Degas’ Dancer Making Points
What do a New York City heiress, the founder of H&R Block, and the FBI have in common? They’re all linked in the most unlikely way through a Degas painting called Dancer Making Points. She has changed hands many times and the story of how she ended up where she is, is odd, to say the least.
I’ll call this case a theft because I think the painting was stolen but there’s so much more to it than that. I’ll start with some background on the painting and how it came to be owned by New York copper heiress and daughter of a US senator, Huguette Clark.
Dancer Making Points
This work was created by Edgar Degas between 1879-1880. It depicts a single ballerina dressed in a yellow and orange ensemble pointing her toe, as the name would suggest. Not a ton has been written about this painting or is really known about it specifically but it is obviously gorgeous.
What we do know is that the painting was sold in a gallery in Paris in 1927 but was soon passed on to French collector Georges Lévy as he was moving his collection to America in 1939-1940 to escape the Nazis. Huguette Clark or her mother purchased the painting sometime before 1955. Throughout her life Clark was notoriously reclusive, rarely being seen outside her home, but always being known for her spectacular art collection.
Dancer Making Points remained in the possession of Clark in the big apple. She had a massive inheritance from her parents and lived in a lavish 42 room (yes you read that correctly, 42 ROOM) apartment on 5th Avenue. When she turned 84, in 1991, her health was failing and she was convinced to move into a hospital where she would spend her remaining 20 years.
The Start of the Mystery
When Clark went into the hospital is where everything starts to get a little murky tbh. It is not known 100% how the painting left her apartment, the three main thoughts are that one of the servants stole it, it was given away for some reason, or it was thrown out. A doorman at her building claims to have seen it in the dumpster but that makes no sense to me at all. I think the most believable theory is that it was stolen either by someone who worked in the household or someone who was able to gain access somehow.
In 1992 or early 1993 Clark’s lawyer, David Wallace finds out that the painting is missing. Apparently, Clark told him at that time that she didn’t want to press charges or really do anything to find out who took it and where it is. As I said, she was reclusive and she said that she valued her privacy more than her possessions. So of course she doesn’t want to do something that would generate huge publicity surrounding her. But, behind her back, either the building manager or Wallace (we’re not sure) calls the FBI. The agents came into her room at the hospital even though she said she didn’t want to see any visitors and again she tells them not to investigate. She didn’t file an insurance claim and she didn’t register the painting with the Art Loss Register, founded in 1991 as a comprehensive database of stolen artwork.
In 1993 a well-dressed man walks into Peter Findlay Gallery, a 15-minute walk down 5th Avenue from Clark’s apartment, and says that he has inherited a painting by Degas that he wants help selling. He says that it’s been in the family for years and when he brings in Dancer Making Points, Findlay says that it did have “the aura of a work that had been in a family for a long time” (Dedman, 2012). He was right about the painting but had the wrong family. Now, I couldn’t find anywhere if this man had ever been identified but this is an open case with the FBI so even if he has been they may not want to release that information yet.
So Findlay agrees to sell the painting for this man. To his credit he does everything he can to confirm the authenticity and provenance of the painting, he even checked with the Art Loss Register but because Clark never registered the painting with them Findlay had no reason to believe it was stolen.
The Sale
At this time Henry and Marion Bloch were in NYC shopping for some art. You may know them from a little company that Henry started called H&R Block. They already had an impressive art collection including works by Monet, Renoir, and van Gogh. They even already had a Degas but once they saw Dancer Making Points they decided they had to have it and ended up selling their other Degas to make room.
In 2005 an auction house in New York eventually noticed, who knows how, that the Degas owned by Clark was the same one that had been sold to the Blochs. The FBI contacted Henry Bloch in late 2005 saying that they were doing an investigation and that they wanted to confirm that they had purchased the Degas. Apparently they didn’t mention to the Blochs that the painting was stolen and told them that they had nothing to worry about.
