The witnesses who came to the defense of Brancusi were Sculptor Jacob Epstein, Forbes Watson, editor of the Arts magazine, Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
After hearing all the evidence, the court conceded that “under the earlier (court) decisions, this importation would have been rejected as a work of art, or, to be more accurate, as a work within the classification of high art.” However, it noted that opinions of what constituted high art had undergone changes under the influence of modern schools of art.
Finally the court said of the statue: “It is beautiful and symmetrical in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental, and as we hold under the evidence that it is the original production of a professional sculptor and is in fact a piece of sculpture and a work of art according to the authorities above referred to, we sustain the protest and find that it is entitled to free entry....”
The storm kicked up over the Brancusi bird created little more uproar than the arrival in New York in May, 1955, of an abstract painting by the European artist Dr. Alberto Burri. It was a most unusual work of art, as it consisted of several pieces of burlap sewn together and affixed to a board, stencilled with letters, and decorated with birds painted in oils. The artist said the effect of the whole was to convey a spiritual sense of the order in life. He valued his work at $450.
However the Customs examiner, failing to perceive the artist’s message, ruled that the importation was not a work of art. He held that it was a manufactured object whose chief value was in the vegetable fiber, or burlap sacking. Under this ruling, the import was dutiable at 20 per cent of the value placed upon it by the artist.
The examiner’s ruling posed an unusual problem. Art experts agreed that Dr. Burri’s work was not a painting—but a collage. And Congress had failed to mention collages in the categories of art held to be duty free, an oversight thought by some to reflect no credit on the Congressional artistic sense.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of museum collections of the Museum of Modern Art, and Leo Castelli, owner of a New York art gallery, were among those who came to Dr. Burri’s defense in court. They agreed his collage was an original work of free fine art and they described Dr. Burri as one of the first half-dozen artists to emerge in postwar Italy with a world-wide reputation. His works had been exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Allbright Gallery in Buffalo and other well-known museums.
The court reluctantly held, however, that since Congress had failed to include collages in the free fine arts, an import duty of 20 per cent would have to be paid—a ruling which later led to Congress amending the law to permit collages to be imported free of duty.
These cases and others moved leaders in the world of art to petition Congress to change the tariff laws governing the entry of works of art, and to remove the absurdly restrictive language which had caused so much embarrassment not only to the artists and to museums, but also to Customs and the government itself. As a result of these petitions, Senators Jacob Javits of New York and Paul Douglas of Illinois introduced in 1959 a bill to amend the tariff laws to permit free duty for all fine art and to eliminate the old definitions which had bemused Customs examiners. The bill was passed by Congress.
Actually, the slings and arrows hurled at the Bureau in the disputes over abstract art obscured the fact that over the years the Bureau had developed a good many experts whose opinions were valued highly by museums and leaders in the world of art. The Bureau also has some of the country’s leading experts on appraisals of a wide range of imports. It even boasts that it has a man who can look at a hog’s bristle and tell whether the hog was raised on the China slope of the Himalayas or the Indian side of the mountain, a bit of esoteric knowledge which is not as useless as it might seem. Little is heard of the fact that almost daily these men protect American dealers, collectors, and the buying public from forgeries, fraud, and unfair trade practices.