I began my art dealing career in 1981, when I moved my family from Chicago to New York. A former art history professor of mine at the University of Chicago kindly arranged an interview for me with Ira Spanierman. In short order, I found myself the second-in-command of a remarkable, not-to-say legendary dealer. Ira’s father had had a small auction house in New York whose weekly auctions of household goods – paintings, rugs, furniture, silver – gave Ira a thorough grounding in things aesthetic.
There are in general two kinds of dealers. The marchand amateur, often a scholar, begins as a collector, starts to trade or resell his acquisitions, and wakes up one day to find himself a dealer. Then there’s the hustler who, if he weren’t selling paintings, would be selling cars or stocks or real estate. I don’t mean the description “hustler” as an insult. Hustlers can have great eyes; indeed, there are several hustlers whose gut feeling about the authenticity of a painting I would trust over the certainties of most professors. Ira was one of these hustlers.
Ira’s gut feeling had told him a dozen years before I met him that it was possible that a painting listed as a copy of a lost Raphael at an auction in London just might be the real thing. He turned out to be right. Ira had an eye for quality in American art as well. Back in the 1960s, long before the Bicentennial had begun to generate widespread interest in American art, Ira had held important exhibitions of John Twachtman and Theodore Robinson.
By the time I joined him, Ira had decided to concentrate his formidable energy on American art, thus setting the course of my dealing career. Those were exciting times. There was so much stuff available. Ira ran a monthly ad in The Magazine Antiques which stated, “We will pay over $1,000,000 for highly important paintings by …..” followed by a list of the most important American artists. We got calls almost every day. (Part of my job was explaining to callers that, say, a doodle by Winslow Homer did not qualify as a million dollar work of art.)
When we participated in an antiques fair out of town in the day before cellphones, we would run the “we will pay” ad in the local paper and hire an answering service to take the calls. The parking lot of the fair often resembled a low-tech version of Antiques Roadshow as people brought works of art for Ira and me to see. I looked at a lot of fakes in the trunks of cars, but I also discovered and purchased works that I remember fondly to this day.
We were able to purchase works at advantageous prices both from individuals and at auction because very little information about the art market was available to the average person. The buyers at auction were still mostly dealers. Auction results were compiled once a year in an unillustrated volume called the Art Sales Index, which gave only title, medium, size, and price. If you didn’t attend the auctions regularly and hadn’t put together a library of marked catalogs, it was very difficult to stay abreast of the market.
Thirty years later, the art market is completely different. When I came to New York, there were at least a dozen public galleries dealing in 19th and 20th century American art. Now there are a handful. The internet has made it possible for potential buyers to find and compare prices for an artist’s work. Small auction houses list the lots in their sales online, and a collector halfway around the world can easily bid in real time on an object in an auction in rural Ohio. The auctions, once mainly a wholesale market for the art trade, are now selling things for high retail prices and setting world records. Dealers can no longer afford to buy at auction, since they are competing against their own retail customers.
Just as important, the attics of America are pretty much empty. Every now and then, a cobweb-covered masterpiece by an important artist is discovered, but it’s not common. Dealers in 19th and 20th century art are now facing the situation that their counterparts dealing in Old Masters have had to face for a long time. There just aren’t enough works available to put on a continuing series of one-artist exhibitions. There are still dealers in the field, but, again like the Old Master dealers, they have often had to close their public galleries and go private, participating in art fairs and hosting only the very occasional exhibition.
Some say that the art market of the future will be entirely on the internet; others (like myself) are not so sure. As the gatekeeper role of dealers and the large auction houses has been swept aside by the glut of works offered online, the number of fakes has proliferated, and the glut of unsubstantiated “facts” has made true knowledge and connoisseurship an ever-more-precious quality. If you’re buying a vintage car for a lot of money, it would be worth your while to hire an experienced mechanic to inspect it before writing a check. The same philosophy holds true with a painting – my expertise can save you some expensive lessons as you assemble a collection.
I’ll talk more about the market and its issues in the months to come. I hope you’ll stay with me.