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So like twelve years ago, I stumbled across this photo in some dealer’s bin. It’s a portrait of a young woman with hair pulled back, a braid just peeking out across the back of her head, and she’s wearing a very plain, even severe outfit. There’s a great rhythm of contrasts between the sitter’s hair and forehead, her cheeks, and her dress and shawl.

On the back was written “photograph by Berenice Abbott, N.Y.,” in one hand [but not the signature Abbott’s known for], and in another,
Mrs Joseph Barber
2 col cut
Sun Soc
EBL

Which meant this was Mrs Barber’s engagement photo? Pretty modern. And it was a print submitted to a newspaper with a wedding announcement, where it ended up in a morgue for decades.

So I bought the print, and figured I could sleuth it out and authenticate it. Abbott would have been a bold choice for a wedding portrait in 1935-6. Most Abbott portraits we’ve seen are of sitters we know: in Paris she famously photographed James Joyce and Eugene Atget, for example.

Mrs. Barber was not, for example, included in the portrait portfolios Abbott published at various times; she’s not one of the 42 portraits on the website of Commerce Graphics, the outfit which acquired Abbott’s archive. Of course, they didn’t have a website when I got the photo. Google Images had barely launched, and still kind of sucked, in fact. So the only way to research was through books, where Mrs. Barber didn’t appear, or through newspaper archives, where, eventually, she did.

Joseph Barber Jr., of Andover, Harvard, and Columbia Journalism School, was an editor at The Atlantic Monthly when he married Eileen Paradis, a graduate of Mt Holyoke College and the University of Grenoble, on 15 February 1936. He would later become the magazine’s managing editor and hold editing and reporting positions at the Washington Post. A collection of Barber’s reports for The Atlantic was published in 1941 as a book, Hawaii: Restless Rampart. In it, he maps out the monopolistic plantation feudalism of the island territory’s politics, as well as the massive US military buildup of the book’s title. He quoted an army official as saying, “We intend to make the price of taking Pearl Harbor so prohibitively high that no enemy would want to pay it.”

Anyway, Eileen Paradis. The only mention I could find of Paradis at the time was her wedding announcement in a Boston paper [on microfiche!], where she was reported to have worn “an oyster white chiffon gown made on Grecian lines,” with a matching veil held by a gold wreath, and a gold belt. Which sounds like it’d match the hair. But the photo in the Globe that day was for Miss Mary Redmond Davidson, who had announced her engagement to Mr. Samuel Loring Ayres, Jr.

And that’s where it stood. A dead end, confirming Paradis/Barber’s marriage, but no proof of whether the photo was actually her, and, of course, whether Abbott had taken it. I didn’t have a hallway packed salon-style with vintage photographs, and I’m not really into hanging lone pictures of other peoples’ relatives, so I put it away.

And I just found it this morning while looking for some documentation of another work. On a whim, I typed “Eileen Paradis” back into Google, and whaddyaknow. Amid all the citations from the alumni newsletters and the Harvard Club directories is a collection of silver and art donated to the Mt. Holyoke College Museum of Art by The Estate of Eileen Paradis Barber (Class of 1929) in 1997.

The Barbers turned out to collect a fair amount of modern art in their day. There were watercolors by Arthur Dove, works by Max Ernst, Isamu Noguchi, Reginald Marsh, Romare Bearden, and John Marin, along with a sheaf of Japanese woodblocks and a couple of impressionist drawings. There were also five photographs, all by Berenice Abbott: three classic images from her Changing New York project–and two prints of Paradis’ portrait.

Berenice Abbott, Eileen Barber, prob. 1936, MH 1997.14.4

One print is much lighter, and the background especially looks to have been dodged or retouched. The other is closer to mine, though the image is a little longer. From the jpg, at least, the image looks like the best of the three, which may be why Barber kept it.

