If you asked a dealer in 19th and 20th century art to rate subjects in terms of popularity, he or she would undoubtedly put still life paintings of dead fish or game down at the bottom of the list (along with portraits) and put beach scenes at the top. Beach scenes have been enduringly popular with the general public, and no American artist illustrates this phenomenon better than Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927). Born in Cincinnati to a cabinet maker and his wife, Potthast showed early artistic interest and was studying at a local art school by the age of 12. By the time he was a young man, he was working as a lithographer in a local printing firm. Like many of his contemporaries from applied arts backgrounds, he would move easily between fine and commercial art for the rest of his life. Potthast followed the example of many Midwestern artists of German ancestry and studied at the Royal Academy in Munich, where he absorbed the teachings of instructors steeped in the dark palette and bravura brushwork of the 17th century Old Masters. Only later would he study in Paris, where he picked up the bright tonalities of the Impressionists. He would divide his time between Cincinnati, earning money, and Europe for the next twenty years. In 1895 he moved to New York, which would be his artistic base for the rest of his life. Potthast would be just another of the solid but relatively unknown American artists from the decades around the turn of the last century had he not, at around the age of 50, stumbled onto...
In 1887 two girls were born who would grow up to be remarkable modernist artists. First to arrive, in Santa Rosa, California, was Marguerite Thompson. Two months later, Georgia O’Keeffe first saw the light of day in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Each would make a successful career in the artworld, achieving renown in a strongly male-dominated society. Their final reputations, however, would be completely uneven. Born the daughter of a well-to-do lawyer, Marguerite grew up in Fresno. She had been accepted at Stamford University but abandoned those studies for an extended visit to an aunt in Paris, where she wrote articles on the Latin Quarter for her hometown paper and studied in progressive art schools. She met Gertrude Stein and Picasso and became close friends with Ossip Zadkine. Greatly influenced by the work of Matisse and the Fauves, she exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Independants. By the time of her return to California in 1911, she was undoubtedly one of the most avant-garde American artists of her time. Against her parents’ wishes, she moved to New York a year later to marry William Zorach, whom she had met as a student in Paris. As Marguerite Zorach, she settled with her husband in Greenwich Village and exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913, through which mainstream America was introduced to modern art. O’Keeffe grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. After a year’s study at the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York for two more years’ study at the Art Students League. For the four years following her studies, she worked as a commercial...
I met a fellow dealer walking down Madison Avenue a few days ago. When we first met, 20 years back, he had a gallery on the Upper East Side. Since his primary focus was contemporary, he had followed the migration of contemporary dealers to Chelsea and opened a new gallery there. Now, he told me, he was closing his Chelsea space. He was going to deal privately out of his large apartment uptown. “Wait,” I asked him. “If you don’t have a public gallery, how can you remain a member of the ADAA?” The Art Dealers Association of America has always required that each of its members operate a public brick-and-mortar space with regular exhibitions. Private, by-appointment-only dealers have always had their applications rejected. “No problem,” he told me. “I’ll continue to mount exhibitions under my own name but in conjunction with other dealers, and I’ll publish catalogs. I’m about to mount a show in a pop-up space, and I’ll continue to do art fairs. The ADAA is fine with that.” In a few words, my friend had summed up the changing situation in today’s art world. Commercial rents in desirable neighborhoods have gotten ever higher, and the contemporary art market has bifurcated into a handful of mega-galleries such as Gagosian and David Zwirner, which represent a few superstar artists, and a lot of smaller galleries which often exhibit emerging artists. The smaller galleries, handling artists whose works trade in four and low-five figures, are having a hard time keeping their heads above water financially, even when the shows they mount are critically well-respected. Creative strategies to solve the...
Thirty-five years ago, I was working for a New York gallery that ran frequent ads in national publications. Our high profile meant that we received inquiries seeking advice about art. One day I received a call from a man who had recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii. There had been an art gallery just off the lobby of the hotel where he had stayed, and the dealer had attempted to interest him in a really good deal. My caller wasn’t sure exactly what the medium of the work was – he felt sure it was a print of some kind – and he couldn’t remember the name of the artist, but he was struck by the facts that the artist was both famous and elderly and could reasonably be expected to die soon. The dealer had assured my caller that the death of the artist would immediately cause the artist’s prices to rise, and he was wondering whether he should follow up on this marvelous investment opportunity. “Let me guess,” I asked him, “Was the artist’s name Salvador Dali?” “Yeah, yeah, that’s right!” he responded. “Dali!” Salvador Dali (born 1904, he would die in 1989) had once been a Surrealist painter of some significance, but by the time of the call, he had long been a caricature of himself, indulging in publicity stunts, appearing on late-night television, and endorsing a variety of products. He was not in good health and was dependent on caretakers who controlled him. It was rumored that he had signed thousands of sheets of blank lithographic paper at their behest, paper that would be...
The first time Roberta and I visited the Barnes Collection, we could tell why it was world-famous. The museum was at that time in its old digs in Merion, Pennsylvania, and they didn’t make a visit easy. This quiet suburb of Philadelphia did not want a lot of traffic, so admission was strictly controlled. You had to make your reservation for a visit some time in advance. Once inside, however, you were treated to an incredible array of paintings by the greatest of the French Post-Impressionist and modernist artists – Cezanne, Seurat, Picasso, Matisse, and more, all represented by true masterpieces. They were laid out on the walls with folk art and decorative objects in the idiosyncratic hanging prescribed by Albert Barnes, the museum’s famously irascible founder. I didn’t mind the installation, but the lighting was terrible, especially for someone accustomed to the track lighting found in modern museums and commercial galleries. Whole rooms were lit by only a single lamp in the middle of the ceiling, and the colors of many paintings seemed muted instead of being vibrant as they ought. Barnes intended his collection to remain ensconced in Merion until Doomsday. 40 years after his death, however, the trustees found themselves facing major financial difficulties. A suggestion was made to move the collection into Philadelphia to make it more accessible to visits by lots of people. It took years of lawsuits to break the will, but in 2012 the collection moved to a modern building on Museum Parkway, not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was excited when the new museum opened. I had heard...
