"Is That Mondrian Upside Down?"

by Julia Jacobs 

And does it matter? A curator concludes that a work was hung ‘the wrong way around.’

[There always seem to be stories about mistakes with works of art.  Usually it’s simply because new information came to light after decisions and conclusions had been made based on what had been known before.  It happens.  Art isn’t science and people, especially artists, don’t keep the same kinds of records.

[Sometimes, however, someone just goofs.  The story below, from the New York Times of 2 November 2022 (Section C [“Arts”]), is about the suggestion that just that may have happened with a 1941 painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian by the German museum that owns it now.  If those who believe an erroneous decision was made are right, it’s now an over-75-year-old boo-boo!]

About a year ago, an Italian artist wrote to a museum in Düsseldorf, Germany, to share a nagging feeling he had about an abstract work that had been at the institution for decades.

The artist, Francesco Visalli, had been researching the work of Piet Mondrian [1872-1944], the Dutch painter known for gridlike works with geometric pops of primary colors. The artwork in question was an unfinished piece called “New York City I” [1941]: a canvas layered with crisscrossing red, blue, yellow and black lines of tape.

“Whenever I look at this work, I always have the distinct feeling that it needs to be rotated 180 degrees,” Visalli wrote to a museum leader. “I realize that for decades it has been observed and published with the same orientation, yet this feeling remains pressing.”

Visalli also presented evidence to support his hunch: a photograph, from a [June] 1944 issue of the American magazine Town & Country, that showed the work resting on an easel in Mondrian’s studio shortly after his death. Compared to how it hung in the German museum, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen [the art collection of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf], the artwork was flipped.

The email persuaded the museum staff to take a closer look. Was it possible that “New York City I” had been displayed upside down for more than 75 years?

“I am 100 percent certain the picture is the wrong way around,” a curator, Susanne Meyer-Büser, said, according to The Guardian, as the museum prepared to open an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of Mondrian’s birth [Mondrian. Evolution, 29 October 2022-12 February 2023].

The declaration prompted an improbable deluge of headlines about 20th-century abstract art. But some Mondrian experts are skeptical that the evidence is definitive, especially considering that the piece was unfinished and without a signature. Mondrian was even known to flip his pieces while working on them, said Caro Verbeek, an art historian at a Dutch university who contributed to the exhibition’s catalog.

“It’s still in process,” said Harry Cooper, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington who has helped organize two Mondrian exhibitions [Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, 2001 (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, and Dallas Museum of Art)]. “Even though it might have been put on an easel at some point, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been worked on further. A different decision about its orientation could have been made.”

Susanne Gaensheimer, the director of the German museum, which acquired the Mondrian in 1980, said on Monday that its orientation had been a tangential piece of information in a news conference about the exhibition — before exploding into an international curiosity.

Meyer-Büser did not respond to requests for comment. And Gaensheimer clarified that the museum was not saying that the work was definitively hanging upside down, but rather that its research had determined that Mondrian had created the work from the opposite perspective.

“We cannot know what is correct or incorrect,” Gaensheimer said.

On Page 198 of the catalog accompanying the exhibition [Mondrian Evolution (Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 2022); Kathrin Beßen and Susanne Meyer-Büser, “Ciphers of the New Era: Four Works from the Kunstsammlung Norderhein-Westfalen”], Meyer-Büser cited another work, “New York City” [1942], which is the only one in a series of similar works to have been painted rather than created with adhesive tape. (After relocating to New York from war-torn Europe, Mondrian began experimenting with colored tape, which allowed him to quickly rearrange his designs as he plotted out works.)

The painting, on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is hung with a close grouping of several lines at the top — the same way as depicted in the 1944 photograph — rather than at the bottom.

Another piece of evidence described by Meyer-Büser is the direction in which the tape appears to have been rolled out. As the work is currently hung, there are gaps between some of the ends of the tape and the top of the canvas, suggesting that Mondrian started at the opposite end.

“Assuming that Mondrian began by attaching the strips at the top,” she wrote, “and, following the principle of gravity, unrolled them downward to attach them at the bottom of the canvas, then the painting has indeed been hanging upside down ever since it was first exhibited in 1945.”