Berenice Abbott, Eileen Barber, prob. 1936, MH 1997.14.4a

Mine also has a handling crease on the far left edge and the top left corner, and a little orange spot in the image that looks like a chemical burn, which may be why she sent it to the paper.

So mystery solved. I’m kind of marveling at how something once impossible became instantly knowable. It still feels like magic sometimes around here. I’m also kind of daunted, because I found out this photograph, this piece of paper I’d bought on a hunch, turns out to be what I thought it was. Abbott’s famous images are everywhere, and published in editions of hundreds. But this is one of only three known to exist. and what series of happy accidents kept it intact this long?

update: After I published this a scholar familiar with Abbott’s work confirmed that Barber’s portrait does indeed reside in the artist’s archive, among many other interesting portraits of less public figures.

And it was suggested that the Barbers got to know Abbott via the writer Elizabeth McCausland. McCausland wrote about art for many publications of the day, and on many of the artists in the Barbers’ collection. And of course, McCausland was also Abbott’s partner and frequent collaborator, writing the texts and captions for her photobooks and exhibitions.

So rather than just an avant-garde wedding portrait commission, the photo is likely a document of a friendship and a community of artists and writers.

So Knoedler Gallery’s Ann Freedman didn’t only traffick in forged Motherwells and Pollocks; she moved a couple of fake Barnett Newman paintings, too. But, I guess, because the owners of them didn’t sue, we haven’t seen images of those works. Which doesn’t mean they’re not out there. Or that they haven’t been seen. In fact, at least one Newman painting was included in a high-profile gallery exhibition in New York, and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, making it one of the most prominent paintings in the whole Knoedler forgery scandal.
The details come from the complaint filed by Freedman earlier this month as part of a defamation lawsuit against dealer Marco Grassi, which Art Market Monitor has posted. Freedman sued Grassi for giving a fairly nonspecific quote about how she hadn’t done her due diligence before selling dozens of previously unknown AbEx masterpieces brought to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales. I’m struck by how incidental Grassi’s actual comments are, especially compared to the extensive details which Freedman lays out in her complaint. It’s almost like she is suing someone just so she can inject her version of the facts into the public discourse on the case, attempting to bolster her own claim that she’s a victim of Rosales’ deceptions, not a collaborator or enabler.

And so Freedman goes artist by artist, describing all her gallery’s research efforts, and piling up the comments and credentials of the art world experts she says saw–and praised, i.e., authenticated–the Rosales paintings. She mentions two Newmans. For Untitled (1949, a 59×34-in Newman canvas, the list included Ann Temkin, who curated the Philadelphia Museum’s Newman retrospective; Richard Shiff, who co-authored the artist’s catalogue raisonne; directors and curators from the Albright-Knox, who she said tried to acquire the painting; and the National Gallery’s Harry Cooper:

These experts and scholars likewise believed in the authenticity of this painting. For example, when Cooper viewed it, he stated that it was “beautiful” and “bore a relationship to the feeling in Stations of the Cross,” a well-known Newman work.

“Believed in the authenticity of this painting.” Imagine Freedman, the president of the oldest art gallery in the country, hosting a group of museum officials one evening in 2007, and then asking them what they thought of the Barnett Newman piece she’d just hung. If they asked where it had come from, she’d have said, what? From a private Swiss collection? Who would be the one to cast doubt on the authenticity of the painting in that context?

Another expert was even more deeply involved with the 1949 “Newman,” though; art historian David Anfam included it in his 2008 show, “Abstract Expressionism: A World Elsewhere,” that inaugurated Haunch of Venison’s New York space after Christie’s purchase of the gallery. The exhibition, stuffed with works borrowed from both museums and other dealers, was technically a non-selling show, though as Roberta Smith’s scolding review noted, Haunch of Venison’s statements on the matter were coy, dissembling, or both. Smith counted a dozen, but based on the number of gallery-organized loans, I figure at least 30 of the 62 works in the show could have been for sale. And sure enough, in Freedman’s lawsuit, she says that Anfam had “eagerly marketed [the Newman he borrowed] to potential purchasers.”
[MAY 2014 UPDATE: The NY Times’ Patricia Cohen cites unspecified court documents to describe how fear of litigation kept skeptical scholars from speaking out publicly, but it didn’t shut them up entirely:

