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.
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 paintings that were done by her late husband, a surgeon who painted in his spare time. He had exhibited them at a long-defunct gallery in their hometown, and he had told her that they would be worth a lot of money someday. She sent me a couple of photos of the paintings. They were pleasant abstractions, better than I could do, but nothing special.
I’ve been trying to put the lady off, gently, writing her that I don’t have any idea what she can do with the paintings. I know what she hopes will happen – that I’ll be quite taken with the paintings and will immediately come up with a list of dealers who would be interested in seeing them.
What I could honestly if brutally tell her is, “These paintings have no commercial value. Zero! Zip! Nada! No respectable New York City gallery would have the slightest interest in handling the work of a surgeon who was an amateur artist. I wouldn’t even risk my credibility by approaching the dealers I know and asking them to look at the work.”
I’m not going to tell her that (or I’ll phrase it more diplomatically), but it’s true. It is extremely difficult to create a posthumous career for an artist who had little recognition in his lifetime. I say “his” and not ”his or her” because with the work of a female artist, particularly one of color, you can at least try to make the argument to potential buyers that she was a talented artist, unfairly denied the chance for recognition during her career because of discrimination in the art world.
But with a Dead White Male, there’s no chance for such a pitch, and as a dealer you then come up against the skeptical question, “So if this guy was any good, how come I never heard of him?” If you next throw in the fact that the painter wasn’t a professional artist, that he was a doctor who painted as a hobby, you can forget the chance of a sale unless you’re offering the painting for a couple of hundred bucks at an outdoor art fair.
I doubt that the doctor’s widow is counting on the sale of her husband’s work to pay her daily expenses; she simply wants to honor her husband’s achievement. If I knew of any museum that would be interested in receiving one of the paintings as a gift, I would certainly suggest it to her. Museums, however, generally have storage areas that are already stuffed to the brim, and no museum I know is going to accept a work by her husband. She has all his works she can hang, and I assume her children have paintings as well. She can give some to friends, and I suggested she might try donating a piece or two to the hospital at which he worked. But there’s no other advice I can give her.
I expect that the lady will go on paying the storage fees every month, unwilling to give up and toss her husband’s paintings away. Perhaps her children will feel a similar devotion and will keep paying the bill after their mother’s death. Eventually, however, they will probably ask themselves why they continue with the expense. Perhaps they will find the space in their basements to store Dad’s work, but there will come a time, probably during a move to a new house, when holding onto the works becomes too much trouble. Then it’s either a bonfire or the dumpster.
Maybe I’m wrong. A couple of years ago, like 600,000 other art lovers, I was blown away by an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of works by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Af Klint was born into a well-to-do naval family and attended art school in Stockholm. She at first painted conventional landscapes and portraits, but in her mid-20’s she became interested in spiritual exploration, particularly through the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Through the inspiration, she claimed, of spirits she referred to as “High Masters,” she painted a series of 193 abstract paintings between 1906 and 1915. They were among the earliest abstract paintings in the history of modern art. They were shown at some Theosophical conferences in her lifetime, but were not offered in commercial galleries.
Af Klint, who never married, left these works to her nephew, Vice-Admiral Erik Af Klint, on her death in 1944, specifying in her will that they not be shown for at least twenty years. When the paintings were unpacked in the late 1960’s, they were offered to the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm, which turned them down. The heirs then donated the works to a newly-created foundation bearing the artist’s name. The foundation funded research into her work, and an art historian introduced her paintings to the world at a scholarly conference in Helsinki in 1984. The rest is (art) history. And, yes, the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm now has a dozen of her works on permanent display.
But where were those boxed-up works during the twenty years? It certainly helps if you have a manor house, as the af Klint family did, which will always be property of the family and where there are plenty of attics, basements, or outbuildings where paintings can rest undisturbed until the day when they might be truly appreciated. Failing that, however, an artist’s heirs are presented with the dilemma of the doctor’s wife: their money or the dumpster.
