for the fund established by one of the most famous women in the world, well, that would have been quite something. At the least, an irresistible story. One you’d think would have been mentioned even one time in the legal proceedings that embroiled Sotheby’s and C.N. over the Cowboys Milking situation a couple of years hence. Even in passing in an internal email produced for discovery, in a chronological account, even just a footnote. A mention that a blogger would have already written about and then linked back to a hundred times over the next fifteen years. She did it for Audrey! For the children!
Or for Audrey’s children. Because though vast archival databases exist to show the same thing for a price, even in its current degraded state, Sotheby’s public website states pretty clearly that the artist, or C.N., donated the artwork to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund in 1994, the year after the actress’s death, when her two sons, Sean Ferrer and Luca Dotti, along with her longtime partner, actor Robert Wolders—whose third to last acting gig was in an episode of the 1974 TV series Banacek, about a swaggering Polish-American art heist insurance investigator played by Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s co-star and later A-Team star George Peppard, and who [Wolders, that is, not Peppard], by 1994, had let the healing begin, and had begun dating dancer Leslie Caron —changed the name of a UNICEF passthrough fund to Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund from Hollywood for Children, Inc.,
and after, perhaps the kickoff benefit auction that might have precipitated a solicitation of artwork donations to Paula Cooper Gallery, where in 1994 the artist showed several presidential candidate-related artworks of a similar style—screenprinted campaign material on honeycombed aluminum—and another one ten years later, the AHCF benefit auction concept fizzled out, and the organization ended up making most of its money by touring an international exhibition of “Hepburn memorabilia—centered mostly on a collection of Givenchy gowns,” and donating whatever was left over to UNICEF,
And though the fact that this little sculpture was being sold out of Milan in 2008 might make one wonder if, actually, in 1994 or later, it ended up back in the Ferrer Collection, and was perhaps a liquidity datapoint, along with the “financially burdensome real-estate transaction in Italy” and divorce from his third wife that precipitated a personal financial crisis that, according to a 2017 lawsuit brought against Ferrer by the AHCF—by then abandoned by Ferrer and chaired by Dotti—led Ferrer to demand significant fees for the AHCF’s continued use of Hepburn’s property, name, and likeness [“the Hepburn IP”], which may or may not have been the memorabilia trove that was sold off in a marathon 10-hour auction—at Christie’s—and which, with no mention of any charity, presumably just raised £4.6million in funds for the benefit of Audrey Hepburn’s children, C.N.’s silence about published assertions regarding the provenance of any work does not signify agreement about claims that are being made.
[Though, provenance disclaimers aside, if it did, in fact, pass through the townhouse gallery of Robert Mnuchin, father of Trumpist former treasury secretary Steven, it’s hard not to imagine the bemused chortles of ironic self-satisfaction an art trophy dedicated to Ronald Reagan purportedly by Cady Noland might have elicited from the hedge funders who, assembled to dine at one of its acquirer’s homes, might have found it propped wickedly in the powder room.]
And because there are more situations like this auction which place demands on her time and the artist’s attention to ensure proper presentation of her artwork (including its representation in photographs), than she has time or capacity to be involved with, the artist’s, or C.N.’s, silence about the publication of a photograph of a work does not signify agreement with how it is installed and photographed, and whether Reagan is read up or down, and whether the sculpture is standing upright or leaning against the wall.
I have no idea whether Ms. Noland has or has not been asked for nor has she given the rights to any photographs of her works or verified their accuracy or authenticity. I just screenshot what I can’t right-click and move on.
Wow, this disclaimer business is harder than it looks. And if there are installation shots from the powder room or wherever, hmu.
[post-visit update]: I have not seen this irl myself, but several people have reported in from the preview, and it is a banger. greg.org hero Ian sent pics of the verso, which has enough metadata and instruction written on it to fill a disclaimer:
[update: unlike almost everything else I’ve blogged about this auction season, it sold. for an $80,000 bid, $100,800 total, barely above the low estimate.]