Other experts pointed out that Mondrian had tended to work with his canvases laid flat, walking around them and approaching them from different angles, which Meyer-Büser acknowledges in her essay. If he did work from different perspectives, she said, “there would be no right or wrong orientation.”

In her essay, Meyer-Büser also cited the photograph sent by Visalli, which was taken shortly after Mondrian’s death in 1944, when the artist’s friend and heir, Harry Holtzman [American abstract artist, 1912-1987], opened up the studio for a fashion shoot. In the photo, a model poses with her elbow on a mantel, part of the canvas in question visible off her left shoulder.

Cooper, from the National Gallery of Art, noted that a different photograph of Mondrian’s studio from around the same time shows another Mondrian work — “Victory Boogie Woogie” [1942-44] — in what appears to be the same position on the same easel. The photo suggests that someone other than Mondrian could have positioned “New York City I” after his death, Cooper said.

Despite its curator’s convictions, the German museum has no plans to flip the work, because it has grown increasingly fragile.

Visalli said in an email that he agreed with the decision, writing that without a signature or inscription from Mondrian, there was no way to know for sure.

“Above all,” he wrote, “who can say what Mondrian really wanted?”

[There are many instances of errors in other art forms like the possible one described here in the art world.  Another small one concerning a painting has to do with the title of one by Surrealist Joan Miró (1893-1983).

[On 27 November 2008, the day before Thanksgiving, I saw Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  One painting on the exhibit was Miró’s 1927 canvas entitled Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse.  It was one of the few pieces in the show whose French title wasn’t translated. 

[I checked the Internet to see if there's an “official” translation of the phrase, and there isn’t.  One site said that the words are essentially untranslatable into English, which is wrong.  Another site incorrectly translated the title as: “A bird pursues a bee and kisses it”; the translator confused baiser, ‘to kiss,’ for baisser, ‘to knock down.’ 

[(Some commenters suggest that Miró intended there to be such a misreading, because baiser can also have the slang meaning of ‘to make love to’ or, more vulgarly, ‘to fuck.’  Personally, I don’t buy it.  Seems too low-brow for Miró to my ear; he’s wittier than that.)

[So I went about translating it myself.  The first part is easy: “A bird pursues a bee and . . . .” 

[At first, I mistook the last two words as a noun with the definite article: la baisse means ‘the fall’ or ‘the drop.’  (What the stock market does periodically is une baisse.)  In context, that doesn’t make much sense, though: “A bird pursues a bee and the fall.”  No synonym works any better. 

[Then I realized that the end of the phrase isn’t an article and a noun but a pronoun and a verb; la refers to une abeille.  As a verb, baisser means ‘to drop,’ ‘to knock down,’ or words to that effect.  So the phrase now means, “A bird pursues a bee and knocks it down.” 

[The museum or its curator hadn’t made a mistake with the painting’s title, but the smarty-pants websites I consulted did.  Someone reading them who didn’t know some French would have gotten bum steers and not even known it!

[In another instance, in the realm of literature and literary archives, there’s the case of a letter misattributed. . . to someone who never existed.

[In April 2006, I went up to Butler Library, which houses Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, to find correspondence from Elia Kazan (1909-2003) to a number of personalities whose papers were reposited in the Columbia University manuscripts archive.  A Missouri-based scholar had been hired to catalogue the director’s letters and he hired me to do the legwork in New York City.  

[A great number of Kazan’s letters and cards are in the several Tennessee Williams collections in libraries and archives around the country, and that’s where I was looking at RBML. (Over his career, Kazan directed six of Williams’s plays and two of his films.)  Much of Kazan’s correspondence is signed “Elia,” “EK” (or, often, “ek”), and, most frequently with his close acquaintances and associates like Williams, ”Gadg.”

[As I imagine many people know, “Gadg”—pronounced gadzh—was Kazan’s college nickname which he continued to use all his life.  It’s from “Gadget”: he was handy with tools and repairs, which, as a scholarship student at Williams College, was one way he earned pocket money.

[Among the hand-signed notes and letters, many had signatures that were barely legible and readers could only discern that they read “Gadg” if they knew that’s what Kazan signed.  In fact, one folder contained a one-page, typed letter dated 22 January 1959 addressed simply to “Tennessee,” identified both in the RBML card file and on the folder as having been hand-signed by “Sady.”  

