But for a label, that early Pollock would have been mine...

Forrest, the ghost behind Joslin Hall Rare Books (and crafter of, I suggest, the best catalogue entries currently being printed) offered up this wonderful piece today. The story is from the August, 2006 issue of Maine Antiques Digest (and I am embarrassed to admit that I missed it when published). In (very) brief: the US government is somewhat aggressively pursuing WPA program art pieces. Their position is that these art pieces (focused on painting and prints here, but probably extends to photographs, etc.) where paid for by the Feds and they own them, as put here:

“…There is much that needs to be made public about this…There are at least 10,000 WPA easel paintings missing. And the WPA artists and their work were treated shabbily by any standards when the project came to a close. Many works were unceremoniously dumped or otherwise mistreated, and some may have found their way back to the artists.”

According to the article, the distinguishing artifact appears to be a wee label reading something like, "Federal Works Progress Administration, Pennsylvania". In the case discussed, one labeled painting was seized while another, by a WPA artist and of the "right" period...but lacking the label...was not. Expect to find similar labels in various gallery waste bins.

Interestingly, a large number of these works appear to have been legally transferred by the government:

“In late 1943, a Long Island junk dealer paid a government warehouse in Flushing, Queens [New York], four cents a pound for bales of canvas that he planned on reselling as insulation for hot water pipes—until he noticed that the canvas was painted on. It turned out that the bales contained a ton of paintings from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Arts Project, two New Deal programs that had employed artists as part of the Roosevelt administration’s much broader effort to cut the 25% unemployment rate of the Great Depression. The now-defunct programs had required artists to turn in one piece a month as a condition of employment, but with World War II going on, the paintings, minus their frames, were declared surplus property.

It is an interesting and complex issues. One one hand, if the government made a very bad sale (say, several tens of millions of dollars worth of art for, you know, a liquidation price of $50/ton), then they should just have to suck it up and deal. Frankly, from a legal standpoint, they had the "stronger" negotiating position in the sale and errors should be "read against them." That said, they are the government and have the annoying ability to change the rules as they see fit. There has been some litigation...but none that seems determinative. This will, I wager, change. Certainly worth keeping an eye on this one as well...