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And why the relatively low price? One possible reason involves the offer of both the Rousseau and the Van Gogh to Italian Auto Tycoon Giovanni Agnelli. Agnelli also happens to have an interest in Marlborough, a firm that —under the guidance of Frank Lloyd, a dealer of legendary if unloved astuteness—has in the past decade become the world's richest gallery complex, with main offices in New York, London and Rome, a branch in Tokyo and a network of holding companies in Liechtenstein. Fiat had agreed to design and build four air-conditioned "Artmobiles" equipped to carry shows all over the U.S. The American branch of Fiat was to give these to the Met as a public relations gesture. Though the Met officially denies it, sources within its staff believe that the gift of the buses was to be treated as part payment for the works of art. Then Agnelli — so the story goes — went cold on the paintings, fearing that the sale would be used for propaganda in the labor disputes that almost paralyzed the Fiat plant last fall. Neither he nor Marlborough told Hoving this; so Hoving went on believing that both paintings were in Turin, and actually said so to the Times in October 1972.
The loss of the works provoked a storm of protest from art historians, critics and the Art Dealers' Association of America; one prominent scholar, John Rewald, wrote an article in Art in America demanding Hoving's resignation. Then the Met revealed another secret deal with Marlborough. At first it seemed that the museum had swapped two more De Groot paintings, a Modigliani and a Juan Gris, for Becca, a sculpture by David Smith and a painting by California Artist Richard Diebenkorn. Later the Met disclosed that the swap had cost the Met not two but six works — another Gris, a Bonnard, a Picasso and a Renoir.
In the process, the Met had been royally if quite legally taken by Marlborough. Becca cost the Met $250,000, the highest price ever paid for a Smith. It had been offered to the Met in 1969, and the trustees then refused it at $100,000. But for Curator Henry Geldzahler, it was "undoubtedly the greatest Smith on the market." It had been a star item in the huge centennial show of New York art that Geldzahler organized for the Met in the fall of 1969. Naturally, this drove its price up. "You might call it the principle of indeterminancy," Geldzahler observed. "You change the behavior of an object by looking at it." Or by putting it in a big show at the Met.
Marlborough, by contrast, got Modigliani's Red Head for $50,000—with the astounding guarantee that if it proved to be a fake (both Rousseau and Geldzahler doubted its authenticity) the Met should give $60,000 back to Marlborough. Presumably the extra $10,000 was for air fare, since Red Head promptly went to Tokyo, where an anonymous Japanese bought it for between $200,000 and $250,000.
Marlborough has now picked up six paintings as nearly pure cream from the De Groot sale. The Met's own valuation on these was $190,000, but chances are that Marlborough can sell them for considerably more.