Former Guggenheim Foundation director, Thomas Krens, is at the center of an investigation surrounding the purchase of works for the museum’s flagship European sight in Bilbao (The Independent).
With a budget of 96mn euros (£76mn), most of which provided by Basque regional authorities, Krens has been accused of frivolous spending at inflated prices. The resulting collection is said to appear structureless. The Basque government’s adviser to the museum between 1996 and 1998, Javier Gonzalez de Durana, has highlighted one of the examples as Large Blue Anthropometry, by Yves Klein. The $2.7mn that the museum paid for the work is said to be a gross overestimation, with reasonable estimates valuing the piece at no more than $2mn. Durana added that Krens had built up Guggenheim Bilbao’s collection on the basis of “personal criteria and overpayments.”
Durana also cited the purchase of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 831 as a piece of last minute opportunism. Although works by Cy Twombly and Brice Marden were top of Guggenheim Bilbao’s list, it is thought that when the purchase fell through, Krens turned to a last minute fumbling deal for the LeWitt installation. “That commission was the result of an improvisation, since this artist was not among those considered important for the collection,” Mr Durana stated. Although Krens described the LeWitt piece as a “discovery,” Durana described it as the product of a “fortuitous” visit to an exhibition by the conceptual artist, who died last year.
All this comes in the wake of an investigation into Guggenheim Bilbao’s financial irregularities, after Roberto Cearsolo Barrenetxea, who had been head of finance at the Frank-Gehry designed museum since it opened in 1997, admitted in a letter to officials that he was responsible for an unaccounted half a million euros from the museum’s fund. In the letter, Mr Barrenetxea confessed to transferring a total of 487,000 euros ($776,000) from companies linked to the museum into his personal account since 1998.