Piqued prince pulled his treasures from Royal Academy show
Alonso Sanchez Coello “Portrait de Don Diego, fils de Philippe II d’Espagne”, 1577
One of the biggest art exhibitions planned for next year has collapsed because of a row between a European prince and HM Revenue & Customs.
Masterpieces by Rubens and Van Dyck were among the treasures from the royal family of Liechtenstein’s collection, which were expected to draw huge crowds to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) from next September.
But yesterday Prince Hans-Adam II cancelled the loans because a long-running dispute involving export licences and a Spanish Renaissance painting bought in London has not been resolved in his favour.
His decision leaves the Piccadilly institution scrambling to plug a gaping hole in its schedules at short notice, a fate it only narrowly escaped two years ago when the Kremlin agreed to release 120 Impressionist and Modern works for the From Russia show less than a fortnight before press previews.
On that occasion the RA succeeded in mobilising David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, James Purnell, then the Culture Secretary, and a battery of Whitehall mandarins to argue its cause, and eventually fast track legislation that reassured the Russians that their paintings would be safe in Britain.
This time Ben Bradshaw, the Culture Secretary, has told the RA that he is powerless to intervene because the disputed painting is part of a criminal investigation. The prince is an innocent party.
Senior figures at the RA are privately furious that what they see as bureaucratic delays at Revenue & Customs have cost them one of their two major loan shows of 2010 (the other is The Real Van Gogh, which opens in January).
Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the RA, said that he was “very upset” by the failure to find a solution to the problem but was hoping that the cancellation would prove to be “a great opportunity”.
Under the flamboyant leadership of Sir Norman Rosenthal, who left the organisation last year, the RA had a reputation for flinging together successful shows in similar situations. Notable examples included Sensation, and an exhibition on Turkish culture in 2005 that replaced a long-planned Egyptian show that fell through because of the Iraq war.
A spokesman for the gallery said: “The Royal Academy has a number of projects in development and is considering alternatives for next autumn.”
The Liechtenstein Collection had been scheduled for the RA’s main galleries from September 25 to December 12, 2010. In a statement from the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, it was announced “with regret” that the exhibition “will now not take place”. Times.co.uk
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