John Singer Sargent famously said that a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. Two portraits have been much in the news lately, as the National Portrait Gallery announced that its portrait of Barak Obama by Kehinde Wiley and its portrait of...
Roberta and I were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, enjoying an exhibition entitled Epic Abstraction that consisted of large-scale abstract works by important 20th century artists. Among the paintings we admired was Sam...
“The art business is not something you can equate to any other business. They’re not selling stocks and bonds here. They’re selling fine art.” Thus spoke dealer Helly Nahmad in a recent New York Times article entitled “The Fickle Salesroom,” which reported on a 40...
Any art dealer knows that the size of the painting he or she is offering is going to be an important factor in getting a collector to purchase the artwork. Collectors with loft-style walls may make exceptions for large contemporary paintings, but dealers in older art...
As part of a group from the Appraisers Association of America, I visited the studio last week of sculptor Chaim Gross (1902-1991). The building in Greenwich Village now houses the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. It’s definitely worth a visit – the ground floor...
My two-year-old granddaughter, Veronica, was sitting at my dining room table last week, having some strained pears and admiring Water Garden #1, a painting by the late Paul Gardere. It’s a large, complicated piece by an artist who was also large and complicated. Paul...
