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 was born in Haiti in 1944, part of the educated Creole elite who ran the nation and sent their children to be educated in France. Paul’s father died when Paul was a boy, though, and with the rise to power of Papa Doc Duvalier, it became dangerous to be part of what had been the ruling class. When Paul was 14, his mother brought him to the United States. Four years later, he won entrance to New York’s renowned Cooper Union Institute, whose alumni include George Segal, Alex Katz, Tom Wesselmann, and many others. He went on to get an MFA and become an established artist. The memory of his homeland called to Paul, however, and several years later he took his wife and young son back to Haiti, where they lived for seven years and had a daughter. For the rest of his life, Haiti and the cult of Vodou would play a large part in Paul’s art. In Water Garden #1, we see the influence of Haiti in the totemic central figure, the use of glitter (which is found in Vodou flags and decorations), and the topography of the island, which is literally represented by the map that forms the gray background to the piece. But Paul also had a thorough education in European and American art history, and quotes from canonical artists...
In 1981 I arrived in New York, jobless and with a wife and a baby daughter to support. I had worked in art publishing in Chicago and hoped to find something similar in New York, but a professor I had known at the University of Chicago called me and made a suggestion that changed my life forever: he advised me to go see a dealer he knew, Ira Spanierman. A day or two later, I was sitting in front of a desk in the gallery, being interviewed by a 53-year-old man who did not match my preconceptions of what a Madison Avenue dealer should look like: he had collar-length hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and a soul patch under his lower lip. He was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. I was seeing the last vestiges of sartorial rebellion. Ira had always fluctuated between hip and Saville Row, but shortly after I went to work as his new second banana, he shaved the patch, trimmed his mustache, shortened his hair, and settled into a routine of elegant bespoke suits. I had, all unknowingly, enlisted in what I came to call “the boot camp of the art world.” Ira was extremely demanding – over the course of my four years with him, I saw people last from one day to six months – but if you could cut it, you got a lot of responsibility very fast. A week after joining him, I was juggling phones, wheeling and dealing, and giving a creditable imitation of an experienced art dealer. Ira had dealt in all kinds...
Branding is everything these days, and lately I’ve been wondering if I should change the name of my business from Reagan Upshaw Fine Art to Reagan Upshaw Appraisals and Fine Art. It’s not that I don’t have fine works of art to sell – I do. But appraising art has been the meat and potatoes of my business since I began to deal privately six years ago, and some of my clients for art don’t realize just how many appraisals I do. Like most of the bare necessities of life – food, housing, et cetera – appraisals aren’t inherently glamorous, but as long as people die, get divorced, or owe taxes, appraisers will be needed. And many people have no clue about what goes into calculating a value for a piece of stained canvas or a piece of hacked-at stone. Things used to be very informal when it came to appraisals. Fifty years ago, a brief letter saying simply, “One painting by Joe Smith, value $200” was considered OK. Some of the old-timers have even told me of having a pad of forms – they just filled in the details of the piece, entered their valuation, then signed at the bottom of the list, and that was that. The Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980’s, caused in part by grossly inflated valuations put on real property had an effect on all appraisals. The Appraisal Foundation, a not-for-profit private foundation, was authorized by Congress as the source of appraisal standards and appraiser qualifications. The Appraisal Foundation put together what has become the Bible of appraisers, The Uniform Standards of...
Well, the 19th and 20th century American sales have come again and gone. Any new trends? Not really. Sotheby’s sale began with modernist paintings which initially sold well, with several works by Milton Avery exceeding their high estimates. Then things turned ominous. One of the stars of the sale, Edward Hopper’s Shakespeare at Dusk, failed to meet its $7,000,000 low estimate. After that, results were extremely uneven. African-American works, continuing the trend of recent years, generally sold well, with works by Horace Pippen and Jacob Lawrence exceeding their high estimates. A large oil from the mid-1920’s by Hale Woodruff, Picking Cotton, sold for $764,000, more than tripling his previous auction record. A first-rate gouache by Jacob Lawrence brought almost a million dollars, and a landscape with a church by Horace Pippin brought $300,000. The market for works by artists of color remains strong, as does the market for works by well-known illustrators – works by N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Joseph Christian Leyendecker all exceeded their estimates. But Sotheby’s offerings by artists of the American West generally sold below their estimates, and buyers of works by the Hudson River School demanded that the paintings be of the Hudson River area, not scenes painted in Europe. The sale ended with a decided whimper, with 9 of the final 13 lots, all of them 19th century works, failing to sell. Christie’s sale the following day was much more successful, with more desirable lots. Modernist art, again, was strong – Marsden Hartley, Charles Green Shaw, and Arthur Dove set records for work in their respective media. Works by figurative artists such as...
As a private dealer, I sell works of art for clients, but if a client has a painting that isn’t a 19th or 20th century American work, my list of prospective collectors for the painting will be limited, and in such cases I often recommend that the client send the work to auction. I then become the client’s representative with the auction houses, getting estimates to compare, providing independent advice on which auction house to choose, and then helping with shipping and other administrative matters in the months before the sale. I recently helped place this painting in next month’s Impressionist and Modern Sale at Sotheby’s. It’s by Eugene Boudin (1824-1898). Boudin was the son of a harbor pilot in Normandy and spent a lot of time on ships as a boy. When his father left the sea in 1835 to open a shop selling stationery and picture frames in Le Havre, Boudin worked in the shop, meeting many artists who encouraged him. At the age of 22, he began to paint full time, specializing in scenes of the harbors he knew so well. This painting, Low Tide, Portrieux, was painted in 1875 at Portrieux, a harbor on the northern coast of Brittany. Paintings such as this one made Boudin one of the most celebrated marine artists in France. He exhibited at the Salon and was eventually made a Knight of the Legion of Honor. And here is where desire, the subject indicated by my title, comes into play. When a painting is offered at auction, an estimate must be set, and estimating what a work might bring is...
If you enjoy the sound of a broken record, try calling a score of curators of American art at museums around the country and ask them what art they’re seeking for their collections these days. I guarantee you’ll hear the same thing over and over – “works by artists of color.” African-Americans have been part of American art making since before the Revolution. Many of them were enslaved artisans and craftspeople – ceramicists, basket-makers, carvers, and the like – rented out by their owners. With luck, they might be able to keep part of their earnings for themselves, eventually purchase or otherwise obtain their freedom, and become like Joshua Johnson (c. 1763 – c. 1824), a Maryland portrait painter who became the first African-American known to make his living as an artist. In the 19th century, the painter Robert Duncanson and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, living north of the Mason-Dixon line and aided by Abolitionist patrons, were able to achieve significant reputations, though Lewis, like many subsequent African-American artists, found that working in Europe afforded her a much more congenial way of life. Henry Ossawa Tanner achieved an international reputation but had to spend most of his working life in France to do so. Such artists, however, were outliers seldom mentioned in American art history. When I was in grad school, I can’t remember a single African-American artist being discussed. Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and a host of other major African-American artists who came of artistic age in the second quarter of the 20th century – they might as well have...
