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,...
My nephew collected baseball cards as a kid. His father was an avid collector of various items such watch fobs, and Greg aspired to an equivalent seriousness. He got a guidebook about the value of individual cards and kept abreast of the value of each card in his collection. He came to me once, proudly showing a card. “Look at this!” he bragged. “This card is worth eight dollars!” He was so proud of his possession that I didn’t have the heart to ask him, “Greg, do you know anyone who will actually put eight dollars into your hand in exchange for this card? Because if you don’t, it’s not worth eight dollars.” The same warning applies to any baseball card, even the “Holy Grail” of them all, the card of Honus Wagner which was included in packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes from 1909-11. (Baseball cards came with cigarettes, not bubble gum, back then.) A mint-condition copy of this card, less than three inches high, sold in a sports memorabilia auction last year for $3,120,000. Even copies in less than perfect condition bring big money. And yet, remove the card from its protective holder, take it to the mall in your town, hand it to the counter person at McDonald’s, and ask him to give you a Big Mac in exchange. Unless the counter person is extremely knowledgeable about old baseball cards, my guess is that you’ll leave hungry. In the same way, works of art derive their monetary value from the passions (and the income) of the people who collect them. When there is a large pool of...
In my last blog, I wrote about the results of the American auctions that had occurred in the previous week in New York. Among the lessons they taught, I said, was that the market for 19th century genre and still life paintings was “dead as a doornail.” Spoken too soon. A couple of weeks after that post, the still life below by William McCloskey came up at a Grogan & Company fine art and jewelry sale in Boston. Estimated at $80,000-150,000, it sold for $488,000, including premium. McCloskey (1859-1941) studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taught briefly in Denver, and then moved to Los Angeles, at that time a sleepy provincial town with pretensions to culture. While he enjoyed an active career in California as a portrait painter, McCloskey would be unknown today except for the paintings he made of oranges and other fruit, which have proved perennial favorites over the years. In setting the estimate, Georgina Winthrop, the cataloguer at Grogan, was playing it safe. Although a similar McCloskey still life sold in New York for $782,500 in 2011, Ms. Winthrop obviously thought, as I did, that the current market for Victorian-era paintings was weak and that a conservative estimate was called for. Whether or not the low estimate and the non-New York venue encouraged collectors to think that they might get a steal, there was no stopping them once the bidding began. Six telephone bidders engaged in a bidding war, tripling the estimate. Initial reports had said that the buyers of the painting were a young couple from San Francisco who...
Is there anything more embarrassing, fashion-wise, than looking at your high school yearbook 10 to 20 years after you have graduated? Those hair styles! That outfit! What on earth were we thinking? The embarrassment gradually subsides. And, who knows, beehive hairdos, mullets, or gimme caps may one day get sufficiently retro to be recycled. These reflections were prompted by the performance of various schools of art at the American auctions last week. While 19th and early 20th century American art, as I have said in previous posts, is not nearly as sexy as contemporary art, the sales, though uneven, did show solid results in some areas. A synopsis would be as follows: modernism still strong, illustration art still strong, Western all right, Hudson River School spotty, Impressionism surprisingly iffy, and 19th century genre and still life paintings dead as a doornail. These analyses are based on market performance this past week, not artistic quality. But what causes some schools to go out of favor and others to suddenly rise? In terms of fashion, why have lush Victorian-era still life paintings gone the way of capri pants? Consider the failure of this painting to sell. This opulent still life is by Morston Ream (Morston Constantine Ream, to be exact. He and his brother Carducius Plantagenet Ream, also a still life painter, seem to have had parents who believed that children should have names to live up to.) I don’t know what Christie’s was thinking when they put a $100,000-150,000 estimate on the painting, when smaller still lifes by the artist regularly sell for four figures. The auctioneer at this sale...
There was a kerfuffle in the art world recently about an exhibition that opened in Beijing last fall and is currently on tour to three other Chinese museums. The exhibition is of the works of Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), a German artist whose monumentally-sized works deal with the heritage of 20th century Germany and in particular with its Nazi past. Kiefer’s works have brought three and a half million dollars at auction, and he is rightfully recognized as one of the most significant contemporary German artists. Kiefer had had many one-person exhibitions at major museums over the past 30 years; what made this exhibition notable was that over ninety percent of the works were owned by one Chinese collector and that the artist was not consulted in the preparation of the exhibition. The Chinese museums and the German foundation that organized the exhibition dispute that last assertion, but let’s assume that it’s correct and that the artist was given no chance to have a say in the show. Living artists have traditionally had a hand in museum exhibitions of their works, consulting with the museums’ curators on the selection artworks, working with the museums’ designers on the layout of the galleries, and giving interviews to the scholars writing the catalog. The three galleries which sell Kiefer’s work put out a joint statement that “to plan such an important showcase in China without the artist’s input is disrespectful.” Whether organizing the show was disrespectful or not, Kiefer and his dealers had no legal standing to block it. The works are the property of the collector, who can show them wherever...
