What’s the Mona Lisa worth? The short answer is, whatever someone will pay for it. The longer answer is that nobody knows, because no one has tried to sell it recently, and you’ll never know how much a painting is worth until you try to sell it. Unless the Louvre decides to offer the Mona Lisa at public auction to the highest bidder, we’ll never know what it’s worth. Might some Russian or Chinese plutocrat pay $1 billion for the painting? I can imagine that happening, but I have absolutely no way of proving my assertion. Leonardo’s paintings have been in the general news lately because of lawsuits and threatened lawsuits involving Sotheby’s. The story is the stuff of Antique Road Show dreams – a group of New York dealers bought a painting, Christ as Salvator Mundi, for $10,000 in 2013 from a small auction in Louisiana. At the time, it was considered a painting by a follower of Leonardo. After authentication by experts, however, the painting was declared to be an original oil by Leonardo, and the dealers sold it for $80 million to Yves Bouvier, a Swiss dealer. Sotheby’s was or was not deeply involved in the sale, depending on whom you ask. Bouvier then flipped the painting to a Russian billionaire for $127.5 million. When the original group of dealers learned the resale price, they decided to sue Sotheby’s for the difference between their original sale price and the amount the billionaire paid. Sotheby’s was, in their opinion, either colluding with Bouvier to get a low price, or it was at fault for not knowing what...
Two things happened last month that served for me as contradictory bellwethers for the current state of the market for 19th century American art. The first was the annual meeting of the Appraisers Association of America. The second was the American auctions. I should start by saying that the market for 19th century American art has never been a sexy one. In the 1980’s, when the Japanese were buying like drunken sailors, they were after French Impressionists and the School of Paris, not the artists of the Hudson River School. Back then I used to laugh at the difference between the Impressionist and Modernist auctions and the ones for American art. The Impressionist and Modern sales were glamorous evening events with champagne being served, people in black tie air-kissing each other, and plenty of celebrity spotting – ooh, look, there’s Bianca Jagger! “Stolid” was the adjective that came to mind for the American sales. The seats were filled with bankers from Toledo with their wives, while standing at the rear were us dealers, sipping tepid coffee from Styrofoam cups. The bid board showed the prices being bid in pounds, francs, yen, and so forth, just as it did during the Impressionist and Modern sales, but the conversion wasn’t necessary. American art traded only in dollars, as there wasn’t a worldwide demand. After several ups and downs through the past 30 years, the Impressionist and Modern market today is doing fine. The players have changed – Chinese and Russian buyers are now major presences in the sales rooms. I don’t think there’s the sort of indiscriminate buying that was done...
Last month the Pursuits section of Bloomberg.com published an article entitled “That $100,000 Painting Bought to Flip Is Now Worth About $20,000.” The article by Katya Kazakina detailed the travails of Niels Kantor, an art dealer and collector, who two years ago had bought the painting below for $100,000: Hugh Scott-Douglas was already a rising star at the age of 24, when he created the untitled painting to the left. (I’ll call it a painting although it’s actually a cyanotype print on canvas nearly eight feet high.) In 2014, two years after he made the work, a very similar painting would bring $100,000 in sale at Christie’s New York. Kantor had already bought the painting above, so his purchase made him look prescient. If Scott-Douglas’s market continued to rise as it had over the previous two years, Kantor stood to make a tidy profit by flipping the piece to another collector. The market, however, did not cooperate. 2015 saw a noted softening of the contemporary market as collectors turned away from several once-trendy young artists, and Kantor could not find a buyer for his painting. He cut his asking price to $60,000 and finally decided to unload the work for whatever the market would bear. “I feel like it could go to zero. It’s like a stock that has crashed,” he told Bloomberg. On September 20, the painting sold for at Phillips New York for $30,000, including buyer’s premium. Subtract that premium, plus the commission charged to the seller, and Kantor probably received around $23,000 when all was said and done. This kind of story would never have happened...
If you asked a hundred urban twenty-somethings to describe themselves, a fair number would define themselves as artists of one sort or another. “I’m a painter,” a few would tell you. “I’m an actor,” others would say. Jazz saxophonist, dancer, standup comedian – the entire gamut of art forms would probably be found in the self-descriptions of those hundred young people. A tiny percentage of our hypothetical group will go on to achieve commercial and critical success in their fields. The vast majority will not. Of the also-rans, most will come to their senses sooner or later and take conventional jobs. But there are a few souls who carry their self-definition as artists with them despite their lack of commercial success. If you define yourself as a painter, then you paint, whether or not you can sell your paintings. Samuel Rothbort (1882-1971) was one of these artists. Rothbort was born in Vawkavysk (Polish: Wolkovisk), a town now part of Belarus. In keeping with Jewish life in the shtetl, his father was a Talmudic scholar, and his mother supported the family, selling flour and grain. Rothbort showed artistic leanings early, shaping little figures from the dough with which his mother made bread. If he found a pencil, he would draw on whatever paper was available, sometimes on the inside cover of a book, an act for which he remembered being punished by the rabbi. His activities gained him the Yiddish nickname Schmuel der Mahler (Samuel the Painter). He was entirely self-taught and never had formal artistic training. Revolution was in the air as the new century arrived, and as a...
All of us know someone with a seemingly effortless sense of style. It’s usually a woman, someone to whom you could give a man’s old tuxedo jacket, a peasant blouse, a tartan skirt, and combat boots and say, “Make an outfit out of this.” She would roll up the jacket’s sleeves, pick the perfect jewelry and accessories, and wear the resulting costume with such panache that she would be the embodiment of chic. Most women who tried to do something like that, however, would look like a walking rummage sale, while any attempt on my part to assemble some kind of male equivalent to that look would cause my daughters to have another of their increasingly frequent discussions on What To Do About Dad Before He Does Something Outright Dangerous. There are men, however, who can pull it off. I remember chatting with the painter Wolf Kahn at a gallery opening many years ago. He was wearing a linen suit of pale olive, paired with a dark purple shirt and a bright orange tie. The combination pushed right up to the edge of outrageousness but didn’t fall in, and the effect, coupled with his silver hair, was stunning. (A lesson here – artists can often get away with things that normal people cannot.) All of which is simply a lead-in to a discussion of style when it comes to collecting art. There are some combinations of styles which have a long history of going together. The exhibition of French cubist painting with African sculpture, for example, goes back to the earliest days of cubism. The pairing of folk sculpture...
