Salander's "Blameless" Victims?
The Washington Post, always the voice for the powerful, connected, and well-moneyed, has an article on the victims of art dealer Lawrence Salander. They've tracked down Earl Davis, the son of American modern master Stuart Davis, some psychiatrist whose father's collection was entrusted to the dealer
The Washington Post, always the voice for the powerful, connected, and well-moneyed, has an article on the victims of art dealer Lawrence Salander. They’ve tracked down Earl Davis, the son of American modern master Stuart Davis, some psychiatrist whose father’s collection was entrusted to the dealer, and a few others.
What the Post “reports” is a tale of blameless victims taken advantage of by the big bad Salander. And trust me, I don’t have any affection for the bigwig dealer turned con man, but there are some questions that the Post doesn’t ask, including:
- Why the hell would the daughters of some collector turn their work over to a dealer in the first place if they didn’t intend to sell it? Were they naive? Upset for not being paid? Delusional?
- Earl Davis has spent decades tirelessly promoting his daddy’s work? Hello, Post, how about asking people to corroborate that claim.
- How about a smidgen of credit to Salander for funding major projects during the last few decades, including various catalogue raisonne projects?
It’s obvious that something seriously went wrong with Salander’s gallery, but painting his victims with a broad brush doesn’t serve the interests of truth. Call me cynical, but I just don’t buy the fact that most of Salander’s victims didn’t know what was going on to some degree, and their failure to be diligent about their possessions is really their own fault, I mean, isn’t this what should be expected in an unregulated art world.
The only figures in this article that came across well were the Crawford brothers, who don’t take any shit:
Brooklyn artist John Crawford, son of Ralston Crawford, became so uneasy he drove his truck into the city, marched into the gallery and loaded any of his father’s paintings that he could find. In Wyoming, his brother Neelon called a New York City detective in the art fraud division. The detective made a short, laconic phone call to Salander and Crawford’s work was shipped to Wyoming that week.
It shouldn’t surprise me that the Post fixates on the collectors (and hiers) in their story, but I wish they could have showed more concern for the artists who were represented by Salander and never paid, which inevitably happens when a dealer goes down. The Post only briefly mentions artist Paul Resilka, who even admits that Salander “did tremendous things for art.” The truth is I’d rather hear their stories, not the ones that portray the fat cats as the victims.
