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...
A client called me the other day, looking for a particular print by Claes Oldenburg – “Profile Airflow (Axsom Platsker 59), cast polyurethane relief over lithograph, done in 1969. So I’m looking around – call me if you have one. But the request got me thinking about Oldenburg, who entered the pantheon of American art with his Pop Art contemporaries some time ago. Where do we put him now? Pop Art arose as an antidote to the ponderous theorizing of late Abstract Expressionism, a once-adventurous style that had hardened into a technique surrounded by a lot of pronouncements that had degenerated into buzzwords – action painting, the canvas as arena, abstraction as the apotheosis of high art, and so on. Pop Art cheerfully erased the boundary between high and low, between “real” art and “commercial” art — it was often hard to tell whether the artist was presenting an image of, say, a soup can with ironic intent or whether he genuinely admired the product and its packaging. Coupled with any knowing look was often a sort of goofy happiness, and Oldenburg’s work was the epitome of this. When he made papier-mâché replicas of items of clothing such as the life-sized little girl’s dress below, any critique of Western consumer culture is completely subverted by a sense of fun and the same sort of pride that a third grader might evince in making a similar project. A similar sense of fun pervades Oldenburg’s large outdoor commissions in which everyday objects are simplified to their essential forms and then expanded to gargantuan size, rendering them simultaneously familiar and strange. Most...
Greta Gundersen died in July of cancer. She was a private person, and I hadn’t known she was sick until a few weeks before her death. I had had the sense that something was wrong, for I had written a short essay for an exhibition she was due to have this fall and had heard nothing back when I sent it to her, which wasn’t like her at all. I met Greta fifteen years ago. A museum curator had recommended her as an artist whose work might be appropriate for an exhibition I was organizing for a New York gallery. The show was to be a multigenerational one, with 150-year-old paintings by members of the Hudson River School hung next to works by contemporary artists. I contacted Greta and asked if she could send me some images. “My works don’t reproduce well,” she told me. “Why don’t I just bring some of the smaller ones to you?” So it was that a week later I met Greta and saw her paintings. “These are great!” I enthused. “I want them for the show!” “Are you sure?” Greta asked doubtfully. “You don’t want some time to think it over?” Her response was, I came to learn, quintessentially Greta. Although a native New Yorker, through her Norwegian heritage she always carried a bit of Lake Wobegon. Landscape was the common element of the show I had planned, and I wanted to see what the paintings from different eras had to say to each other. Greta’s paintings pushed the genre about as far as it could go. They could be read as landscapes,...
