In 1981, in an act of faith that today makes me shudder at its innocence, my wife and I moved with our baby to New York from Chicago. The passage of time has mercifully dulled the troubles of those first days – moving into half the space we’d had in Chicago for twice the rent, looking for a job, closer to family, but cut off from our good friends back “home.” Looking back, I am struck by the kindness and generosity of artist friends we had known in Chicago who had preceded us to New York. Michael Hurson and Ellen Lanyon invited us for dinner to their lofts almost as soon as we arrived and helped us deal with the inevitable culture shock at a time when we were struggling to find our feet. One other artist with a Chicago connection reached out to us – George Deem. The connection was more tenuous but just as real – we had published a piece by him in White Walls, a magazine of writings by artists that we had founded five years earlier with our friend Buzz Spector. George invited us to his loft on West 18th Street, the same loft in which he would die 27 years later, where we met his partner, Ronald Vance. The supper that night was the first of many we were to have over the years, simple yet sophisticated, full of good food and lively talk, with the seemingly effortless attention to detail that marked our hosts as masters of entertaining. The affection I feel for George and Ronald and those days surrounds me now...
One of the joys and nuisances of having been trained as an art historian is that you constantly see life imitating art. I was attending the opening of The Armory Show two weeks when I was struck by the sight of a young woman tending bar. “Excuse me, but would you let me take your picture?” I asked her. “You remind me of a famous painting.” She graciously agreed to pose, and I took the photo below. Some of you probably already know the painting I was thinking of, the Courtauld Gallery’s great Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Folies-Bergère was not yet the home of the Can-Can and the nearly-nude revue in 1882, when Manet painted his picture, but it was already a popular night spot that featured operettas, popular music, and gymnastics, not to mention copious amounts of alcohol. The similarities between the two images above made me think about the similarities between their two venues. Openings of art exhibitions have been popular social occasions for over 250 years, since at least the heydays of the French Salon and the Royal Academy, and the art always seems to have taken a back seat to the opportunity for the fashionable crowd to see and be seen. Nevertheless, major art fair openings today have married glamour, fashion, and money in a way not seen since the hot nightclubs of the 1940’s and 50’s such as the Stork Club in Manhattan or the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Like those nightclubs, major art fair openings feature movie stars, tycoons, arm candy, and a well-established pecking order for who gets admitted...
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . ~Robert Frost Last summer I visited the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It’s a terrific little museum and well worth taking time to visit when you’re in the Boston area. The Addison Gallery had mounted a retrospective exhibition of the work of Alfred Maurer (1868-1932), and I was eager to get a full view of the artist’s achievement. I was going through the exhibition as any art dealer would, i.e., reading the wall label credits and thinking, “Is this painting owned by an institution, or was it loaned by a private collector whom I can call to try and get it for sale?” I was particularly taken by Maurer’s work done in Paris during the first years of the 20th century, especially his portraits of women such as Model with a Japanese Fan, painted around 1903. The influence of Whistler is plainly there, of course, but there’s also something of the bold, new century. The woman is clearly not the languid Dame aux Camélias model beloved by the previous generation. Her gaze confronts the viewer directly, and for all her elegance, there’s something rather earthy in the cluttered interior with objects tossed upon or draped across the chair at the left. Looking at such paintings, I thought of a Maurer painting I knew in a private collection and made a mental note to call its owner when I got home and see if she might be willing to sell. When I got home and went through my notes, however, I realized I was thinking of...
I am ordinarily the soul of benevolence and good will toward all humanity, but there are occasional dark days, often caused by the failure of some museum curator to return my calls, when my spirit turns peevish and I entertain myself by playing a game of my own invention called “Catalogues Raisonnés in Hell.” Catalogue raisonné, a French term we have imported into English, literally means, “reasoned list.” The catalogue raisonné for an artist is a complete list of known works by that artist, along with the provenance of each painting, its exhibition history, and its current location if known. Inclusion in an artist’s catalogue raisonné is mandatory if a painting is to be accepted by the art market as genuine. Such reference books these days are often assembled by a committee of scholars, sometimes with the assistance of the artist’s family or heirs if the artist is recently deceased. Given the enormous amount of scholarly labor involved, it helps if the artist is a major artist whose work shows variety and artistic growth. Many artists, however, find a profitable subject and devote their artistic careers to a seemingly endless series of miniscule variants on a theme. In playing “Catalogues Raisonnés in Hell,” I weigh which of those artists I would like to assign to the miscreant who has not called me back. “Let me think,” I purr to myself, “Which artist should I assign to ____________? — Bruce Crane? Henry Pember Smith? Or what about Guy Wiggins?” Consider the case of Guy Wiggins (1883-1962), whose work appears below. The son of a respected American landscape painter, Wiggins studied...
I was once visiting a collector’s home, admiring his works of art. The paintings were first-rate and had one thing in common: they were all nudes. Even the paintings which would properly be classed as landscapes had nude ladies populating them. I asked him what the focus on nudes was about. “It’s easy,” he said. “I learned long ago that if you collect nudes, you get the field to yourself. Corporations won’t touch them. Museums are afraid that they’ll get angry letters from members. Some collectors have young children, and they’re not comfortable having nudes around. I’ve got important paintings by major artists that I bought for a fraction of what their works normally go for, simply because there’s a nude in the picture.” He was right, of course. For all our talk about being sexually liberated, the Puritan heritage hangs heavy on American culture. Pornography flourishes in private, but when it comes to nudity in public, a naked lady on a museum wall can set off demands to know why the museum is promoting the display of a young woman who is apparently, as our grandparents would say, No Better Than She Should Be. And if the model is not Playmate of the Month material, the condemnation can be even worse. It seems that if the viewer is going to be shocked, he at least expects to be titillated as well. I don’t expect this column to change that situation for museums, but I would like to relate a personal experience that came about early in my dealing career. I was working for Ira Spanierman, and he had...
