Werner Spies

Werner Spies (born 1 April 1937 in Tübingen) is a German art historian, journalist and organizer of exhibitions. From 1997 to 2000, he was also a director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. According to Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina, Vienna, Spies is "one of the most influential art historians of the 20th century."

In his younger years, Spies worked as a writer of feuilletons for some German newspapers. He then studied art history, philosophy and French literature at the universities of Vienna, Tübingen and Paris. He completed his Ph.D. thesis and Habilitationsschrift, both in the history of arts, at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Since 1960, Spies has lived in Paris. From 1975 to 2002, he was a professor of the history of arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He also writes articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

As an expert on, and friend of,Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso, he wrote many books, and also organized major exhibitions, on these artists. He compiled the first catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s sculptures in 1971 and organized the first ever Max Ernst retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1975. On his suggestion, photographer Andreas Gursky donated PCF (2003), his photograph of the headquarters of the French Communist Party, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, to the Centre Pompidou in 2010.

In his later years, Spies was fooled by art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi's near-identical forgeries of five works by Max Ernst. The art historian, who first met Ernst in 1966 and is the leading expert on this artist, mistakenly issued certificates of authenticity for these fake copies of the surrealist’s work. On 24 May 2013, Spies was convicted by the high court in Nanterre and ordered to pay €652,883 to the collector who purchased in 2004 an alleged Max Ernst painting, entitled Tremblement de Terre, that he had wrongly authenticated. This decision was however overturned by the Court of Appeal of Versailles which ruled that Spies had "expresse[d] an opinion outside of a determined transaction" and could not therefore "be charged with a responsibility equivalent to that of an expert consulted in the context of a sale”. The Court further retained that it “cannot be required of the author of a catalogue raisonné to subject each work in a catalogue published under his responsibility to the execution of a scientific expert assessment, which requires the removal of fragments of the work and represents a significant cost”.

...
Wikipedia