As a young dealer of American art, I sometimes looked enviously at dealers in Old Masters and French Impressionist art. Not only did they have excuses for frequent trips to art fairs in Europe, but they also had a worldwide clientele. The major Impressionist and Modern sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were black-tie, invitation-required, champagne-fueled, evening affairs with plenty of what the daily papers called “celebs” in attendance. You might find a Hollywood movie star, a Japanese industrialist, and a member of European nobility pursuing the same work of art. American art was, however, the Rodney Dangerfield of the art market. Our auctions were decidedly daytime affairs, with bankers from Toledo and oilmen from Texas holding up their paddles while we dealers stood at the back, sipping lukewarm coffee from Styrofoam cups. It seemed that nobody outside America wanted 19th and early 20th century American paintings. There were a few exceptions – the Japanese liked Andrew Wyeth and Grandma Moses, and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza put together a formidable collection of American art – but such collectors were rare. The fact that European collectors were uninterested in American art until the second half of the 20th century, however, has turned out to be a blessing for me in one respect: dealers in American art never have to worry about lawsuits from the heirs of European Jewish collectors. At the recent national conference of the Appraisers Association of America, Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman for the Americas, gave a talk called “Expanding Dimensions of Provenance.” The Nazis, as is well known, plundered Jewish collections in Germany and the European countries they...
Two stories about art captured the general attention this past month. The first embodied every thrift store visitor’s dream, something that has kept the Antiques Roadshow franchise in business since 1977. It invites visions of “That could happen to me!” A woman who has remained anonymous was browsing in a New Hampshire thrift shop in 2017. Poking through a dusty stack of paintings in search of an old frame that she might restore, the shopper came across a painting of two women in conversation. Liking the antique frame, she purchased the piece for four dollars and stuck it in a closet at home until she had time to deal with it. When she finally examined the painting carefully, she found a label on the back with the name N.C. Wyeth and another label mentioning a book called Ramona. N.C. Wyeth. Senora Gonzaga Moreno and Ramona.Photo courtesy Bonhams Skinner. The owner did some online research and discovered that the painting was indeed by Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), one of the foremost artists who worked in the Brandywine region of Pennsylvania, and the father of Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was a popular book illustrator in the first half of the 20th century, and this painting had served as the frontispiece for the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a 19th century writer and early crusader for the rights of Native Americans. N.C. Wyeth is a big deal for collectors of American illustrators today. Thirteen of his paintings have sold at auction for over a million dollars. The highest price, just under $6 million, was achieved at Sotheby’s five years ago. While Ramona...
As any retailer will tell you, presentation is everything. Painters, as retailers hoping to sell objects they make, have to consider how those objects are best presented. If a painting is to be framed, what kind of frame will present it to best advantage? Not framing a painting is also an aesthetic choice. I’ve written before about the role frames play in our perception of a painting (see previous blog here). The issue came up for me again this week when Roberta and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape. The show follows five artists – Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand – as they painted the evolving suburbs west of Paris during the 1880’s. It’s worth a look, both for the paintings themselves and as an example of the ways that such paintings have been framed. When I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, I sneered at Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings bearing Louis-style gold frames. I had read Felix Feneon, a critic who was close friends with several of the Neo-Impressionists, and I knew from his writing that the only proper frame for such works was a simple white frame, with just enough vermillion and chrome yellow added to the mixture to keep the white paint from being too cold. But a trip to the Art Institute revealed Impressionist paintings in Louis-style frames to beat the band, and even Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte bore such a frame. What was wrong...
The Appraisers Association of America is releasing a new edition of its handbook Appraising Art next spring. I was asked to contribute a chapter on appraising the art of the American West. Since finishing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about how different my contribution would have been if it had been written, say, 30 years ago. Much of the advice I give now would have been the same then, such as the fact that you need to compare apples with apples: paintings of European subjects by artists who are commonly classed as Western artists bring a fraction of what their Western subjects bring. A painting of a Prussian soldier by Frederic Remington will bring less than a painting of a U.S. cavalryman. A landscape of the Alps by Albert Bierstadt will bring less than a painting of the Rockies. In writing my chapter today, however, I found myself obliged to discuss how recent social changes have affected the value of Western art. Paintings of Native Americans that portray them as bloodthirsty savages are not going to be sought after by museums and many collectors. This rejection of stereotypes applies not only to Native Americans. A painting such as this early oil by Charles M. Russell is practically unsalable today. Charles M. Russell. Making the Chinaman Dance. Black Lives Matter and other movements have changed the landscape for collecting. It’s irrelevant whether an appraiser personally feels that such changes are long overdue social justice or whether an appraiser thinks that PC has gone too far. Just as changes in aesthetic fashion cause the value of a particular artwork to rise...
The Supreme Court just came out with a ruling that caught the attention of the art world as well as the general press. It involved the appropriation by Andy Warhol of a photo that had been taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the pop star Prince, and it dealt with the problem of “fair use,” an issue that has been brought up often in recent years as technology has made it increasingly easy for a visual artist to “sample” another artist’s work. The problem has been an issue in the music world for years, but the recording industry has long had a system to ensure the payment of royalties. I was going to write this month’s blog about the ruling, but I’m just not up to it. I refer you to Sarah Cascone’s excellent summation of the issues in Artnet. One of the reasons I’m not up to it is my brain, which looks forward to parsing legal arguments with as much enthusiasm as it does to actually reading the technical manuals that accompany major household appliances. The other reason is that I’m physically tired right now after a day of digging and weeding in the garden. My activity, however, got me to wondering about artists and their gardens. Not paintings of gardens, mind, but actual gardens that have been created by artists. The most famous example of such a garden in the past 150 years is Claude Monet’s water garden in Giverny. Monet’s garden, GivernyPhoto courtesy Wikimedia. Of course, by the time he created his garden, Monet was a world-famous artist and had the funds to employ a...
I was on a business swing through the Midwest recently and visited the Art Institute of Chicago to view Salvador Dali: The Image Disappears, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of the artist most associated in the public mind with Surrealism. It was a strong show, displaying works from the 1930’s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career. Paintings like the one below, included in the exhibition, would make his name. Salvador Dali, William Tell, 1930, Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, ParisImage courtesy Wikiart. Born in the Catalonian region of Spain in 1904, Dali received a thorough grounding in Old Master techniques in Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Intelligent, articulate, a tireless networker before the term was even invented, and an exhibitionist with a talent for attracting notice, he went through brief Cubist and Futurist phases after art school before becoming a proponent of Surrealism, a style in which his classical chops could be put to full use. He would become the most important member of the movement. Art historians and certainly Andre Breton, the founder of the movement who later expelled Dali from its ranks, would disagree with the above statement, but in terms of popular recognition, the verdict is in. The person in the street may not be able to define the term “surrealist,” and they may not have heard of Max Ernst, Hans (Jean) Arp, or Yves Tanguy, but everyone knows the name Dali. St. Petersburg, Florida, is not generally noted as an artworld hotspot, but over 400,000 people visit the Dali Museum there each...
