French ‘not to be trusted with art’

“THE FRENCH cannot be trusted to look after valuable works of art”, The Telegraph has claimed.

The paper, basing itself on a remark made by a curator at the first Duke of Wellington’s London home Apsley House while giving a tour, said that “lending works of art to France is a risky business”.

It quoted curator Josephine Oxley as having pointed to a work of art and said: “We wouldn't lend that to the Louvre. We don't know what state we'd get it back in. They've got a history of damaging items or putting them in a cupboard and forgetting where they've put them."

The paper cited cases of art being damaged in French museums, including the “most notorious example”: Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana being ripped in five places while being restored. It added Interpol data showed France and Italy were the countries that suffered the most art thefts. Most recently, five paintings by artists such as Picasso and Matisse, worth €100 million, were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in May.

However at the end of the article the paper quoted Ms Oxley's employers, English Heritage, as having said she "made a completely off-the-cuff remark within an informal situation and no weight should be attached to it".

French newspaper 20 Minutes reported on the article, quoting the Louvre as having denied any difficulties over having art on loan from the UK. “The British have lent us 18 works for our next big exhibition, Antiquity Rediscovered, a spokesman said.

However the founder of leading art market website Artprice Thierry Ehrmann told them: “Foreign institutions know France does not by any means run things in a modern way and they are very afraid of lending us their art.”

Mr Ehrmann, who also owns the controversial Demeure du Chaos in the Rhône (a house decorated with shock images), added that not enough was invested in security.

An art critic, Vincent Noce, said he did not think art was damaged more in France than elsewhere, but the security problem was worrying. He said former Culture Minister Christine Albanel had made some progress with this but Frédéric Mitterand was “completely uninterested”.