In March, 2020, I sent out a letter to clients and colleagues instead of posting my usual monthly blog. Covid was beginning to make itself felt on a serious scale. The country was entering uncharted territory, at least for non-centenarians. In my letter, I included an image of Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware and called for courage in uncertain times. It seemed trivial to talk about art in a period where so many were dying, but I hoped that a cure for the disease would be found relatively quickly and that things could get back to normal. The pandemic soon affected the ranks of my colleagues. In April, 2020, John Driscoll and William Gerdts, both noted scholars (and in John’s case, a major dealer as well) died of Covid. There was no vaccine yet, and the art market had gone into lockdown with the general economy. Auctions were postponed, and galleries were closed. How would the art business survive? And yet it did. More than that, it thrived. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and the artworld has had to adapt before. In the depths of the recession of the early 1990’s, a small group of dealers, unable to afford public galleries with a regular schedule of shows, rented rooms on one floor of a Manhattan hotel for a weekend and displayed art for sale on top of dressers and leaning on headboards. From that modest beginning, The Armory Show, one of New York’s major art fairs, evolved. In the same manner, dealers and auction houses over the past two years have upped their...
More years ago than I care to remember, a professor in a course I was taking on Baroque architecture told us how you could tell who had power in Italian cities during the 16th and 17th centuries. Buildings were normally erected to front the streets on which they were located; that is, they were built within the confines of the street grid. But families such as the Medici or the Farnese, who numbered popes and dukes among their members, were not bound by street grids. Their palaces did not conform to the grid; rather, the families built where they liked and made traffic circle around them. When Art Basel began its Miami Beach subsidiary about 20 years ago, the big New York auction houses still had major sales the first week in December, around the same time as Art Basel. After a few years, however, tired of watching all the major dealers, collectors, and curators leave New York for Miami during that period, Sotheby’s and Christie’s surrendered, moving their sales to November. Like the Medici, Art Basel Miami Beach made traffic conform to its desires. Art Basel’s success in Miami Beach acted as a magnet for satellite fairs, each with its own pitch to collectors. The scene, sprawling across Miami Beach and into Miami itself, was overwhelming – I’ve often said that no one could see all the artwork on display during those four days without the aid of amphetamines and a chauffeur waiting at the curb. Photo courtesy Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau The Miami fairs were cancelled last year due to the pandemic (there were on-line...
Many years ago, my wife and I were having supper at the home of friends. After supper, Tim said he wanted to show me something. I followed him outside to be met by a two-foot-high stack of unstretched canvases that Tim had pulled out of the garage. They were paintings that had been done by a late friend who had been Tim’s college roommate. Tim had been left the paintings and had lugged them around since his friend died, and he now wanted to know if I had any suggestions on what to do with them. I picked through the pile. Tim’s friend had painted as a hobby, and the works could be described as vaguely Abstract Expressionist. I told Tim that I had no idea what could be done with the paintings. No contemporary dealer I knew would be interested in handling the work of an amateur artist. There was something, however, that could be done with the paintings, and a few years later, after Tim had died of cancer, his wife Linda did it. She dragged the canvases out onto the lawn, doused them with lighter fluid, and tossed a lighted match onto the pile. Tim may have had a sentimental attachment to his friend’s work, but Linda didn’t, and she needed the space in the garage. Stephen Remick Burning Old Paintings, courtesy Saatchi Art I’ve been thinking about Tim and Linda because I’ve recently encountered a similar situation, one which almost every dealer encounters. A very nice lady has been trying to get me to meet her at a storage locker to view a bunch of...
Magazzino Italian Art, a terrific small museum that opened in Cold Spring, NY a few years ago, currently has on view an exhibition of works by Costantino Nivola (1911-1988). Nivola was born in Sardinia, the son of a mason, and attended art school near Milan. He went to work as a designer for Olivetti in Milan, but fled fascist Italy with his Jewish wife in 1938 as war approached. They came to New York and settled in Greenwich Village. Nivola pieced together a living, working as art director for several magazines and doing other design projects. In 1948 Tino, as he was called, was able to buy a farmhouse in Springs, a village on Long Island near East Hampton which had already been discovered as an inexpensive place to live by several Abstract Expressionist artists, most notably Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. There Tino and Ruth created a home that was really an environment, with house and garden intermingling with each other, and they raised a family. (Nivola’s grandson Alessandro is earning rave reviews these days for his performance in the Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark.) Nivola’s big break came in 1954 when he was commissioned to design the showroom of Olivetti’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Olivetti wanted something that would get attention from passersby, and Nivola certainly delivered, with marble floors, modern furniture, and cast stone wall reliefs of his own design. (The reliefs are no longer there. When the showroom closed, they were donated to Yale University, where they are now installed.) Nivola continued to do public commissions in New York and elsewhere,...
I like to say that there was only one truly creative genius in the whole of art history: the first caveman (or woman) to draw a mastodon on that cavern wall. All other artists have been stealing from him or her ever since. I’ve been reminded of this assertion lately while working on a series of lectures on American art that I’m giving for the Lifetime Learning Institute at Vassar College. Reviewing the biographies of the noted artists of the Colonial Era and the first years afterwards, I was struck time and again at how difficult it was for a would-be artist to learn his craft back then. Art needs other art, unless you’re the prehistoric genius mentioned above. Books were expensive and difficult to come by, but a budding poet in Colonial America had a chance to learn his craft from the works of Shakespeare or Milton. At the very least, he could undoubtedly lay hands upon one of the masterpieces of English prosody: the King James Bible. But what could painters see? The masterpieces were in Europe. If you were in Boston, you came up against the Puritans’ suspicion of visual art, a consequence of the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. If you were in Philadelphia, you had to battle the Quaker aversion to anything that was not deemed plain and modest. There were no magnificent church altarpieces or frescoes to encounter at Sunday worship, no princes displaying works in their palaces. John Singleton Copley, writing as a young artist in 1766, complained in a letter to Benjamin West, who was working in England, “In this Country...
My wife and I just got back from two weeks in California, visiting our daughters. As always, Roberta and I were struck by the beauty of the California landscape. It brought back a question I have occasionally pondered: why bother to paint landscapes in California? I mean, a Californian can simply look out his or her window and see soaring mountains, dramatic shorelines, and wildflowers everywhere. How can an artist hope to compete with all that? Yet artists have been trying for well over a century, and places such as Sausalito, Carmel, Laguna Beach, La Jolla, and many more have become famous as artists colonies. The first artists to achieve real note in the 20th century were the California Impressionists – Guy Rose, John Marshall Gamble, Edgar Payne, William Wendt, and many more – several of whom had studied in France, particularly at Giverny, where Monet had his famous garden. Guy Rose (1867-1925), View of Wood’s Cove. Oil on canvas, 24 x 29 inches. Photo courtesy Bonhams Impressionism became extremely popular in California and persisted there as a style long after its reputation had faded elsewhere. Indeed, California Impressionism has been described as “the Indian Summer of American Impressionism.” The reaction, when it came, came hard. By the mid-20th Century, California Impressionists were dismissed by art historians who deigned to notice them, particularly on the East Coast, as illustrators whose sweet images belonged on chocolate boxes, not in museums among “serious” modern artists. An indication of how low their reputations had fallen was to be seen in the mid-1970’s when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art deaccessioned several...
