One of the now-normal occurrences of life in this Age of the Corona Virus, at least for those of us who watch the nightly news, is our newfound entry into the personal spaces of the talking heads who must broadcast remotely from their homes. These intrusions into...

Economists may not have caught on yet, but the art market has often made a pretty good canary in the coal mine. There seems to be something in the air that the art market senses a few months before everyone else. In 1989, for instance, the gallery I worked for was...

I got the kind of call last month that no dealer, appraiser, or art lover in general ever wants to get. A client called me to say that his home had been destroyed by a fire. He had managed to rescue some of his collection, but most of it had burned completely or had...

John Singer Sargent famously said that a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. Two portraits have been much in the news lately, as the National Portrait Gallery announced that its portrait of Barak Obama by Kehinde Wiley and its portrait of...

Roberta and I were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, enjoying an exhibition entitled Epic Abstraction that consisted of large-scale abstract works by important 20th century artists. Among the paintings we admired was Sam...

“The art business is not something you can equate to any other business. They’re not selling stocks and bonds here. They’re selling fine art.” Thus spoke dealer Helly Nahmad in a recent New York Times article entitled “The Fickle Salesroom,” which reported on a 40...

Any art dealer knows that the size of the painting he or she is offering is going to be an important factor in getting a collector to purchase the artwork. Collectors with loft-style walls may make exceptions for large contemporary paintings, but dealers in older art...

As part of a group from the Appraisers Association of America, I visited the studio last week of sculptor Chaim Gross (1902-1991). The building in Greenwich Village now houses the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. It’s definitely worth a visit – the ground floor...

My two-year-old granddaughter, Veronica, was sitting at my dining room table last week, having some strained pears and admiring Water Garden #1, a painting by the late Paul Gardere. It’s a large, complicated piece by an artist who was also large and complicated. Paul...

In 1981 I arrived in New York, jobless and with a wife and a baby daughter to support. I had worked in art publishing in Chicago and hoped to find something similar in New York, but a professor I had known at the University of Chicago called me and made a suggestion...