WHO OWNS WPA PRINTS?
TRANSCRIPT OF PANEL DISCUSSION HELD AT THE PRINT FAIR
NOVEMBER 4, 2000 -- page 7
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
GG: I would like to start the ball rolling by asking Francis or Franklin, if you did introduce a bill in Congress demanding that the terms of government ownership versus private ownership be strictly defined, what would that bill contain, what would you ask to be done in the bill?
FF: The minimal amount, which is that all prints out in the public, not part of a government facility, which have not been stolen from a government facility, shall remain to be the property of the possessor or the owner, other than the United States government. A separate issue might be about the copyright. But certainly, with respect to the print itself, I would simply have a brief bill that would confirm ownership of everything that's out there.
FO: I would add to that text that it should include all works of New Deal art, not just prints. Murals, easel painters, monumental and pedestal sculpture, all sorts of drawings and designs, an enormous amount of material done under these projects, all over the country. And there would have to be some blanket statement by Congress to the effect that all of this is the property of the individuals or the institutions that possess it at a certain given date.
GG: This is Jacob Kainen who was one of the WPA printmakers.
Jacob Kainen: Francis O'Connor said that it's a good idea for all branches of the WPA to be considered at this time. I want to talk about what happened to the paintings. The paintings, as you may know, were auctioned off to the highest bidder, but the art world knew nothing of it. Brehon Somervell the Colonel, did a dastardly deed. He sold or auctioned off works to a heating contractor who used the paintings to wrap around hot water pipes. I also have a letter from Joseph Solomon dated January 4, 1944. He said, "At last I know what happened to the WPA paintings." He went to a junk shop on Canal Street and saw piles of paintings, unframed of course, and he ran through them. They were sold for $ 5 each, so he picked up some of his paintings there. Now, there's a man called Ira Smolin that Francis mentioned. Ira Smolin phoned me and said he was going to Riker's Island in about 1950 and he saw men and woman, who were patients, drawing on sheets of paper, and on the backs of the paper were WPA prints. So he went to the head of the hospital and said, "That isn't good to draw or write on, you can't erase because the paper's too soft and mealy. I'll give you fine bond paper to give to the people, and they could draw on that. If you let me have the prints, I'll give you a little money for them." The doctor agreed and he got all of the prints.
Now, if the paintings were thrown away like that, Smolin said that he got two Rothko's, a Gottlieb and a couple of other paintings, the government has renounced any claim to prints or paintings, or any work that was done in the WPA. I think that it's hopeless to try to straighten it out because all this neglect can't be changed by a rule, not by Congress, or anyone. This stuff is so neglected that they can forget about it. (NOTE: Jacob Kainen died March 19, 2001.)
Question: Has the GSA tried to do an inventory of paintings from the Projects?
FO: That's one of the mysteries. The inventories it has done seem to be mostly prints, whereas the 119 institutions that received allocations received allocations in almost all the art forms. It's unclear and there is no consistency.
WB: Is it possible that you can identify the prints fairly easily because of the stamp but you can't identify the paintings?
FO: That is true. On the other hand, many of them do have little brass plates on the frames or on the stretchers indicating their provenance. In some cases, there are recognizable inventory numbers that we know were used by the Projects. We can't always find the key to the inventories, but we can recognize the inscriptions on the back.
Question: What motivated the government at this time to try and reclaim the works?
GG: Well, they have been at it for a number of years, quietly. It's just that I think they've been more concentrated.
FO: As for motivation, I watched this from the beginning in the late 60's. Almost as soon as I did an exhibit of New Deal Art at the University of Maryland, Karel Yasko was writing me a letter telling me about his inventory. We watched this very carefully. I left the University of Maryland around 1970, and went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art for two years, and I remember Joshua Taylor and I used to pass the letters from the GSA on this subject. And we came to the conclusion that this was simply a bureaucratic process.
SC: I know, I was involved with the withdrawal of the prints from the Christie's sale back around 1981, '82, and when those prints were withdrawn, it was done by the federal Attorney General in New York. At that time, I called Washington and Yasko's office. At that time, I was running the Associated American Artists, and I told him I had WPA prints, and I'd love to clarification, and what should I do? They said, "Oh Mr. Cole, we know about you" and that was the last word I heard.
Then, nothing has happened until January, or last June, when a Swann auction man, Todd Weyman, was out in Minneapolis and appraised two WPA prints, and then he got the first letter that I saw. It was 1999, and it just said "We want you to be aware that those are our property." The second was after Mrs. Strasnich put a Harry Shokler into an on-line auction. They got an e-mail from the GSA saying, "Hey, take it off auction. It's our print and send it to us". That is the only case of "sending it to us." And the interesting thing is that Mr. and Mrs. Strasnich had bought the Shokler from the artist, so it wasn't their property to begin with. And the question now is how can they prove that the Riva Hellfond that I have in my booth for sale isn't one of the proofs she had and eventually put on the marketplace? You know, this whole thing gets so convoluted. What are they going to do about all the unstamped prints of which there are thousands and thousands?
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