It is a sad 20th birthday for the Musée Maillol in Paris, which shut its doors indefinitely this weekend. The museum has posted a message on its website that says the closure is due to planned renovation work, but there is more to the story. On 5 February, the company that manages the museum, Tecniarte, filed for bankruptcy.
According to court filings, with only €11,000 in cash in its coffers, Tecniarte could not possibly cover its €3.3m debt, which is “due immediately”. The list of creditors has not been made public and the foundation that runs the museum has declined to comment since the bankruptcy filing.
Named after the sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), the museum was opened in 1995 by Dina Vierny, who was the artist’s model and muse before she became an art dealer. A diminutive figure, full of energy, she was active in the American journalist Varian Fry’s network to help Jewish artists and scholars escape Vichy France through the Pyrenees during the Second World War. In her hôtel particulier on Paris’ fashionable left bank, she displayed her personal collection of Maillol’s work and organised Modern art shows.
After her death six years ago, aged 90, her son Olivier Lorquin hired an Italian director, Patrizia Nitti, to manage the museum through her company Tecniarte. With the Musée Maillol as its only client, it made €3.6m in revenue last year. The company’s books were still balanced in 2012, when earnings were up to €5m, but by 2013, its losses amounted to €1.3m. This month, “the loss of clientele and a huge deficit” led a judge to approve Tecniarte’s liquidation.
Although she is not an art historian, Nitti ran a theatre festival at Pompeii in the 1980s and she maintained strong connections in Italy, which allowed her to borrow significant works by artists such as Botticelli and Veronese for special exhibitions. Her earliest shows at the Musée Maillol were well received, but in 2012, two exhibitions on the artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Canaletto were roundly criticised by specialists due to doubts over some of the works’ authenticity. Last year, Nitti bounced back with a brilliant display of treasures from the chapel of San Gennaro at Naples Cathdral, which had never before been shown outside Italy. But museum attendance by then was already on the decline.
“There is no suspicion of any mismanagement expressed against Ms Nitti”, her lawyer, Stéphane Sebag, told The Art Newspaper. “After five years of brilliant exhibitions, she decided on her own to file for bankruptcy. General attendance at the museum has been falling. Some shows did not meet the expected results. And the final blow came after the terrorist attacks in January.”
Sebag added that the agent appointed by the court to oversee the bankruptcy is discussing an agreement with the Maillol’s foundation to insure, secure and return the works loaned by Italian museums for its recent exhibition on the Borgias, which ended on 15 February. The next show, “The Kiss in Western Art”, scheduled to open in March and organised by Serge Lemoine, the former director of the Musée d’Orsay, has been cancelled. The Art Newspaper understands that Nitti is considering returning to Rome. Her attorney declined to comment on this but says: “it is only the end of a beautiful adventure, and then each partner will go its way. She still has great things to accomplish.”