What a Catalogue Raisonne Is, and Why Its Entries Get Fought Over
The catalogue raisonne is the closest thing the art world has to a register of title in authorship. Inclusion makes a market; exclusion can end one.
In short
- A catalogue raisonne attempts the complete corpus of an artist's authentic work.
- Inclusion and exclusion have direct, sometimes total, effects on value.
- Compilers have been sued, and several have stopped issuing opinions.
- A second edition that drops a work is one of the most consequential events in the field.
What it is
A catalogue raisonne is a scholarly attempt to list every work an artist made, with descriptions, dimensions, provenance, exhibition history and literature for each. It is the reference against which any new candidate is measured.
Its authority is informal but close to absolute. There is no statute making a catalogue raisonne definitive; it becomes so because the market and the museums treat it that way.
Why entries are contested
Because inclusion is worth money. For an artist with a strong market, a work in the catalogue is a tradeable asset and a work excluded from it is close to unsaleable at anything above decorative value, regardless of quality.
That gives owners of excluded works an enormous incentive to challenge the compiler, and it has made compiling a legally hazardous activity. Several authentication bodies for twentieth-century artists have been dissolved after litigation, and individual scholars have become correspondingly cautious about putting opinions in writing.
Editions change
A catalogue raisonne is not permanent. Second and third editions add works discovered since, and remove works the compiler no longer accepts. A picture that was in the 1978 catalogue and is not in the 2011 one has been demoted by the only body whose opinion the market reads.
This is why a record should cite the edition and not simply the catalogue. 'In the catalogue raisonne' without a year is not a fact.
What it means for an artist without one
Many artists have no catalogue raisonne, or an old and inadequate one. For Cimabue, where nothing is signed and the accepted corpus runs to a few dozen works assembled by scholarly consensus over a century and a half, there is no register to appeal to at all.
In those cases attribution reverts to argument between specialists, which is slower, less decisive, and considerably more honest about its own uncertainty.
Questions
No. Its authority is conventional. Courts have nonetheless treated inclusion and exclusion as commercially decisive facts.
Yes, in a supplement or a new edition, and this is one of the main routes by which a rediscovered picture is rehabilitated.
Usually a foundation, an estate or a university press. The funding source is worth knowing, since estates have an interest in the size of the corpus.