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...
The end to my days as an outsider artist occurred in the second grade. My classmates and I were making crayon drawings the way children do today – a strip of green along the bottom for the grass, with a child and a tree standing against the white of the paper, and a strip of blue along the top for the sky. Mrs. Goldwater, our teacher, told us to fill in the uncolored portion with blue. “The sky comes down to the horizon,” she told us. And we looked and saw that she was right, sort of. But our drawings were also right – we instinctively knew that when we were running around at recess it was not in a sea of blue as if we were underwater. It was clear where we were. The sky was Up There. From then on, however, we made our drawings with the sky coming all the way down to the grass. The days of untutored talent were over. These reflections are occasioned by my having kept my New Year’s resolution: I attended the Outsider Art Fair in New York with my wife, to whom I give thanks for suggesting this blog’s title. I came away having seen a lot of interesting art, but with less clarity than ever about what the term “outsider art” means. The term was coined in 1972 by Roger Cardinal as an English equivalent to the French term art brut (“raw art”) which was used by French artist Jean Dubuffet to categorize art made by untrained or mentally-ill persons. Such art has also been called “folk art” and...
It’s the time of year for vows of changed behavior in the year to come. Take these art-related resolutions with me — they should be easier to keep than losing 30 pounds or quitting smoking. Explore something new: Museum curators of American art, not to mention dealers like me, tend to confine ourselves to our area of specialization. The prospect of reading a book or visiting an exhibition on something outside our bailiwick can seem like time lost that ought to be spent improving our knowledge of our subject. It is important, however, to indulge in that sheer enjoyment that brought us to art in the first place. I vow to see at least one show and read at least one book in 2018 on a field of art I’ll never deal in. It can be liberating to visit, say, an exhibition of Islamic art and just enjoy its beauty instead of walking through a show of American art and mentally placing a price on each piece, i.e. “That Hassam, $350,000 once; now probably $275,000. And that John Falter! Could have bought it for $20,000 or less, twelve years ago; now worth at least $100,000.” Shut the market out, and just look. Delve a little into something new. See it now: I missed the Florine Stettheimer exhibition at the Jewish Museum this past summer. I intended to get to it, but I kept postponing a visit, making the usual excuses – I don’t have the time today to devote enough attention to it, the museum’s too far uptown to combine with today’s trip to 57th Street, and so on....
Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New York two weeks ago. Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is suing the Swiss dealer who sold him this work for $127,500,000, alleging that the dealer overcharged him on several other deals, undoubtedly had the last laugh here. The sale was surrounded by controversy from the start. Was this a genuine Leonardo? Experts differed. If so, how much of the original painting remained? The work had been heavily restored. In the end, it didn’t matter. Christie’s put on a full court press in marketing the work, holding public viewings of it in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and New York. De-emphasizing the Christian theme (it is a portrait of Jesus, after all), Christie’s touted it as “the male Mona Lisa,” brilliantly linking it with what is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I witnessed some of the hoopla the New York exhibition generated as I arrived to view the American works coming up for sale at Christie’s that same week. I had to push my way past a long line of people who had waited 30 minutes to an hour for a look at the painting. The atmosphere reminded longtime New Yorkers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was on display. Over 27 million people visited the Vatican Pavilion at the fair to stand on a moving walkway and be transported past the...
Earlier this month, I gave a lecture entitled “Appraising the Art of the American West” to a group from the Appraisers Association of America. I spoke about how to set valuations on artworks depicting the American West and its inhabitants by artists from the early 19th century until the present day, and I explained the various factors that make, say, one painting by Frederic Remington more valuable than another of equal size. One of the artists I discussed in my talk was Charles Bird King (1785-1862). Born in Newport, Rhode Island, King came to New York at the age of 15 to apprentice himself to Edward Savage, a now all-but-forgotten portrait painter. In 1806 King left for London to study with Benjamin West, a famous American painter who had settled there. Returning to America in 1812, King spent the next few years in various mid-Atlantic cities, making a living by painting portraits of politicians and other notables. By 1816, he was living in Washington, DC. King would be nothing but a footnote in American art history today had he not received a commission from the government in 1821 to paint the members of Native American delegations who were visiting Washington. For the next 20 years, he would paint portraits of tribal leaders as they arrived in town to be shafted yet again by the Great White Father. Those portraits aroused much interest when they were exhibited and later served as the basis for illustrated volumes which are still widely sought after by bibliophiles. In my talk, I emphasized that what often makes one of King’s portraits more popular, and...
