The French Disconnection
#574
Last week, my friend, Liz Hobday, who works for AAP, pointed out a story she’d written about a commercial gallery in Melbourne selling work by a mysterious French artist called Jean Paul Mangin. To make matters even murkier, M. Mangin’s works bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Australian artist, Anya Pesce, a graduate of the National Art School, Sydney.
From 2018-21, Pesce had been represented by Studio Gallery, run by dealers Michael and Kerry Armstrong. The gallery seems quite prosperous, with three branches in Melbourne, and satellites in Sydney and Brisbane. By Australian standards this is a virtual empire. Fashionable contemporary dealerships such as Sullivan + Strumpf and Station can only manage one branch in Sydney and one in Melbourne, even though their artists are constantly being exhibited and collected by the public art museums.
What is Studio Gallery’s secret of success? I’ll come back to that question shortly.
The story, as Liz tells it, is that when Pesce left the gallery in 2021, the dealers informed her they had already made contact with another artist working in the same “genre”, and would probably represent him in future. Within a few months, this is precisely what happened.
What shocked Pesce was the close resemblance between her works and those of Jean Paul Mangin. Both produced abstract, coloured relief sculptures from high-gloss plastic. When Pesce went on-line to find out more about her French rival, she drew a blank. The “internationally acclaimed and collected French sculpturist” appears to have no Internet footprint apart from posts linked to Studio Gallery and Instagram puffs from gallery supporters.
Kerry Armstrong answered a query about Mangin’s apparent invisibility, explaining: "Jean Paul personally shuns contact, I am told he has trauma regarding an accident as a younger man… We respect his wishes and we're just feeling very fortunate to represent him and of course the stunning works."
What’s truly stunning is that an “internationally acclaimed” French sculptor would choose to be represented exclusively by a low-profile commercial gallery in Melbourne, especially given that the comparative price of art in Australia is much less than in Europe or America, and the exchange rate is not attractive. Whatever unique form of trauma M. Mangin may have suffered it deserves close study by the psychoanalysts and his financial advisor.
The explanation of his work given on the gallery’s website, is a small masterpiece of artspeak, sounding very portentous while telling us nothing:
“Jean Paul Mangin’s work largely draws from intimate and emotional experiences of life. The artist feels the translation and physical embodiment of his oeuvre not only defines his future but creates a dialogue with the outside world, ultimately providing a safe place to heal, flow, and articulate. Jean Paul speaks through his mediums such as recyclable plastics and polymer materials. The plasticity and very fluid nature of his materials offer a poignant metaphor of our shifting individual experiences within our changing world, how we see ourselves in relation to/in conversation with our surrounding environments.”
This is quite a rap for bits of squished coloured plastic resembling crumpled wrapping paper. Don’t you love those buzz words “safe” and “healing”? At best, one might praise the formal, decorative qualities of the work, which are pleasing enough to the eye.
Whatever we might think of the work, or of Anya Pesce’s work for that matter, the appeal is purely aesthetic. Yet it’s a wellknown phenomenon that the more abstract the piece, the more grandiose the possible interpretations. Julie Mehretu’s current show at the MCA provides a classic example, as catalogue writers invest her squiggles with all sorts of political significance.
This is why art is a special kind of commodity. One can’t dream that a refrigerator or a TV set will provide insights into the human condition, heal our neurotic souls, comment on social injustice, or double in value over time. A work of abstract art offers all these possibilities.
Following on from the Hobday article, the responsibility seems to lie with the gallery to prove that Jean Paul Mangin actually exists. Should the Armstrongs claim they are being defamed, they would still have to produce proof that Mangin is a real person who is actually making these works. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that he is a fiction, have the dealers broken any laws? Almost certainly not. If the works were falsely attributed to Anya Pesce or another living artist it would be a different matter. When the art is being made by parties unknown and attributed to an imaginary artist it may sound dodgy, but it would be difficult to view this as a crime. Even if we see it as fraud, or a hoax, it would be a laborious process to pursue in court.
Where Studio Gallery is vulnerable lies in the basis of trust established between dealer and client. The dollar value of a work of art is simply whatever someone will pay for it, but the potential value is more complicated. When I last looked there were more than 30 Mangin works listed on the gallery website, for prices ranging from $2,900 to $9,900. Most people, when buying a work of art, consider not just its appearance but its status as an investment. If the artist is a fiction, all of this is thrown into chaos because there is no reliable mechanism for a rising valuation. Unless we know who actually made the work it will never be anything but a decoration.
