ICRA's Advisory Board
The Advisory Board consists of ICRA founders and former board members, offering a wealth of specialist knowledge and advice for which the current Board is most grateful.
Harriet Bridgeman CBE
In 1972, Viscountess Bridgeman founded Bridgeman Images, today one of the world's most prominent image libraries. In 2006, she was lobbied by art market professionals to set up the Artists' Collecting Society, which handles the copyright and resale rights of nearly 2000 artists including such high-profile names as Cecily Brown, Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer. She is also a founder of ICRA.
In additions, she has worked closely with many authors and publishers in the production of their catalogues raisonnés. Lady Bridgeman supports pre-eminent artists in distributing or circulating of their work through the handling of their copyright. In 1997 she was awarded the European Women of Achievement Award in the Arts, in 2005 the International Business Woman of the Year and in 2013, she was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the arts.
Teresa Krasny
Teresa Krasny is the former Chair of ICRA, and the director and editor of the forthcoming Degas Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Works on Paper (https://degascatalogueraisonne.com/) whose mission is to create a free and complete online catalogue raisonné of the paintings and works on paper of Edgar Degas. Advised by an international board of experts on the artist and his era, the project will incorporate current and contemporary scholarship and technical studies to offer an updated approach to cataloguing Degas' works.
Teresa is also curator to a private collector. The expertise process is a fundamental part of the due diligence she undertakes prior to any acquisition. She has considerable first-hand experience of the issues relating to the authentication and archiving of an artist’s work and the damage that the lack of a credible catalogue raisonné and authentication process can cause to an artist’s legacy and commercial viability. As former Head of Sale at Christie’s Impressionist & Modern department in London, Teresa was responsible for ensuring the authenticity of the artworks offered in the context of the auctions she ran. Knowing the relevant experts and understanding the authentication process for each artist in this category was essential.
Pierre Valentin
Pierre Valentin is one of the founders of ICRA, and a leading art lawyer. He was formerly Associate General Counsel and Senior Director of Sotheby’s. He has been advising artists and their estates for over twenty years. He is a founder of Artistate, a platform designed around artists and their legacy. For over ten years, he was a trustee of the Artists’ Collecting Society. He has his own art law practice and is the joint head of the art, heritage and cultural property law practice of Fieldfisher in London.
Toby Treves is an art historian and publisher.
He has written 2 ½ catalogues raisonnés (Peter Lanyon: catalogue raisonné of the paintings and three-dimensional works; Lucian Freud: catalogue raisonné of the prints; Lucian Freud: catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings [co-authored]) and published 2 more, Andrea Rose (ed.), Leon Kossoff: catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings and Patricia Reed, William Nicholson: catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings.
He is the founder and owner of Art Publishing Inc., which has been appointed to publish catalogues raisonnés for Rachel Whiteread, Howard Hodgkin, and Patrick Heron.
Saskia Spender
Saskia Spender is the President of the Arshile Gorky Foundation since 2016, and is the artist’s granddaughter, as well as a fifth generation artist herself. The Arshile Gorky Foundation is a US based 501(c)3, dedicated to safeguarding the artist’s legacy. Its primary purpose is to complete the Catalogue Raisonné.
Saskia grew up in Italy, emigrating to England to study social anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge. She has two children and works in London.
Edith Devaney is an independent curator and writer.
For twenty years she was a senior curator at the Royal Academy of Arts where she was responsible for originating and curating exhibitions such as Jasper Johns; ‘Something Resembling Truth’ exhibition in 2017 and Abstract Expressionism in 2016. She also curated the David Hockney exhibition, 82 Portraits and one still-life, and originated and co-curated the Hockney landscape exhibition, A Bigger Picture, in 2012, and Richard Diebenkorn in 2015. In her capacity as Head of Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, she worked with many international contemporary artists on both the curation of this annual exhibition and special projects and displays relating to it.
She left the Royal Academy in 2021 to manage the David Hockney Foundation and David Hockney Inc for two years.
Independent curatorial projects include Milton Avery at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Fine Art in Connecticut in 2022 and the Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth Texas in 2021; Afro: 1950-1970: From Italy to America and Back; in 2022 and Arshile Gorky; 1904 – 1948, both at the Ca’Pesaro Museum of Modern Art in Venice.
In addition to curating independent projects, she is also Artistic Advisor to the Malta International Contemporary Art Space.