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Werner Spies (born 1 April 1937 in Tübingen) is a German art historian, journalist and exhibition organizer. From 1997 to 2000, he was a director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.[1] Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina in Vienna, has called Spies "one of the most influential art historians of the 20th century."[2]
In his youth, Spies worked as a writer of feuilletons for German newspapers. He studied art history, philosophy and French literature at the universities of Vienna, Tübingen and Paris.[3] He completed his PhD thesis and Habilitationsschrift, both in the history of arts, at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.
He has lived in Paris since 1960. From 1975 to 2002 he was a professor of the history of arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.[4] He also writes articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.[5]
As an expert on and friend of[6][7] Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso, he has written many books and organized major exhibitions on these artists.[8] He compiled the first catalogue raisonné of Picasso's sculptures in 1971, and organized the first Max Ernst retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1975.[9] 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.[10]
In his later years, Spies was fooled by art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi's forgeries of five works by Max Ernst. Spies, who first met Ernst in 1966 and is the leading expert on his work, mistakenly issued certificates of authenticity for the copies of the surrealist's work.[11] One of the certificates was given to Beltracchi's fake "La Forêt (2)", which subsequently allowed controversial Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier, whom Spies had put in contact with Helene Beltracchi, to sell it to a private company for $2.3 million.[12] The painting was eventually sold to New York publisher Daniel Filipacchi for $7 million.[13]
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, Tremblement de Terre, that he had wrongly authenticated.[14] However, the decision was 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 stated 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".[15]
