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 having its best year ever. The first half of 1990 continued the trend, and then suddenly it seemed like someone had turned off a tap. Things were absolutely dead. The recession that would drive George H.W. Bush from office officially arrived a few months later. On the other hand, in 1983 we had been getting our brains kicked in. Inflation was sucking all the disposable money out of the market, and oil prices had collapsed. Then one day a collector walked into the gallery, bought a $140,000 painting, and wrote me a check then and there. A couple of months later, the Department of Commerce announced that the recession had ended two months earlier on Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 PM. My collector had walked in at 2:01. I’m exaggerating, of course, but I have often marveled at the close if slightly anticipatory tracking between the art market and the general economy. People with the disposable income to spend six-figures on a painting are not worried about getting laid off on the assembly line, and yet some unseen spirit begins to whisper that now is not a good time to spend money on art. The art market, like the rest of the economy, is currently grappling with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Art galleries have been closed to...
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 been damaged. He was going to need my services as an appraiser once things had been sorted out. For the works that had been totally destroyed, the process would be fairly simple. He had an up-to-date insurance appraisal for his collection. If his destroyed Cassatt, say, had been appraised at $200,000, then his insurance company would pay him that amount less any deductible. But what about those cases where the painting had been only partially damaged? That is where he needed me to conduct a damage appraisal. A trained conservator can repair tears and other damage so that it will be invisible to the naked eye. For the Monet shown below (this is not one of my client’s paintings), the edges of the ripped canvas could be joined by a lining on the back of the painting and the “scar” concealed by careful inpainting. Assuming there was no previous damage to the painting, the repaired painting will still have 99 percent of its original paint, and the condition could fairly be described as “good,” which is defined as “unrestored with no apparent damage to the original condition or restored/conserved/stabilized with concern for preserving the integrity of the work.” The painting, after careful conservation, will look just fine to any casual viewer. The repaired tears, however,...
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 Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald will be going on a coast-to-coast tour to five museums. Visitors coming specifically to see the portraits have doubled the National Portrait Gallery’s annual attendance since they were unveiled there in 2018. Sargent’s comment is indicative of the power struggle, implicit or not, between the artist and the sitter as to how they really look and how they are to be depicted. President Obama alluded to such a struggle in his remarks at the unveiling. Wiley had become famous for his paintings depicting young African-American men in poses derived from Old Master paintings. His initial thought was to depict Obama in the trappings of royalty, or as the President said, to “elevate me and put me in these settings with partridges and scepters and thrones and shift robes and mounting me on horses. And I had to explain that I’ve got enough political problems without you making me look like Napoleon. We’ve gotta bring it down just a touch.” And the artist did. The two portraits are now property of the nation, but there would be a hot market for them if they were able to be sold. A hot market is a rare exception for portraits in general. Unless the sitter is famous or infamous, George Washington or Jesse James, most collectors are not interested in displaying a...
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 Gilliam’s Carousel State, a 22-foot-wide acrylic. Born in 1933, Gilliam grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He was encouraged in his artistic leanings by his teachers beginning in grade school and eventually went on to earn a Master’s degree in painting from the University of Louisville. In 1962 he moved to Washington, DC, which has remained his home ever since. Critics have seen him as belonging to the second generation of the Washington Color School, a group of abstract painters who worked there in the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of whom used the technique of pouring or otherwise applying diluted oil paint onto unprimed canvas, allowing the pigment to saturate the support. Carousel State dates from 1968, a period when Gilliam abandoned the wooden stretcher and created works which drape over their supports or hang like curtains from the wall. It was such works that brought him national recognition, and Carousel State is undoubtedly one of the largest and most important works from this series. Like any art dealer visiting a museum, I always read a painting’s wall label from the bottom up. That is, I want to see who owns the painting, and this information is usually given in the last line. If the painting is owned by the museum, then I’ll never be able to offer it for sale. But if it’s only on loan to the museum, then I make a note of the collector’s name. He or she just might be willing to sell it one day. ...
“The art business is not something you can equate to any other business. They’re not selling stocks and bonds here. They’re selling fine art.” Thus spoke dealer Helly Nahmad in a recent New York Times article entitled “The Fickle Salesroom,” which reported on a 40 percent drop in sales of impressionist and modern art at auction this November, compared with the sales of six months ago. The art market may not be like the stock exchange, but that’s not for want of trying. At the annual meeting of the Appraisers Association of America a couple of weeks ago, I heard speaker after speaker talk about new realities in the art world, several of which are attempts to wrestle an unruly market into something with which an investor can be comfortable. The situation has long been in the making. In 2002, the Mei Moses Indices were developed by two Stern School of Business professors. These indices attempt, in the words of Sotheby’s, which acquired the company three years ago, to produce “objective art market analysis to complement the world-class expertise of [Sotheby’s] specialists.” Sotheby’s goes on to explain that “the Sotheby’s Mei Moses indices control for differing levels of quality, size, color, maker, and aesthetics of a work of art by analyzing repeat sales.” It sounds all very scientific, but I have my doubts. As has been pointed out by critics, indices such as Mei Moses overstate return and underestimate risk. For one thing, most art sales don’t make it into databases such as Artnet or Askart, as they’re made privately. Second, repeat sales at auction account for less than...