[I couldn’t imagine who “Sady” could be; I’d never run across that name in all the work I’d done up to that date. Kazan’s wife until her death was playwright Molly Day Thatcher (1907-63), and none of their children was named Sady.  I’d done considerable research on Tennessee Williams by this time, too, and no one of whom I knew in the playwright’s circle was named Sady, either.

[Well, of course, the signature was “Gadg,” but no examiner would ever have been able to tell that’s what the scrawl read without knowing the fact beforehand.  Of course, even if I hadn’t already known Kazan’s nickname, I’d scrutinized scores of his letters by this time, from formal business correspondence to casual notes and postcards, and I recognized his informal signature right away.

[I drew the attention of the RBML staff to this misreading.  The librarian on duty hand-wrote a correction on the folder cover before I left the library, and presumably the error was adjusted by the time the files were next consulted.  I don’t know how long the letter’d been on reposit at RBML, however, so I can’t guess how many people might have consulted it before I got there and corrected the misattribution. 

[Mistakes like that can self-perpetuate—one researcher uses the incorrect attribution and then another researcher uses the first source for the citation, and so on.  The error becomes the record and is replicated in one book or article after another, ad infinitum.  For the consequence of this phenomenon, I refer ROTters to “A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt,” posted on Rick On Theater on 11 April 2009.]

*  *  *  *

[In the art world, there are many instances of art lost, gone astray, or mis- (or even un-) identified.  Take a look at the following reports.] 

“A MICHELANGELO ON 5TH AVE.? IT SEEMS SO”
by John Russell 

[The news story of the rediscovery of a lost Michelangelo marble was published in the New York Times on 23 January 1996 (Sections A [news] and C [“Science Times”]).]

One of the more stately houses on Fifth Avenue is No. 972, between 78th and 79th Streets. Designed by Stanford White [1853-1906] for the family of Payne Whitney [William Payne Whitney (1876-1927), American businessman and member of the Whitney family] and built between 1902 and 1906, it was bought by the French Government in the 1950’s and today houses the cultural services of the French Embassy.

White, as was his custom, designed much of the interior of the house. An integral element was what looked like a large garden fountain that had somehow drifted indoors. It was lodged in the shadows under an elegant rotunda in the center of the lobby, and White placed on it a three-foot marble statue of a naked, curly-haired youth, set on an ancient Roman altar.

Over the last half century, the statue has been seen by thousands of visitors, many of whom gathered for social events in the shadows around the fountain. But if they thought of it at all, it was as a throwback to turn-of-the-century taste. Never did anyone suggest that the statue, which is missing its arms and the lower portion of its legs, might be Manhattan’s only sculpture by Michelangelo [1475-1564].

Until last October [1995], that is.

For the opening of an exhibition of French decorative arts, the house was brilliantly lighted at street level. The fountain could be seen as it had never been seen before. One of those who saw it that evening was Dr. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt [b. 1934]. Dr. Brandt, who teaches at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts around the corner on 78th Street, is an authority on 16th-century Italian sculpture. She is also a permanent consultant for Renaissance art to the Vatican Museums.

“I’ve walked past the house on my way to the Institute of Fine Arts for the last 30 years,” she said last week. But it wasn’t until that night that she recognized the possible importance of the statue, which, she said, “reminded me forcefully in its every detail of the earliest works of Michelangelo.”

Claims of this sort, if not well founded, are a form of professional suicide in the art world. So Dr. Brandt, who said she was at first “profoundly skeptical of my impression and wary of its consequences,” proceeded cautiously.

She began by researching the history of the house as well as that of the sculpture. This disclosed that the sculpture had been attributed to Michelangelo at auction in London in 1902 by the Florentine collector Stefano Bardini [1836-1922]. It went unsold at the auction and was returned to Rome, where White acquired it from a dealer who described it as an antiquity that had recently been dug up.

The statue arrived in New York, together with the altar and the candelabrum that now serve as its base. A large and circular stone basin was then made in New York. Ever since, the completed fountain has stood in the shadows of the rotunda.

On the evidence of the photograph in the 1902 auction catalogue, an Italian scholar, Alessandro Parronchi [Florentine, 1914-2007], attributed the statue to Michelangelo in 1968, but his view won no support.