And in June 2008, months after Dedalus started asking questions, three Barnett Newman experts — John O’Neill, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Yves-Alain Bois — concurred that what was said to be a Newman, from Knoedler, hanging at the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland was a fake. But as Mr. Bois wrote in an email to the Beyeler, he and his colleagues were “told not to make a public announcement” by a lawyer for the Barnett Newman Foundation, who feared a lawsuit.

June 2008 would be Art Basel season. I can’t see what exhibition at the Beyeler might have included a Newman, though.]
Smith’s review mentioned “an unfamiliar Newman” as a worthwhile element of the Haunch of Venison show, but there was none visible in installation shots online. [And of course, Christie’s deleted HoV’s website after the gallery was folded into the auction house’s private sales division.] So I headed to the Strand to pick up a remaindered copy of Anfam’s catalogue for the show.
In his essay for a New York School show in New York, blocks from dozens of well-known masterpieces on constant view, Anfam said he sought works that provided “freshness and variety.” So “a hitherto almost [sic] unknown Newman from his annus mirabilis of 1949″ must have fit right in.
Whatever my original interest in seeing what a successful fake ur-Newman looked like, it couldn’t compare to the odd sense of skeptical anticipation I had flipping through the catalogue. There were four Newman’s in Anfam’s show, and as I saw each one, I wondered if it was the fake.
It didn’t matter that I had the title and dimensions of the forgery; suspicion still tainted that first look. The expectation of uncovering a forgery had me questioning every work, searching for anomalies. That zip didn’t look right. The brushy, translucent fields are obviously off. That’s just a poorly proportioned copy of a classic. And in each case, of course, the work turned out to be an authentic Newman with immediately unassailable provenance. The Newmans Newman had painted had been set at odds with my mental image of what a Newman “should” be.

It reminded me of Mel Bochner’s contribution to the “Artists & Photographs” box published by Multples, Inc. in 1970, titled Misunderstandings ( A theory of photography). Bochner had been collecting quotes about photography on note cards, which no art magazine had wanted to publish. When Marian Goodman asked him for a piece, he mixed six of the quotes with three he made up on his own. As he told triplecanopy & rhizome in 2010:

To this day, I have never revealed which are which. Under the principle “One rotten apple spoils the barrel,” the intention of this act of forgery was to undermine any possibility of belief in the text. The “groundlessness” of the quotations became the equivalent of what I viewed as the groundlessness of photography itself, focusing attention on the artificiality of any framing device. I saw this as an attack on one of the main tenets of minimalism, Frank Stella’s claim that “what you see is what you see.”

What you see is what you see. The Knoedler forgeries blow that up both coming and going.
I’ve tried to preserve, or at least approximate my sense of doubt here, by not captioning the images from the HoV catalogue. I’m sure you can figure it out, though, even without doing math or looking at img file names. It’s one of those “Now that you mention it” moments. The others are, of course, unassailably authentic, with provenances and documentation and history that only emphasizes the Knoedler painting’s complete lack of the same.
And meanwhile, the other Knoedler/Rosales Newman, Untitled (1950), is still a mystery. Like the 1949 forgery, it was selected for a 2007-8 show organized by the Guggenheim and Terra Foundations titled, “Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation,” but it ended up staying home. [Though the show also traveled to Moscow, Shanghai, and Beijing, Freedman’s complaint only says that Untitled (1949) went to the Guggenheim Bilbao.] Anyway, I hope (1950)’ll turn up, too.
Meanwhile, I’d like to make an open offer to the current owner(s) of the Knoedler/Rosales Newmans, to buy them for a fair price. Assuming they can be authenticated, of course.