Viewing page 43 of 49

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

8

sold them all as original paintings by Romney and Reynolds et al and if Uncle Sam were to turn thumbs on their authenticity his clients would have a right to demand refunds.  He protested and won.  But those in the inner circles of the art world who know this dealer's stick and have seen the collections he formed for nouveau-oil-riche Southwest buyers still wonder if the examiner was not right.

More immediate and positive in his opinions on authenticity--though less strict in his standards--than any art history professor is Frank McCarthy, chief art examiner of the New York Appraiser's Store.  He is a short, stocky Irishman whose ears, standing at right angles to his head, give his jovial, blue-eyed face a contagiously comical look, which is reinforced by his continual dead-pan kidding and the way he laughs first at his own jokes, perhaps because as Fred Allen once said about a comic, he is "close to them than you are."

"In the service" for forty-six years, and art examiner for the last thirty, McCarthy has been educated in the art field in unique ways.  Primarily experience has been his teacher.  He scrutinizes about  paintings annually.  His directed observation ranges from a $250,000 Rembrandt and a $80,000 Cezanne to a mincing portrait of a cat bought for $6 at the Hotel Drouet in Paris (admitted, incidentally, as a work of art but with 10 per cent duty on its modern frame).

McCarthy examines objects warehouse at the Appraiser's Office and in all the New York art outlets: he is a familiar visitor in the plush inner sanctums of Duveen and Wildenstein, in the avant-garde atmosphere of the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, in the dark recesses of the Manhattan Storage Company and the jam-packed, gee-gaw filled, excelsior-strewn rooms of the lesser importing firms in the East Fifties whose clients are the Third Avenue antique and junk shops.

In addition to the lessons of experience, McCarthy has depended on