Courtesy Stair Galleries

A portrait of Harvard University president John Thornton Kirkland, by or a copy after Gilbert Stuart.

Courtesy Stair Galleries

The stolen art in Kingsland's estate included this 1790 Copley painting.

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The shadowy William Kingsland and his link to Art+Auction

By now most people in the art world are familiar with a shadowy character who called himself William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland. By nearly all accounts a rather unkempt, bespectacled man with a toupee (or comb-over) who insinuated himself into the tony circles of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he died this past spring without a will. It has since been revealed that Kingsland’s real name was Melvyn Kohn and that the cache of art found in his apartment included stolen works, among them a Giacometti bust, a painting by John Singleton Copley and a portrait of a Harvard University president.

Less widely reported is that Kingsland was a regular contributor to Art+Auction during its early days, from 1979 to 1984. His articles, consisting mostly of auction reviews and previews, may not reveal whether he was an innocent buyer of the purloined works, a conduit for their sale or an outright thief—some of the central issues now being investigated by the FBI. But they do serve as a gauge of his considerable knowledge of and involvement in an art world that was smaller and clubbier and more hospitable to, well, shadowy characters than it is today. In the time before Web databases of stolen art and more sophisticated methods of tracking provenance, it was simply easier to acquire stolen works, knowingly or not.

For a man who invented his own aristocratic heritage, Kingsland was fastidious about tracking the history of the art he wrote about. Of a painting by François Boucher up for sale in 1981, he pointed out that “the catalogue listed the Boucher’s provenance since 1777, but somehow omitted mention of its appearance in a 1976 Parke-Bernet sale—when it sold for a mere $3,000 as ‘attributed to Boucher.’” His reporting often had a winking, know-it-all quality. Previewing an Old Masters sale in the same year, Kingsland observed of a Filippino Lippi estimated at $60,000 to $80,000: “Those with long memories will recall the picture’s appearance in a 1972 Parke-Bernet sale, where it made $3,000.”

Manuela Hoelterhoff, Art+Auction’s inaugural editor and now the executive editor of Bloomberg News’s arts division, says she has mostly visual memories of Kingsland and, in particular, of the “Sherlock Holmes–type coat” he wore. “He was utterly nonconfrontational and seemed to know his material well,” she says. “He mostly stood out in the way he looked, what he wore and the slightly somnambulistic way he walked around. He was never in a hurry.”

The magazine’s second editor, Isolde Motley, who went on to help launch Martha Stewart Living and to develop Real Simple, recalls that Kingsland “knew everything there was to know about decorative arts.” Indeed, in addition to his coverage of Old Master, European and American painting sales, a fair number of the 70-plus articles he penned for the magazine dealt with the decorative arts, and French furniture in particular. “I thought he was a fantasist, but it never crossed my mind that he might be a criminal,” says Motley. “He really did know what he was talking about, and in those days that was tremendously valued. Back then the art-and-antiques world was peopled with eccentrics, so he didn’t stand out as much as he might now.”

According to the New York Times, which first reported on the mysteries surrounding Kingsland in July, he was an avid and witty conversationalist who claimed to have attended Harvard and to have once been married to a French woman of royal descent. Acquaintances also described him as a genealogist and zealous preservationist.

Christie’s called the FBI in September with concerns about provenance that had arisen during its standard pre-sale research of items from Kingsland’s estate, says auction house spokeswoman Bendetta Roux. Because Kingsland died without a will, his property had been consigned by the New York City public commissioner to Christie’s and Stair Galleries, a modest-sized auctioneer in Hudson, New York. (Colin Stair likens visiting Kingsland’s one-bedroom apartment on East 72nd Street to entering “a filthy, dirty Aladdin’s cave” chock-full of art.)