One day about 10 years ago, Dr. James Draper [1943-2019] caught a glimpse of the statue from a passing bus. The next day Dr. Draper, who is curator of European sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, went in to look at it more carefully, but the lighting in the rotunda was too poor for him to form an opinion.

After seeing it recently, however, Dr. Draper, the author in 1992 of a monograph on Michelangelo’s early mentor Bertoldo di Giovanni [sculptor, after 1420-1491], said that “good light made all the difference.” He now believes, as does Dr. Brandt, that the statue is the work of Michelangelo.

So does Nicholas Penny [b. 1949], chief curator for the Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery in London, who saw the statue several weeks ago. “Given the remarkably large number of documented works by Michelangelo that have been lost,” he said, “it’s reasonable to suppose that some of them will be found — and likely that some of them will be found right under our noses.”

Dr. Penny said he believed that Dr. Brandt had been very cautious. “But you are not going to make any discoveries in this field,” he said, “unless you have the nerve to commit yourself, the courage to entertain the idea that it might be by Michelangelo, and eventually to say that you think it is by him. I am convinced that she is right. The more one looks at it, the more it grows on one, not only as a remarkable work of art but something that makes sense as a work by Michelangelo.”

“I am persuaded by it,” he went on, “but I recognize that a lot of people, including some scholars, will find it difficult to accept.”

Could the statue be a fake?

Dr. Penny was categorical: “I don’t think it can be. It’s too peculiar. No faker would have given the boy a quiver of arrows made out of a lion’s paw. Nor could anyone have faked the back of the head with its curls. It’s just too inventive and too idiosyncratic.”

Dr. Brandt said, “Regardless of his name, our artist seems to be an almost eerily gifted debutant,” a sculptor who is both immensely ambitious and yet still uncertain enough of his techniques to “maneuver himself into compositional difficulties.”

The statue has taken a battering over the years, having not only lost its arms and lower legs but also suffered a number of breaks. “There is considerable water erosion,” Dr. Brandt pointed out, “probably from an earlier life as a fountain, on the chest and head. There is some staining on the face and some chipping of the nose and upper lip.”

Dr. Brandt believes that later restorers tried to repair especially worn sections of the statue, like the right eye. A diagonal strap crosses the boy’s narrow chest and disappears over his shoulder to support an arrow-filled quiver shaped like a lion’s paw. “The sculptor had only just begun to carve these forms,” she said, “and they are hard to read.”

“Nonetheless,” she went on, “one can gather that the figure originally surged upwards, perhaps on tiptoe. The thrust of his shoulder makes it likely that he held a bow in his outstretched left hand while he reached across his chest with his right hand to pluck an arrow from his quiver.”

The flickering curls of the hair, the forms and features of the face, the treatment of the body and the carving technique, she said, recall Michelangelo’s earliest works in Bologna [1494-95] and look forward to the “Bacchus” [1496-97], which he made soon after in Rome.

The news of Dr. Brandt’s findings has traveled a few blocks up Fifth Avenue, to the Metropolitan Museum [80th-84th Streets]. “Any discovery of the work of one of the greatest creative artists of all time would be marvelous news,” said Philippe de Montebello [b. 1936], director of the Met [retired in 2008]. “That this sculpture should have been found so close to the Met is both intriguing and tantalizing.”

In view of the intense interest the statue is likely to arouse, he said, the Met will ask to show it on loan. “If possible we would show it in the context of a ‘dossier’ exhibition [a small exhibit dealing with issues common to all the works on display],” he said, “with related works of art and other comparative material.”

Everett Fahy [1941-2018], head of European paintings at the Met, said yesterday: “The moment I saw it, I was absolutely convinced by it. I very much hope that it can be installed on temporary loan in the Blumenthal Patio in the Met, where there is room for the large number of visitors who would certainly want to see it.”

The future of the sculpture may present both legal and diplomatic problems. The mansion at 972 Fifth Avenue belongs the French Government, which has been informed of the situation but has thus far not sent an expert of its own to examine the statue.

If the attribution to Michelangelo wins general agreement, however, the sculpture would certainly be as welcome in the Louvre as it would be in the Met.

