Roberta and I were in Paris recently and took the opportunity to visit the Musée National de l’Orangerie des Tuileries for the first time. Built by Napoleon III in 1852 to house his citrus trees during winter, the building, commonly called just l’Orangerie, retained its botanical use after the fall of the Empire, as well as being used for public events such as music concerts, art expositions, contests, and dog shows. Starting in 1922, however, l’Orangerie took on a new function: as a place to exhibit the massive water lily paintings of Claude Monet (who just happened to be a good friend of France’s prime minister Georges Clemenceau). Courtesy Musée l’Orangerie, photo credit Sophie Crépy Accordingly, two enormous oval-shaped galleries were constructed, each of them about 75 yards long, with skylights to permit the natural light the artist wanted. Construction took five years, with the installation opening to the public in 1927, a few months after Monet’s death. Monet envisioned the galleries as an environment where visitors, enveloped by his paintings, could experience the peace that he had found while working in his garden in Giverny. A sign at the entrance to the galleries admonishes, “The waterlily rooms were designed by Claude Monet as a space for meditation. In order to respect his wishes, we would ask you to view this exceptional work in silence.” Good luck with that. While the guards will shush anyone talking on a cellphone, the galleries are packed with people (timed admission is required), and a constant undertone of conversation accompanies any viewing of the work. Since the invention of the smartphone, however, another...
Ever heard of Babe Ruth? Sure you have. How about his teammate Lou Gehrig? Probably. What about their contemporaries Tris Speaker or Walter “Big Train” Johnson? Maybe not, although both of the latter were among the greatest baseball players of the 1920’s and were later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I was at a reception recently and got to chatting with Nick Dawes, who handles special collections for Heritage Auctions. We were talking about high prices for sports memorabilia, a field in which Heritage is the dominant player, and Nick said something that surprised me. I knew that baseballs signed by Babe Ruth are extremely popular (the baseball shown brought $93,000 at Heritage in 2021). What I didn’t know was that collectors prefer to let stars have the stage all to themselves. You would think that a baseball signed by several well-known players would bring more than a ball with only one signature, but that’s not the case. More signatures drag the price down. Last year, for example, a baseball signed by Ruth, Gehrig, Speaker, and Johnson sold for only $10,500 at Heritage. Differences in condition between the two balls doubtless also played a role in the disparity of values, but collectors like to see one signature showcased, and multiple signatures prevent that. The event at which I spoke with Nick was a viewing at Bonhams of for an upcoming sale of contemporary prints, a subject about which I know far more than about sports memorabilia. Old Master prints can be a tricky subject, with thousands of dollars riding on which state of the plate from which...
My wife has a friend in his 80’s who told her that at his age any gathering of peers begins with what he calls “the organ recital.” My liver’s been acting up, one person says. My knee is killing me, adds another. In like fashion, for the last several years it’s been customary for dealers in 19th century American art to bemoan the state of the market when they meet. Oh, for the days when a painting by a lesser-known Hudson River School painter brought $50,000! Ah, remember when we could sell a neo-classical marble for more than four figures! The market’s shot to hell! Yet, as someone once said, low prices do not make a bad market – no buyers make a bad market. Valuations may change, but the market finds its new level. Ira Spanierman, my first art-world boss, used to say that the most important thing a dealer has to do is to be able to forget. That is, you deal with the market as it is today. If you’re stuck in the past, remembering what a particular artist’s work used to go for, whether higher or lower than his prices today, you’re not going to be able to participate in the market. You might as well close up shop. The auction houses have done a good job of conditioning consignors to the realities of the present market, and their auctions of American art this month bore this out. Gone were the hundreds of lots that could make an auction last three hours or more. Instead, Sotheby’s and Christie’s had more curated sales that could be...
An estimated 1.7 trillion images were produced in 2017. Think about that figure. Actually, you can’t think about that figure; you can’t even really get your mind around it. The estimate comes from a book on photography published a couple of years ago. With the continued spread of smartphones to all corners of the world, the number of images produced every year must be into double-digit trillions by now. We are swamped each day by a tsunami of images, and it’s easy to forget how miraculous image making once was. I like to say that there was only one truly original artist in history – the first caveman or cavewoman who drew a mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from him or her ever since. Lascaux Caves, France, c. 15,000 BCE Yet, while making images is a distinctly human activity, something we did even before our species emerged from their sheltering caves, actual images have been comparatively rare until recent times. How many images did medieval European peasants see in their lifetimes? Perhaps a painting over the altar or a mural if the village church was rich enough. Perhaps images on large pieces of canvas used by storytellers at fairs. Later on, as printed images spread, the humble folk might have a rough woodcut in their cottages. But highly-accomplished images outside of church were seen only by the privileged and their servants. In the 19th century, new printing techniques brought fine art within the means of the general public, and newspapers became expected to provide illustrations for their readers. Improved still cameras made photography...
Suppose I came into a possession of a box of junk from my childhood that my mother had neglected to throw out. Included in the box might be an old baseball from my Little League days. What would that baseball be worth? Nothing, of course. You couldn’t even play ball with it — it would be so brittle that it would probably not survive a good whack of a bat. But suppose I could convince you that this old baseball was the very ball that Roger Maris hit over the wall for his 61st home run in 1961. What would it be worth then? Form and color can make an object beautiful, but only a story can imbue an object with magic. It has increasingly become the job of an auctioneer to attach a story to an object. At the annual conference of the Appraisers Association of American three weeks ago, Bruno Vinciguerra, the CEO of Bonhams, declared, “We’re in the business of passion.” If you want to get a record price for an object, said Vinciguerra, you need to present it as part of a compelling story, and you need to persuade a potential purchaser that he or she can be part of that story. It strikes me that the hunger such a tactic feeds is analogous to the selfie. I recently visited the Diego Rivera exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Twenty years ago, visitors might have been content to view Rivera’s paintings and purchase a postcard or two of their favorite works. Not anymore. The smartphone has done more than allow viewers to...
Ever heard of Lynne Drexler? Up to a couple of years ago, you might be excused for not knowing of her. Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1928, Drexler moved to New York in the 1950’s and studied with noted modernists Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. She was a second-generation participant in the Abstract Expressionist movement and had a solo show in 1961 at Tanager Gallery, a well-regarded artists’ cooperative gallery which was part of the downtown scene. Lynne Drexler, 1960 But that was pretty much it. She married another artist, taught at various schools around the country, and moved back to New York in 1967, becoming just another of the myriad artists working in the city without representation by a respected commercial gallery. Drexler and her husband bought a summer place on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine in 1971, and by 1983 she was separated from him and living on the island full time. She died there in 1999, leaving behind a studio full of paintings. Her auction results in the 15 years following her death were very modest, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, selling mostly at New England auction houses. Since 2019, however, her market has exploded. What’s going on? I was talking with a friend, an important collector and a money manager who brings the same finger-to-the-pulse awareness to the art market that he brings to the stock market. He has the courage of his convictions: he bought his Drexler painting privately in the low six figures a little over a year ago, paying over twice what the auction record for...
