Fear not, Gentle Reader. The word you are about to hear may be said in the presence of small children and eminent divines. It will not cause a single eyebrow to be raised when dropped at the dinner table or inserted into august deliberations. Most people would deem it entirely inoffensive. Applied to a work of art, however, it is an abomination, the very mark of Cain, a word no dealer ever wants to hear uttered.
The word, Gentle Reader, is “atypical.”
Take a look at the lovely oil sketch below.
A beautiful painting, no? But this little painting has a big problem – it’s by Frederic Remington, who is famous for his paintings of the American West, for charging cavalrymen, rambunctious cowboys, and defiant Native Americans.
The Impressionist painting above is not what comes to mind when you think of Remington. It is, in a word, atypical. Yet Remington was moving to increasingly Impressionist brushwork and subject matter in the last years of his life, and it is interesting to speculate on the works he would have painted had he not died young (age 48, appendix). Certainly Remington recognized the break with his early style. He burned the paintings he had in his possession which had been done as magazine illustrations and wrote a correspondent, “There is nothing left but my landscape studies.”
But the art market, then as now, wants the subject that made Remington famous. How is a landscape study like the one above to be priced? A Remington painting this size (just over a foot wide) of the head of a cowboy could easily fetch $100,000. On the other hand, if this painting were by a noted American Impressionist such as Frank Benson or Edmund Tarbell, it could likewise fetch six figures. As it is, this painting was offered at an auction in Santa Fe last December with an estimate of $80,000-100,000. It failed to sell.
So what lessons can be learned from all this? One of my maxims to collectors is, “Don’t buy an autograph with a painting attached.” Perhaps my advice to dealers should be, “Don’t try to sell an autograph with a painting attached.” And yet a beautiful painting is a beautiful painting, no matter who did it. This beautiful painting deserves to be on a wall somewhere. The tension between the beauty of a work of art and its perceived monetary value, that struggle between buyer and seller, is the stuff of the art market.