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...
Last month the Pursuits section of Bloomberg.com published an article entitled “That $100,000 Painting Bought to Flip Is Now Worth About $20,000.” The article by Katya Kazakina detailed the travails of Niels Kantor, an art dealer and collector, who two years ago had bought the painting below for $100,000: Hugh Scott-Douglas was already a rising star at the age of 24, when he created the untitled painting to the left. (I’ll call it a painting although it’s actually a cyanotype print on canvas nearly eight feet high.) In 2014, two years after he made the work, a very similar painting would bring $100,000 in sale at Christie’s New York. Kantor had already bought the painting above, so his purchase made him look prescient. If Scott-Douglas’s market continued to rise as it had over the previous two years, Kantor stood to make a tidy profit by flipping the piece to another collector. The market, however, did not cooperate. 2015 saw a noted softening of the contemporary market as collectors turned away from several once-trendy young artists, and Kantor could not find a buyer for his painting. He cut his asking price to $60,000 and finally decided to unload the work for whatever the market would bear. “I feel like it could go to zero. It’s like a stock that has crashed,” he told Bloomberg. On September 20, the painting sold for at Phillips New York for $30,000, including buyer’s premium. Subtract that premium, plus the commission charged to the seller, and Kantor probably received around $23,000 when all was said and done. This kind of story would never have happened...
If you asked a hundred urban twenty-somethings to describe themselves, a fair number would define themselves as artists of one sort or another. “I’m a painter,” a few would tell you. “I’m an actor,” others would say. Jazz saxophonist, dancer, standup comedian – the entire gamut of art forms would probably be found in the self-descriptions of those hundred young people. A tiny percentage of our hypothetical group will go on to achieve commercial and critical success in their fields. The vast majority will not. Of the also-rans, most will come to their senses sooner or later and take conventional jobs. But there are a few souls who carry their self-definition as artists with them despite their lack of commercial success. If you define yourself as a painter, then you paint, whether or not you can sell your paintings. Samuel Rothbort (1882-1971) was one of these artists. Rothbort was born in Vawkavysk (Polish: Wolkovisk), a town now part of Belarus. In keeping with Jewish life in the shtetl, his father was a Talmudic scholar, and his mother supported the family, selling flour and grain. Rothbort showed artistic leanings early, shaping little figures from the dough with which his mother made bread. If he found a pencil, he would draw on whatever paper was available, sometimes on the inside cover of a book, an act for which he remembered being punished by the rabbi. His activities gained him the Yiddish nickname Schmuel der Mahler (Samuel the Painter). He was entirely self-taught and never had formal artistic training. Revolution was in the air as the new century arrived, and as a...
All of us know someone with a seemingly effortless sense of style. It’s usually a woman, someone to whom you could give a man’s old tuxedo jacket, a peasant blouse, a tartan skirt, and combat boots and say, “Make an outfit out of this.” She would roll up the jacket’s sleeves, pick the perfect jewelry and accessories, and wear the resulting costume with such panache that she would be the embodiment of chic. Most women who tried to do something like that, however, would look like a walking rummage sale, while any attempt on my part to assemble some kind of male equivalent to that look would cause my daughters to have another of their increasingly frequent discussions on What To Do About Dad Before He Does Something Outright Dangerous. There are men, however, who can pull it off. I remember chatting with the painter Wolf Kahn at a gallery opening many years ago. He was wearing a linen suit of pale olive, paired with a dark purple shirt and a bright orange tie. The combination pushed right up to the edge of outrageousness but didn’t fall in, and the effect, coupled with his silver hair, was stunning. (A lesson here – artists can often get away with things that normal people cannot.) All of which is simply a lead-in to a discussion of style when it comes to collecting art. There are some combinations of styles which have a long history of going together. The exhibition of French cubist painting with African sculpture, for example, goes back to the earliest days of cubism. The pairing of folk sculpture...
In 1981, in an act of faith that today makes me shudder at its innocence, my wife and I moved with our baby to New York from Chicago. The passage of time has mercifully dulled the troubles of those first days – moving into half the space we’d had in Chicago for twice the rent, looking for a job, closer to family, but cut off from our good friends back “home.” Looking back, I am struck by the kindness and generosity of artist friends we had known in Chicago who had preceded us to New York. Michael Hurson and Ellen Lanyon invited us for dinner to their lofts almost as soon as we arrived and helped us deal with the inevitable culture shock at a time when we were struggling to find our feet. One other artist with a Chicago connection reached out to us – George Deem. The connection was more tenuous but just as real – we had published a piece by him in White Walls, a magazine of writings by artists that we had founded five years earlier with our friend Buzz Spector. George invited us to his loft on West 18th Street, the same loft in which he would die 27 years later, where we met his partner, Ronald Vance. The supper that night was the first of many we were to have over the years, simple yet sophisticated, full of good food and lively talk, with the seemingly effortless attention to detail that marked our hosts as masters of entertaining. The affection I feel for George and Ronald and those days surrounds me now...
One of the joys and nuisances of having been trained as an art historian is that you constantly see life imitating art. I was attending the opening of The Armory Show two weeks when I was struck by the sight of a young woman tending bar. “Excuse me, but would you let me take your picture?” I asked her. “You remind me of a famous painting.” She graciously agreed to pose, and I took the photo below. Some of you probably already know the painting I was thinking of, the Courtauld Gallery’s great Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Folies-Bergère was not yet the home of the Can-Can and the nearly-nude revue in 1882, when Manet painted his picture, but it was already a popular night spot that featured operettas, popular music, and gymnastics, not to mention copious amounts of alcohol. The similarities between the two images above made me think about the similarities between their two venues. Openings of art exhibitions have been popular social occasions for over 250 years, since at least the heydays of the French Salon and the Royal Academy, and the art always seems to have taken a back seat to the opportunity for the fashionable crowd to see and be seen. Nevertheless, major art fair openings today have married glamour, fashion, and money in a way not seen since the hot nightclubs of the 1940’s and 50’s such as the Stork Club in Manhattan or the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Like those nightclubs, major art fair openings feature movie stars, tycoons, arm candy, and a well-established pecking order for who gets admitted...
