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The Museum of Modern Art in New York will honor the legendary gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend with an exhibition of works that were shown in her galleries in Paris and New York between the 1960s and 1980s. Sonnabend, who opened the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1962, was instrumental in bringing American art of the 1960s, most notably Pop Art and Minimalism, to Europe. Sonnabend opened a New York outpost in 1970 and conversely, popularized European art of the 1970s, including the Arte Povera movement, in the U.S.

Ileana Sonabend: Ambassador for the New will open on December 21, 2013 and celebrates the Sonnabend family’s generous bequest of Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal mixed media assemblage Canyon (1959) to MoMA. The exhibition will present works by approximately 30 artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Jeff Koons. Works will be pulled from MoMA’s own collection as well as other public and private holdings.  

Ileana Sonabend: Ambassador for the New will be on view at MoMA through April 21, 2014.

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Wednesday, 28 November 2012 16:24

Seminal Rauschenberg Work Heads to MoMA

The children of the New York art dealer, Ileana Sonnabend, have donated Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed media assemblage, Canyon (1959), to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While the acquisition is a welcomed addition to MoMA’s existing Rauschenberg collection, the work wasn’t always so warmly regarded.

The Sonnabend heirs received Canyon after their mother’s death in 2007 and the work was soon at the center of a battle between MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the piece had been displayed intermittently since 2005. MoMA ramped up its efforts and promised to add Ms. Sonnabend’s name to the Founders Wall in the museum’s lobby. Officials also vowed to mount an entire show devoted to Canyon as well as Sonnabend, an important player in the modern art movement. While the Met made offers of their own, the Sonnabend family ultimately decided that MoMA was the right home for the work considering the expansive Rauschenberg collection already in the institution’s possession.

Sadly, this is not the first dramatic episode Canyon has been involved in. When the Sonnabend children inherited the work five years ago, appraisers valued the assemblage at $0. The presence of a stuffed bald eagle, a bird that is protected by federal laws, halted any possible sales of trades involving the work. The I.R.S., on the other hand, shrugged this off and claimed that Canyon was worth $65 million and demanded that Sonnabend’s family pay $29.2 million in taxes and another $11.7 million in penalties.

Eventually, a settlement was worked out and I.R.S. dropped all tax charges. In order for this to happen, the Sonnabends were required to donate Canyon to a museum where it could be put on public display. Canyon will be on view at MoMA beginning today, November 28.

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Over the course of some 20 years, art dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend negotiated with federal regulators over a prized possession: "Canyon," a work by artist Robert Rauschenberg that combines a painting, a rope-trundled pillow and a stuffed bird. The problem was the bird—a young bald eagle of obscure origin. And now, five years after Ms. Sonnabend died, the problem continues to be the bird. Under federal statutes that prohibit any traffic in bald eagles or their remains, the artwork cannot legally be sold to anyone. And yet the Internal Revenue Service is demanding that Ms. Sonnabend's heirs pay $40 million in taxes on "Canyon." It's the sort of case where you wonder if the IRS agents are named Willem and Franz.

The mantle of art provides little mediation or mitigation when it comes to endangered species. When Lawrence M. Small was made secretary of the Smithsonian Institution a little more than a decade ago, he let some magazines photograph his collection of Amazonian tribal art, much of which was made of feathers of protected rain-forest birds. The articles and photos were perused with keen interest at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which soon began an investigation. That he considered the items art made no difference—Mr. Small eventually pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Does it help if the artwork is famous? Perhaps, as art lawyer Ronald Spencer notes, it is "bad public relations to destroy works of art," and that can temper the urge to seize. Still, counting on enforcement agencies to be reasonable is a dicey strategy. What is deemed all right under one administration might be discovered to be not all right at all once different officials are in place. The stuffed bird adorning "Canyon" first caught the attention of Fish and Wildlife Service agents in 1981, when the artwork came back through U.S. Customs after a European tour. The Interior Department seems to have been rather accommodating at the time, giving Ms. Sonnabend a permit to hang on to the piece.

But it was a different story in 1998 when she tried to lend "Canyon" to an international retrospective of Mr. Rauschenberg's work. Federal officials notified the gallery it would have to "relinquish the carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service" or donate the artwork to a nonprofit museum—unless "the carcass was taken from the wild prior to 1940" (when the Bald Eagle Protection Act became law).

But how to prove that? This is when the gallery again enjoyed the benefit of regulatory discretion. Mr. Rauschenberg was allowed to simply swear before a notary-public that the eagle was old enough to be legal. He told a quirky story about how the bird had come into his possession. It seems that an artist friend living in an apartment above Carnegie Hall rescued the dingus from the trash in 1959. The eagle, the story went, had belonged to an aged tenant who in his youth "was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders." According to Mr. Rauschenberg's notarized statement, "this Rough Rider acquired, from the wild, a bald eagle which he had taxidermed prior to 1940." When the old cowboy had died, his family tossed the unwanted bird in the garbage. Though the artist was recounting a third-hand tale of an unknown, unnamed cavalryman he had never met, Mr. Rauschenberg's account was accepted as appropriate documentation. Who said the feds can't be reasonable?

Not everyone gets such benefit of the doubt. Just imagine if Gibson Guitar Corp.—locked in a dispute with the Fish and Wildlife Service over the legality of foreign wood sourced for its instruments—had ever tried to offer proof of provenance as flimsy as the artist's notarized statement. But then again, in its dispute Gibson chose not to make nice. The company has been challenging Fish and Wildlife rulings in court. Which might help explain why, a year ago, heavily armed and body-armored agents descended on the company's Nashville factory to seize guitars and pallets of wood.

The Sonnabend heirs would ultimately find out how unreasonable enforcement agents can be. When the IRS first came looking for some payment on the unsalable "Canyon," the tax agency told an attorney working for the estate, Ralph E. Lerner, that the artwork was worth $15 million. But the lawyer refused to agree to that number, insisting that, because there is no legal market for the painting, it has no dollar value. Then, in what Mr. Lerner described to Forbes as the "most shocking part" of the whole fiasco, all of a sudden the IRS issued an official Notice of Deficiency declaring the Rauschenberg to be worth $65 million. Which would suggest that the market value of going along to get along is somewhere around $50 million.

The IRS valuation isn't necessarily crazy, even if its justification—the idea that an imagined black-market value should be binding on people not engaged in black-market transactions—is. But thanks to federal law, that value is entirely hypothetical.

How arbitrary is it to take a good off the market and then demand taxes be paid on an imaginary, indeed illegal, market price? The circumstances may be rare and peculiar, but the capriciousness of officials appears to be all too common.

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