Those who have purchased works in good faith, believing them to be by an “internationally acclaimed” French sculptor, may well feel cheated if the gallery cannot produce evidence that the artist is a real person. Those who were simply looking for a decorative object need not be concerned.
This saga reveals an aspect of the art business that is often overlooked. When I write about the commercial galleries, I’m thinking of a relatively small number of dealers who make their money from reputable contemporary art, or quality resales. There are many more “galleries” out there with no highfalutin cultural pretentions, selling anything that will make a buck – Aboriginal paintings that look like they were produced in a factory, sentimental bush landscapes with billabongs and swaggies, beaches with lavish sunsets, kittens playing with a ball of wool, sad clowns, coy nudes, cibachrome photos of Uluru… you name it. These are the things most people buy, the things that end up of the walls of suburban houses.
Studio Gallery is a big step up from these art “shops”, although its methods are not dissimilar. Looking through the list of artists it represents there are some reasonably wellknown names, and a few I know personally. The bulk of the art the gallery shows may look decorative and derivative, but there’s enough solid work to provide a degree of artworld credibility. The odd, “international” artist – from Paris, no less – adds a touch of cosmopolitan sophistication.
This newsletter is not journalism per se, so without making any in-depth investigations I’m taking an educated guess that much of the work sold by Studio Gallery ends up in new houses, offices, hotels and apartments that have a pressing need for something to put on the walls. They are supplying a lucrative market led by developers, real estate agents and interior decorators. For those who don’t want to buy a work, many pieces are available for rent, so when potential buyers arrive to look at a display home, there will be paintings on the walls.
I witnessed this phenomenon recently when I was invited to inspect at a swish new display apartment and found that almost every room was supplied with a painting by David Bromley, another artist-entrepreneur with keen commercial instincts.
To complete Liz Hobday’s story, she was disappointed that the only newspaper to run her investigative article was the Canberra Times. Neither the Sydney Morning Herald nor the Age picked up on the tale, although their Sunday Life section had run a piece on Kerry Armstrong last July, titled A stately home in Melbourne’s south-east gets an impressive upgrade. It shows the dealer with her horse, Rambo, in front of her Victorian mansion, Melrose - all lifestyle and interior design.
It's a fascinating insight into the way the visual arts are viewed by the media. The supposed quality dailies will run a puff piece on an art dealer’s luxury lifestyle (which doesn’t resemble the lifestyle of most art dealers of my acquaintance!), but not run an investigative piece questioning their business practices.
The implication is that the Armstrongs are to be envied for their success and acumen. If they are selling works of art by artists whose very existence is under question, the papers don’t seem to feel this is newsworthy. After all, it’s only art, and the mugs that buy it must have plenty of money anyway. There’s no thought that buyers may falsely believe they have acquired an investment, or that Anya Pesce has seen her own creative efforts – her intellectual property - devalued by a sudden flood of knock-offs.
The big question about M. Mangin, is why the Armstrongs needed him in the first place. They seemed to be doing very well already, flying under the radar. If it transpires that there is no actual French sculptor of that name, youthful traumas notwithstanding, it threatens clients’ relationship with the gallery. Can one have any confidence in its “personalised art concierge service for private art collectors and commercial trade accounts” if one is being advised to buy such work?
One possible danger is that clients might begin to wonder if Jean Paul Mangin is the only imaginary artist on the books. Perhaps it’s not simply Aboriginal art that needs to be sold with a certificate of authenticity.
The art column for The Nightly looks at the Yayoi Kusama show at the National Gallery of Victoria, which will almost certainly be the major exhibition of the Australian summer. Kusama is arguably the most popular artist in the world right now, and the NGV has pulled out all stops with a survey that looks at her work from the ages of 10 to 95. Don’t imagine that she’s slowing down.
The film is Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu, a homage to F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece of 1922. Eggers has added the words, the colour, and a whole raft of new psychological issues, but has stuck to the main lines of the original script. It’s extremely well-made, albeit more sexualised than Murnau’s film, which was willing to let evil be evil. I’m looking forward to a story about the Count’s castle appearing soon in the pages of Sunday Life.