[In 2009, The French government, which has title to the sculpture, offered to loan it to the Met for 10 years.  The Young Archer, as it had been dubbed, had officially been accepted as the work of Michelangelo by scholarly consensus.  The marble is believed to have been carved when the artist was 15 or 16 (ca. 1490), and went on exhibit in a special presentation in the museum’s Vélez Blanco Patio. 

[(A nearly exact replica of Young Archer created by Met technicians fills the spot at what is now the Cultural Services of the French Embassy vacated by the real sculpture.)

[In 1999, the Young Archer was the centerpiece of an exhibition on Michelangelo’s formative years called Giovinezza di Michelangelo (The Early Years of Michelangelo) at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.  The Young Archer was then exhibited alone at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, where a dissenting curator labeled it as a work of the later 16th century.

[In 2017, the Met presented the sculpture as a touchstone for its exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer.

[At the end of the 10-year period, the French Republic extended the loan for another 10 years.  Sometime during the initial loan period, the sculpture acquired a new name, Cupid, that seems to have eclipsed the title Young Archer.  According to the Metropolitan Museum, the statue was first recorded in 1556 at the house of Jacopo Galli in Rome. Galli is known to have owned a Cupid sculpted by the young Michelangelo, so by 1650 the sculpture was retitled Cupid.]

*  *  *  *
“ONE PERSON’S TRASH IS ANOTHER PERSON’S LOST MASTERPIECE”
by Carol Vogel

[The article below, about the recovery of a painting stolen long ago, ran in the New York Times on 23 October 2007 (in Section E [“The Arts”]).  The artwork was by Mexican Abstract artist Rufino Tamayo.

[My parents, art collectors in their own, small way (see “A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting,” 21 November 2017), never owned a Michelangelo . . . but they did have a Tamayo—a colored etching called Personaje de Perfil ("Head of a man," 1980). 

[I won’t say how much my folks paid for it or what it was valued at when my mother died, but it’s printed on Guarro paper (mixografia/aguafuerte; 29 x 21½ inches), number 86 of an edition of 99, published by Ediciones Polígrafa in Barcelona, Spain.  It was purchased from Arvil Grafica in Mexico City]

It’s hardly a place you would expect to find a $1 million painting.

But one March morning four years ago [i.e., 2003], Elizabeth Gibson was on her way to get coffee, as usual, when she spotted a large and colorful abstract canvas nestled between two big garbage bags in front of the Alexandria, an apartment building on the northwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.

“I had a real debate with myself,” said Ms. Gibson, a writer and self-professed Dumpster diver. “I almost left it there because it was so big, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why are you taking this back to your crammed apartment?’”

But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.”

Art experts would agree with her. As it turns out, the painting was “Three People” [Tres Personajes] a 1970 canvas by the celebrated 20th-century Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo [1899-1991] that was stolen 20 years ago and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.

Experts say the painting — a largely abstract depiction of a man, a woman and an androgynous figure in vibrant purples, oranges and yellows — is in miraculously good condition and worth about $1 million. On Nov. 20 it is to go on the block at Sotheby’s as one of the highlights of a Latin American art auction.

Ms. Gibson said she did not suspect that the painting had any commercial value when she found it. “I am not a modern-art aficionado,” she said. “It was so overpowering, yet it had a cheap frame.”

The painting had been missing for so long that the owners, a married couple whom Sotheby’s would not identify, had long since given up hope of ever seeing it again. The husband, a Houston collector and businessman, had purchased “Three People” at a Sotheby’s auction in 1977 as a birthday present for his wife. He paid $55,000 for it.

Ten years later, when the couple were in the midst of moving from a house to an apartment in Houston, they put the painting into storage at a local warehouse. It was there that it disappeared.

The couple reported the theft to the local and federal authorities, and an image was posted on the databases of the International Foundation for Art Research and the Art Loss Register. They also offered a $15,000 reward to anyone who could help them recover it. But no credible leads surfaced.

The couple later moved to South America, and the husband died. It is his widow who is putting the painting on the market.

How “Three People” got from a Houston warehouse 20 years ago to the streets of New York remains a mystery. The painting’s disappearance so troubled August Uribe, an expert at Sotheby’s, that he volunteered to appear on “Antiques Roadshow” in a “Missing Masterpieces” segment in May 2005.

