Yeah, no.
As I wondered what ever happened since the amazing discovery five years ago of a 19th century monochrome and readymade that would overturn the entire timeline of the avant-garde, and why they hadn’t overturned the entire timeline of the avant-garde yet, I got an update from a greg.org reader in the French art world.
There turn out to be major questions about the provenance of the two, seventeen, or nineteen artworks found by Paris art dealer Johann Naldi, and in particular about his story of discovering them in a forgotten trunk and identifying them as lost works from the series of parodic l’Art Incohérents exhibitions of the 1880s and 1890s.
An extensive investigation published by Libération in 2022 [archive.is, and a youtube recap above] revealed that the actual owners of the objects are well-known antique dealers, who first reached out to the recognized scholar of les Incohérents—without any mention of the two most significant pieces, the Paul Bilhaud monochrome, and the purported Alphonse Allais readymade [sic]. Another collector recognized a print he’d tried to buy, but the dealers said it was reserved for a group they were assembling. When the collection turned up a couple of years later—with the monochrome and the window shade—it was purportedly in the dealers’ family for generations, and they had no idea what it was until Naldi came along.
There are other discrepancies with the historical record: the simple monochrome canvas doesn’t match any of the published descriptions of Bilhaud’s Combat… There is zero mention, ever, of Allais’ work, despite exhaustive coverage of seemingly every other minor thing Allais did or said. And the typeface on the label only came into use several years after 1882, when Bilhaud was reported to exhibit the work.
It’s all enough to cause one of the major art historians to withdraw from Naldi’s research project, and to quash interest in showing the Incohérents works in a museum. The Trésor National declaration instigated by the Musée d’Orsay in May 2021 as a means of preventing the works from being sold abroad, was in effect for only 30 months, so through November 2023. Now they’re presumably just for sale.
And to top it all off, Naldi enlisted professional troll Michel Onfray to write about the artworks, with the point of taking down Duchamp and the avant-garde. Onfray is famously an atheist, anti-Freudian, philosopher who credits himself with taking down Christianity, Judaism and Islam, pyschoanalysis, AND Western philosophy, so why not take down modernism next?