They thought this was weird but since the FBI told them that it was fine they believed it. In the Summer of 2007, they even held an exhibition of their private collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, in the new Bloch Building. The event was sponsored by the H&R Block Foundation and featured Dancer Making Points prominently, it was on the posters and even the merch that people could buy in the gift shop.
They weren’t contacted again by the FBI until late 2007 when they received a subpoena out of nowhere asking them to give the painting to the federal court for investigation. The Blochs said they owned the painting fair and square and this began a bunch of meetings with the FBI and the lawyers for both Clark and the Blochs.
An Arrangement
The main point of contention was that the two sides (the Blochs and Nelson-Atkins vs. Clark) couldn’t agree on whether the painting was stolen or not. Clark’s lawyer said that of course the painting had been stolen whereas the lawyer for the Blochs said that the FBI never actually was able to conclude if it was stolen, given away, or thrown out. I won’t go into all the legalese here but essentially the Bloch claim rested on legal cases requiring the loser of the property to work hard enough to try to recover it. They were claiming that because Clark didn’t register the painting as missing/stolen or investigate its whereabouts after it went missing, she didn’t work hard enough to get it back. Some people also think that Clark should have sued for her painting if she did really want it back, but she was 102 years old by then and was never going to sit for a deposition, plus she hated attention, remember?
So the two parties were able to come to an agreement, the Blochs only really wanted the painting for their lifetimes and then they would be happy to donate it. Clark had made arrangements to donate all of her artwork upon her death anyways so she was happy with this. What ended up happening was that Clark donated Dancer Making Points immediately to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, who would then allow the Blochs to retain possession of the work in their house until they died at which time the museum would get it back.
Conveniently for Clark, she was able to claim this charitable donation (of $10 million) on her income tax return. She really needed that break on taxes.
There was one potential snag, the museum didn’t want to accept this donation from Clark unless she was deemed competent to make the gift by a doctor. So in 2008, her long-time physician swore a statement saying that Clark was “mentally and physically alert” (Dedman, 2012). With that, the deal was sealed.
The physical exchange of the painting is so funny I cannot skip this part. In 2008 outside of the Bloch home in Kansas representatives of the Blochs, Clark, and The Nelson-Atkins met to formally hand off the artwork. First, the Bloch rep handed the painting to the Clark rep to “return” the work to her. The Clark rep then handed the painting to the Nelson-Atkins rep to “donate” the painting to the museum. Finally, the Nelson-Atkins rep handed the painting back to the Bloch rep to “loan” it to them until their deaths when it, along with all of their other paintings, would go to the museum. However, it is important to note that unlike the rest of the Bloch collection, Nelson-Atkins is the owner of Dancer Making Points and is just renewing the loan to the Blochs each year.
After this hand-off, the FBI withdrew its subpoena and no one has ever been charged with taking the Degas painting. They do say that this remains an open case.
When Dancer Making Points eventually makes its way to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art it will be listed as an anonymous gift. Clark is secretive and private even in death.
All of this information was only made public in 2011 following Clark’s death at age 104. In 2008 everyone involved had to sign a confidentiality agreement and only three trustees at Nelson-Atkins knew. This was top secret. This leads some people to believe that perhaps Clark wasn’t in the right state of mind to just give away a $10 million masterpiece however, I think that she was. She loved the painting so much that she requested a full-sized colour photograph of the work be delivered to her following the handoff. She was just an old woman simply not interested in getting into a fight, but you are free to come to your own conclusion.
Works Cited
Dedman, Bill. “The $10 Million Ballerina, The Heiress, and the Tax Man”. NBC News. 2012. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/10-million-degas-ballerina-heiress-tax-man-flna447170
Murphy, Barbara. “The Painting that was Stolen, Bought, Returned, Donated, Returned, and Donated”. A Great Europe Trip Planner. 2012. http://agreateuropetripplanner.blogspot.com/2012/05/the-painting-was-stolen-bought-returned.html