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...
Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus: The heather lies limp and dead On the mountain, the baltering torrent Shrunk to a soodling thread. -from “Under Sirius” by W.H. Auden A few years ago, I interviewed Alex Katz at his summer place in Lincolnville, Maine. He had bought the small farmhouse there in 1954. At the time, it had no plumbing or electricity, and the trek from New York City took far longer than it does today in this age of interstate highways. I asked Alex why he had chosen Lincolnville, when most of the painters, poets, and critics we now lump together as the New York School were spending their summers in the Hamptons. “Well,” he told me, “Larry Rivers said, ‘Come on out and enjoy the party.’ But I liked the look of it here better, you know? And at the end of the summer, I’d come back refreshed, and they’d all be beat up by parties.” At the risk of sounding like a geezer, I wonder how many young artists today could bear to be shut off from their I-Phones and laptops, their e-mail and social media for a summer. (Actually, I wonder the same about middle-aged or white-haired artists as well.) To withdraw into solitude for a month or two and just work at what you love, to do labor, physical or mental, that replenishes as much as it exhausts – it’s a strategy that more of us should consider. The Hampton crowd came back with sunburns and hangovers; Alex came back with a car trunk full of paintings and drawings. Whether you’re an artist...
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. -Thomas Gray Years ago, I read an interview with the actor Bruno Kirby (Godfather II, City Slickers) who spoke in passing of the role that luck and connections had played in his career. “There are actors driving cabs,” Kirby said, “who could blow me off a stage.” Kirby could have been speaking for any actor or artist. What if Michelangelo, instead of being raised in Florence, where he was trained by Ghirlandaio and soon gained the patronage of the Medici, had been raised in, say, Catanzaro and had been trained by the local stonemason there? It is possible that guidebooks to Calabria today would say something like, “In the Church of the Santissimo Rosario in Catanzaro can be found some amusingly vigorous carvings, now sadly deteriorated, by M. Buonarroti.” Talent and training are necessary for any successful artistic career, but luck and location play significant roles as well. I think that most connoisseurs today would say that the three greatest late 19th – early 20th century artists to paint the American West and its cowboys and Native Americans were Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Henry Farny. Farny was by far the best-trained of the three, having studied at the Dusseldorf Academy. Travels in the West, combined with a solid academic foundation, enabled Farny to paint pictures like Departure for the Buffalo Hunt, below: Yet only 40 years ago, Farny was practically unknown outside of Cincinnati, his hometown. The reason is that he returned to Cincinnati after his studies in Europe and...
If you look at my rules for collecting, you’ll see that one of them is “It is better to have a home run by a .200 hitter than a pop foul by Babe Ruth.” You’re not collecting autographs; you’re collecting paintings. Even the greatest artists had bad days. Last week at its American art auction, Christie’s tried to sell an autograph with a painting attached. (See below) Two Puritans by Edward Hopper had an estimate of $20-30 million. It was a large oil, but I thought it was boring and a bit claustrophobic. It did not have the atmosphere of a great landscape such as Railroad Sunset or Lighthouse at Two Lights, let alone the psychological tension of one of Hopper’s city scenes. Collectors agreed with me, for bidding on this work went nowhere. The auctioneer gave up at $16.5 million, and I doubt that it was a real bid. He was probably “taking bids off the chandelier,” as the saying has it. What’s the painting worth, now that it has failed at auction — $8 million? $10 million? I think it will be a tough sell, even at those “modest” levels. One lot that intrigued me was at Sotheby’s — Kenneth Davies’ Clapboards and Shadows. (See below.) Davies, born in 1925, has long been a respected American realist, but his record price at auction during the past two years has been $11,250, with most lots going well below that. Sotheby’s placed a photo of this work on the back cover of the catalog, a place of honor, and gave it an estimate of $70,000-90,000. Based on...
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...
