Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. -Thomas Gray Years ago, I read an interview with the actor Bruno Kirby (Godfather II, City Slickers) who spoke in passing of the role that luck and connections had played in his career. “There are actors driving cabs,” Kirby said, “who could blow me off a stage.” Kirby could have been speaking for any actor or artist. What if Michelangelo, instead of being raised in Florence, where he was trained by Ghirlandaio and soon gained the patronage of the Medici, had been raised in, say, Catanzaro and had been trained by the local stonemason there? It is possible that guidebooks to Calabria today would say something like, “In the Church of the Santissimo Rosario in Catanzaro can be found some amusingly vigorous carvings, now sadly deteriorated, by M. Buonarroti.” Talent and training are necessary for any successful artistic career, but luck and location play significant roles as well. I think that most connoisseurs today would say that the three greatest late 19th – early 20th century artists to paint the American West and its cowboys and Native Americans were Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Henry Farny. Farny was by far the best-trained of the three, having studied at the Dusseldorf Academy. Travels in the West, combined with a solid academic foundation, enabled Farny to paint pictures like Departure for the Buffalo Hunt, below: Yet only 40 years ago, Farny was practically unknown outside of Cincinnati, his hometown. The reason is that he returned to Cincinnati after his studies in Europe and...
If you look at my rules for collecting, you’ll see that one of them is “It is better to have a home run by a .200 hitter than a pop foul by Babe Ruth.” You’re not collecting autographs; you’re collecting paintings. Even the greatest artists had bad days. Last week at its American art auction, Christie’s tried to sell an autograph with a painting attached. (See below) Two Puritans by Edward Hopper had an estimate of $20-30 million. It was a large oil, but I thought it was boring and a bit claustrophobic. It did not have the atmosphere of a great landscape such as Railroad Sunset or Lighthouse at Two Lights, let alone the psychological tension of one of Hopper’s city scenes. Collectors agreed with me, for bidding on this work went nowhere. The auctioneer gave up at $16.5 million, and I doubt that it was a real bid. He was probably “taking bids off the chandelier,” as the saying has it. What’s the painting worth, now that it has failed at auction — $8 million? $10 million? I think it will be a tough sell, even at those “modest” levels. One lot that intrigued me was at Sotheby’s — Kenneth Davies’ Clapboards and Shadows. (See below.) Davies, born in 1925, has long been a respected American realist, but his record price at auction during the past two years has been $11,250, with most lots going well below that. Sotheby’s placed a photo of this work on the back cover of the catalog, a place of honor, and gave it an estimate of $70,000-90,000. Based on...
I began my art dealing career in 1981, when I moved my family from Chicago to New York. A former art history professor of mine at the University of Chicago kindly arranged an interview for me with Ira Spanierman. In short order, I found myself the second-in-command of a remarkable, not-to-say legendary dealer. Ira’s father had had a small auction house in New York whose weekly auctions of household goods – paintings, rugs, furniture, silver – gave Ira a thorough grounding in things aesthetic. There are in general two kinds of dealers. The marchand amateur, often a scholar, begins as a collector, starts to trade or resell his acquisitions, and wakes up one day to find himself a dealer. Then there’s the hustler who, if he weren’t selling paintings, would be selling cars or stocks or real estate. I don’t mean the description “hustler” as an insult. Hustlers can have great eyes; indeed, there are several hustlers whose gut feeling about the authenticity of a painting I would trust over the certainties of most professors. Ira was one of these hustlers. Ira’s gut feeling had told him a dozen years before I met him that it was possible that a painting listed as a copy of a lost Raphael at an auction in London just might be the real thing. He turned out to be right. Ira had an eye for quality in American art as well. Back in the 1960s, long before the Bicentennial had begun to generate widespread interest in American art, Ira had held important exhibitions of John Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. By the time I...
