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...
Seven years ago, I was at the Montclair Art Museum viewing an exhibition called “Cezanne and American Modernism.” As the title indicates, the show traced the influence of the French artist upon American artists ranging from Maurice Prendergast to Arshile Gorky. The works were wonderful, but I found myself thinking of non-aesthetic matters as well. “Let’s see,” I mused, going down the line, “Alfred Maurer killed himself, and Patrick Henry Bruce killed himself, and Oscar Bluemner killed himself, and Arshile Gorky killed himself, and George Ault probably killed himself.” I could have been forgetting someone, but even that quick list of painters was enough to make me realize that if I had been a life insurance salesman back in the period between the World Wars, I wouldn’t have sold a policy to an American modernist artist on a bet. I’ve been thinking about that exhibition because I recently acquired watercolors done a year apart by two artists in the show, one who killed himself, and one who didn’t. Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) was born in Germany, trained as an architect there, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 25. He soon found work as a draftsman in architectural firms. Yet two years later, he was living on the streets, sleeping in Bowery flophouses, and relying on soup kitchens to keep from starvation. Drastic changes in fortune would accompany Bluemner for the rest of his life. He found work again as an architect, designed the Bronx Borough Courthouse (and was cheated out of his fee), took up painting, studied color theory, won a lawsuit over his Bronx design,...
Ellen Lanyon, a Chicago artist who later ended up in New York, often painted pictures that placed ordinary objects in dream-like juxtapositions with a decidedly spooky air. In an article on her work for Art in America twenty years ago, I wrote that I had always considered her to be your basic Corn Belt Surrealist, but that a fuller knowledge of her work had shown me she was much more than that. Ah, the danger of coining a phrase. When Ellen died four years ago, an obituary ignored the positive tone of my article, saying merely that a critic (sneeringly, it was implied) had once called her a Corn Belt Surrealist. Looking back, I see that the problem was with the term Corn Belt — no one would object to an artist’s being called a Surrealist. In my New York provincialism, I was condescending to all artists not working in New York. There was also a lingering suspicion of artists working in a realistic style. When I was pursuing my graduate studies in art history, the history of modern art read like the book of Genesis – all those “begats.” Impressionism begat Neo-Impressionism, which begat Post-Impressionism and so on, all the way down to recent years, when Abstract Expressionism begat Post-Painterly Abstraction, which begat Minimalism, at which point painting was supposed to end. The constant in the modernist version of art history was that art in the 20th century was tending inexorably toward abstraction and the flatness of the picture plane. Any artist who wasn’t in step with this progression was hopelessly retardataire, a dinosaur who hadn’t realized that...
What’s the Mona Lisa worth? The short answer is, whatever someone will pay for it. The longer answer is that nobody knows, because no one has tried to sell it recently, and you’ll never know how much a painting is worth until you try to sell it. Unless the Louvre decides to offer the Mona Lisa at public auction to the highest bidder, we’ll never know what it’s worth. Might some Russian or Chinese plutocrat pay $1 billion for the painting? I can imagine that happening, but I have absolutely no way of proving my assertion. Leonardo’s paintings have been in the general news lately because of lawsuits and threatened lawsuits involving Sotheby’s. The story is the stuff of Antique Road Show dreams – a group of New York dealers bought a painting, Christ as Salvator Mundi, for $10,000 in 2013 from a small auction in Louisiana. At the time, it was considered a painting by a follower of Leonardo. After authentication by experts, however, the painting was declared to be an original oil by Leonardo, and the dealers sold it for $80 million to Yves Bouvier, a Swiss dealer. Sotheby’s was or was not deeply involved in the sale, depending on whom you ask. Bouvier then flipped the painting to a Russian billionaire for $127.5 million. When the original group of dealers learned the resale price, they decided to sue Sotheby’s for the difference between their original sale price and the amount the billionaire paid. Sotheby’s was, in their opinion, either colluding with Bouvier to get a low price, or it was at fault for not knowing what...
Two things happened last month that served for me as contradictory bellwethers for the current state of the market for 19th century American art. The first was the annual meeting of the Appraisers Association of America. The second was the American auctions. I should start by saying that the market for 19th century American art has never been a sexy one. In the 1980’s, when the Japanese were buying like drunken sailors, they were after French Impressionists and the School of Paris, not the artists of the Hudson River School. Back then I used to laugh at the difference between the Impressionist and Modernist auctions and the ones for American art. The Impressionist and Modern sales were glamorous evening events with champagne being served, people in black tie air-kissing each other, and plenty of celebrity spotting – ooh, look, there’s Bianca Jagger! “Stolid” was the adjective that came to mind for the American sales. The seats were filled with bankers from Toledo with their wives, while standing at the rear were us dealers, sipping tepid coffee from Styrofoam cups. The bid board showed the prices being bid in pounds, francs, yen, and so forth, just as it did during the Impressionist and Modern sales, but the conversion wasn’t necessary. American art traded only in dollars, as there wasn’t a worldwide demand. After several ups and downs through the past 30 years, the Impressionist and Modern market today is doing fine. The players have changed – Chinese and Russian buyers are now major presences in the sales rooms. I don’t think there’s the sort of indiscriminate buying that was done...
