Grandma Versus the Icon
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...
Cue the Future
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...
Dead Cat Bounce
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...
Light ‘Em Up
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,...
Inside Outsider Art
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...
New Year Resolutions
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...
Fits and Starts
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...
The Eagle in Question
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...
Oldenburg
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...
Greta
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...
