[78-L] Introduction (a bit long)

[Bart]

At 05:58 PM 6/27/2009 -0400, David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca> wrote:

>
>What art scandal involving the Lass Brothers? Never heard about that one! In 
>fact I've heard only of Boris Lass.
>

You know Boris was a classical violinist in the twenties, an immigrant from
Russia by way of Japan.  His younger brother Mark had been a Russian
general.  Boris recedes from the headlines after the Twenties until a
strange unsavory incident as the 1950's drew to a close.  

The Lass brothers opened an art gallery on Madison avenue in 1959, called
the Re-Mi Gallery (as in Do-Re-Mi).  The put on sale their collection of
impressionists and classical and modern masters: paintings by Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Rembrandt, Dufy, Sutine, Manet, Roualt, Cezanne, Renoir, and
Picasso.  It was the Picassos that would be their undoing.  

Suspicions were aroused and the police surreptitiously sent photos of two
of the Picassos, valued at $175,000 each, to the master himself for
authentication, Picasso being one of the few artists represented in the
collection that was still living.  He confirmed they were fakes saying he
had never seen them before in his life.  The police moved in and arrested
the brothers on charges of attempted grand larceny, false labeling, and
misleading advertising.  District attorney Frank S. Hogan said detectives
seized forty-two paintings in the gallery and another two hundred and
twelve in the brothers' apartment that were falsely tagged, or signed, as
originals of famous painters.

Newspaper headlines across the nation around December 4th screamed the news
of the arrest with headlines like: “Huge Racket in Fake Art Broken Up - 2
Dealers Seized With 400 Forged Masterpieces” - Los Angeles Times, and
“Police Smash Phony Art Racket; Seize Two in New York” - Chicago Daily
Tribune .  Some of the stories don't even mention Boris's career as a
violinist; so completely had the memory of 1927 been lost to the world of
1959.

But despite the screaming headlines and the inflated numbers of paintings
seized and prices demanded, the story seemed to disappear.  Within 10 days
it would be reported in Time magazine almost as a humorous incident..  Time
would wonder if the good sense of the art buying public demonstrated better
judgment than the Lass brothers.  “Museum experts declared the older
pictures largely student efforts, with signatures clumsily painted in. The
Lasses stood firm under fire, protesting that an international art cartel
was out to get them.”  They had some fun at Mark's expense: "Picasso," said
Mark Lass, "is a mere cartoonist." But when he was asked
how much he would take for one of his "Picassos," he answered: "I would not
sell under half a million dollars. I would destroy instead."  The article
closed with the notice that, “in the nine months the Re-Mi Gallery was
open, the Lass brothers did not sell a single picture.“

The mists of time obscure the rest.  I was not able to determine what
happened to the case against the brothers, or the paintings now determined
to be forgeries, nor afterwards to
the brothers themselves.

Some more may be available from the New York Times news archive but I'm too
cheap to pay for the stories.  (Yep, I'm that cheap.) It's free access,
though, to anyone with a subscription whose registered with the web site of
the Times...

>
>White label pressings can be test pressings and they can be "under the
counter" 
>(party) records. What's on the one you have? Incidentally, they can also be 
>commercial pressings supplied in small quantities where the customer was to 
>provide paste-over labels which have since fallen off..these were pressed
with 
>plain white labels since presumably the paste-overs wouldn't adhere to blank 
>shellac. Edison Diamond Discs often turn up minus their labels.
>

This is more of a party record.  The label is there, it's just solid black
with only the song's name, not even the performer.  One side has "Strange
Canine" about a piddlin' pup - the joke is he has diabetes; the other side
is "Offspring Deluxe" which I think may be the same as Ray Bourbon's
Western Record Co. Bourbana-717-B "Love Child", but I haven't heard "Love
Child" so I can't be sure.  I can tell by the voice that the Strange Canine
is a different performer.

Bart