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Rockwell exhibit, the directors’ cut

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More than 20 Norman Rockwell paintings belonging to Steven Spielberg have until next July to get ready for their close-up, which will come when they’re hung in a special exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington -- along with more than 30 other Rockwells from the collection of his fellow filmmaker-to-the-masses, George Lucas.

Then there’s the one sitting in climate-controlled sequestration, somewhere in Las Vegas, and there’s no telling when it’ll be seen again. It’s called “Russian Schoolroom,” and it belonged to Spielberg from 1989 until 2007, when he and it became unexpectedly caught up in a sequence of events that, if turned into a film scenario, would require an eminently skillful director to keep the audience from losing the story’s thread.

The film’s opening scene would be set in 1973. First we’d see the painting itself, a horizontal image of a roomful of Soviet schoolboys seated at their desks, eyes trained dutifully on a white, jut-jawed bust of Vladimir I. Lenin -- except for a lone dreamer (or dissident) whom Rockwell shows letting his mind and gaze wander. The camera would pull back, and we’d see “Russian Schoolroom” being snatched from its gallery wall in Clayton, Mo.

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Cut to 1988, where an auctioneer in New Orleans slams the gavel, and the same painting is sold to a New York art dealer for about $70,000. She shows the painting publicly, advertises it, and by the next year it’s hanging on Spielberg’s wall.

Next big scene: In February 2007, an assistant to the film director sits at a computer and notices that “Russian Schoolroom” is listed on an FBI website of stolen artworks. Spielberg contacts the feds; they thank him for being a good citizen, and tell him to hold the painting for safekeeping until they can figure out ownership.

Soon, Spielberg and the FBI are being sued in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas by Nevada resident Jack Solomon, who owned the Missouri gallery whence “Russian Schoolroom” was stolen. He wants his painting back.

By the end of 2007, Judy Goffman Cutler, the dealer who’d bought “Russian Schoolroom” in New Orleans and sold it to Spielberg, makes a deal with the filmmaker, who is a longtime steady client. She will take back title to “Russian Schoolroom” from him, and fight it out in court with Solomon to secure ownership. In exchange, she gives Spielberg a Rockwell painting from the same mid-1960s period, “Peace Corps in Ethiopia.”

The judge in Las Vegas dismisses Spielberg and the FBI from the case, finding them without fault. He also orders “Russian Schoolroom” transferred into court custody. There the painting remains.

“We wanted to make Steven whole,” Laurence Cutler, husband of Judy Goffman Cutler, and co-founder with her of the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, R.I., said Friday. “He’s a client for decades of Judy’s, and to get dragged into a case is not what clients buying paintings want.”

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Cutler said it’s not so much the monetary value of “Russian Schoolroom” that’s at stake for his wife -- sources close to the 2007 investigation estimated it then at $700,000 to $1 million -- but her desire to vindicate her reputation after Solomon criticized her for not having realized the painting was stolen goods when she bought it, then sold it to Spielberg.

Cutler said the case may go to trial in January if no settlement can be reached.

With “Russian Schoolroom” out of view until further notice, our art-theft cinematic saga could end with an art-montage: first a shot of “Peace Corps in Ethiopia,” hanging in the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., where it’s on loan from Spielberg as part of “Norman Rockwell: American Imagist,” a traveling exhibition.

Last, the camera might pan across two of the paintings that Spielberg will lend to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the show, “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.” Both images are from 1959, a big one on canvas and a smaller study on paper. And both, fittingly, are titled “The Jury.”

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mike.boehm@latimes.com

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