Ms. Gibson had hung the painting in her living room, but remained curious about it. She had gone back to the Alexandria the day after taking it home and asked the doormen there if anyone could tell her who had put it on the street.

“No one remembered anything,” she said. “All they said was that 20 minutes after I took it, the garbage truck arrived. This was truly an appointment with destiny.”

It took three years for her to realize that she possessed a stolen painting.

A few months after she hung it in her apartment, she said, she called a friend who had worked at an auction house and described the painting to him. “He asked me if it had a signature,” she recalled. It did. In the upper right-hand corner the artist had signed it “Tamayo 0-70.”

But her friend did not seem very interested in her discovery, she said.

More time passed, and one day she removed the painting from the wall and examined the back. There she saw several stickers — one from the Perls Gallery in Manhattan, now closed; another from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, where it had been exhibited in 1974; and a third from the Richard Feigen Gallery in Manhattan.

She called the Feigen gallery and told someone there about all the information on the labels. Days later, she said, the gallery called back to say it had no record of the painting.

A year or so after that, she said, she told another friend about the painting. “He showed me a Sotheby’s catalog where a Tamayo had sold for $500,000,” she recalled. He also went to the library and came back with a pile of books on the artist. One — a 1974 monograph of his work by Emily Genauer — had her painting on the cover. “I was stunned,” Ms. Gibson said.

She made an appointment to do more research at the Frick Art Reference Library, at the Frick Collection on East 70th Street. A librarian there directed her to the nearby Mary-Anne Martin gallery, which specializes in Latin American art.

She walked three blocks to the gallery, where she says she was told by someone that it was a “famously stolen” painting. “I was in a state of shock,” she said.

Realizing that she might have something very valuable, Ms. Gibson built a false wall in her closet to conceal the painting, carefully wrapping it in old shower curtains. After Googling the artist’s name, she discovered an image of “Three People” at the “Antiques Roadshow” Web site in reference to the “Missing Masterpieces” segment.

Searching the Web in May, she discovered that the episode would be rebroadcast the next day in Baltimore. She traveled to Baltimore by bus and checked into a hotel to watch the segment.

“It was very nail-biting, but the moment I saw it, I knew it was my painting,” she said.

Upon returning to New York, she immediately called Sotheby’s and made an appointment to see Mr. Uribe. “Just call me a Mystery Woman,” she says she told his office, not wanting to reveal her story until she was face to face with Mr. Uribe. She asked a minister from her church, the First Church of Religious Science, to accompany her and introduced herself as Mrs. Green.

“I asked her to describe the painting,” Mr. Uribe recalled. “And when she said it had a sandy surface, I knew it was the painting.” (Tamayo frequently ground sand and marble into his paint.) She also told Mr. Uribe about the stickers on the back, which offered further confirmation that she had the real thing.

Mr. Uribe visited Ms. Gibson’s Upper West Side apartment, and she began dismantling the false wall. “I saw only a corner of the canvas, yet I knew it was the painting,” he said. “The colors and surface were unique to Tamayo.”

Ms. Gibson will receive the promised $15,000 reward from the seller, as well as a smaller finder’s fee from Sotheby’s, which the auction house declined to disclose.

Sotheby’s informed the F.B.I. that “Three People” had been found. James Wynne, the agent in charge of the case, said that because a criminal investigation was continuing, he could not discuss whether the agency had any clues to who stole the work years ago.

“Finding a $1 million painting in the garbage is very unusual,” Mr. Wynne said. “It’s a real New York story.”

[In November 2007, ­Three People was auctioned at Sotheby’s by the Houston widow from whom the painting was stolen.  The auctioneer was August Uribe, the art expert who’d helped Gibson with her efforts to discover the truth about her find.

[The painting was estimated to be worth $750,000-1 million, but it was sold to an unidentified American collector for $1,049,000 (worth over $1½ million today).  Gibson collected the original $15,000 reward ($21,600 today) the owners had offered and an undisclosed percentage of the sale price from Sotheby’s as a finder’s fee.

[Neither the Houston owners nor the 2007 buyer has been named.  No suspects for the 1987 theft of the painting have yet been identified.]