What’s That on the Wall?

One of the now-normal occurrences of life in this Age of the Corona Virus, at least for those of us who watch the nightly news, is our newfound entry into the personal spaces of the talking heads who must broadcast remotely from their homes. These intrusions into...

No Canary Here

Economists may not have caught on yet, but the art market has often made a pretty good canary in the coal mine. There seems to be something in the air that the art market senses a few months before everyone else. In 1989, for instance, the gallery I worked for was...

Up in Smoke

I got the kind of call last month that no dealer, appraiser, or art lover in general ever wants to get. A client called me to say that his home had been destroyed by a fire. He had managed to rescue some of his collection, but most of it had burned completely or had...

Something Wrong with the Mouth

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...

Rags to Riches – or Not

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...