Any art dealer knows that the size of the painting he or she is offering is going to be an important factor in getting a collector to purchase the artwork. Collectors with loft-style walls may make exceptions for large contemporary paintings, but dealers in older art encounter real resistance when offering a painting larger than, say, 30 x 40 inches. Collectors protest that they just don’t have the wall space. This collector resistance is a factor in appraising as well, a point brought home by two recent occurrences. The first was a tour of Radio City Music Hall with a group from the Appraisers Association of America. The men’s and women’s lounges of the building are decorated with some impressive artwork, none more impressive than the 1932 Stuart Davis painting entitled “Men Without Women” in the downstairs men’s lounge. It’s a huge and lovely work, almost 11 by 17 feet in size. As appraisers, my colleagues and I couldn’t help asking ourselves, “What’s it worth?” We knew that important Davis paintings have brought real money at auction – twelve of them have sold for over a million dollars each, and the record price, $6,847,200, was set only a year ago. But what is the Radio City painting worth? On the plus side, it’s instantly recognizable as a Stuart Davis painting, an attractive composition with large, simplified forms – pipes, cards, gas pumps, barber poles, and the like – juxtaposed with each other. On the other hand, the palette does not have the vibrant reds, blues, yellows, and greens that characterize his most popular paintings. Perhaps Davis was constrained by...
As part of a group from the Appraisers Association of America, I visited the studio last week of sculptor Chaim Gross (1902-1991). The building in Greenwich Village now houses the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. It’s definitely worth a visit – the ground floor houses the sculptor’s studio, with his and his wife’s living space on the floors above. The studio, with many examples of his sculpture, also contains his tools and unfinished works which give real insight into Gross’s working method. The walls of his home are filled, salon style, with dozens of paintings by important American artists, many of them friends of the sculptor – Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Raphael Soyer, Jacob Lawrence, and many more. Along with the famous names, there are many works by artists who were fairly well-known 50-75 years ago but today are known only to specialists – Byron Browne, Paul Burlin, Nikolai Cikovsky, Lawrence Lebduska, and Sol Wilson, to name but a few. My question here is, into which group does Chaim Gross fit today? Gross, the son of a timber appraiser, was born in 1902 in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. World War I brought attacks and counterattacks by Russian and Austrian forces. At one point, the young Gross was dragooned by the Austrian forces into collecting the dead after a battle. Following the war, Gross studied art in Budapest. Deported by a new Hungarian regime determined to rid the country of Jews and other groups deemed foreigners, Gross studied briefly in Vienna and then emigrated to the...
My two-year-old granddaughter, Veronica, was sitting at my dining room table last week, having some strained pears and admiring Water Garden #1, a painting by the late Paul Gardere. It’s a large, complicated piece by an artist who was also large and complicated. Paul was born in Haiti in 1944, part of the educated Creole elite who ran the nation and sent their children to be educated in France. Paul’s father died when Paul was a boy, though, and with the rise to power of Papa Doc Duvalier, it became dangerous to be part of what had been the ruling class. When Paul was 14, his mother brought him to the United States. Four years later, he won entrance to New York’s renowned Cooper Union Institute, whose alumni include George Segal, Alex Katz, Tom Wesselmann, and many others. He went on to get an MFA and become an established artist. The memory of his homeland called to Paul, however, and several years later he took his wife and young son back to Haiti, where they lived for seven years and had a daughter. For the rest of his life, Haiti and the cult of Vodou would play a large part in Paul’s art. In Water Garden #1, we see the influence of Haiti in the totemic central figure, the use of glitter (which is found in Vodou flags and decorations), and the topography of the island, which is literally represented by the map that forms the gray background to the piece. But Paul also had a thorough education in European and American art history, and quotes from canonical artists...
In 1981 I arrived in New York, jobless and with a wife and a baby daughter to support. I had worked in art publishing in Chicago and hoped to find something similar in New York, but a professor I had known at the University of Chicago called me and made a suggestion that changed my life forever: he advised me to go see a dealer he knew, Ira Spanierman. A day or two later, I was sitting in front of a desk in the gallery, being interviewed by a 53-year-old man who did not match my preconceptions of what a Madison Avenue dealer should look like: he had collar-length hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and a soul patch under his lower lip. He was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. I was seeing the last vestiges of sartorial rebellion. Ira had always fluctuated between hip and Saville Row, but shortly after I went to work as his new second banana, he shaved the patch, trimmed his mustache, shortened his hair, and settled into a routine of elegant bespoke suits. I had, all unknowingly, enlisted in what I came to call “the boot camp of the art world.” Ira was extremely demanding – over the course of my four years with him, I saw people last from one day to six months – but if you could cut it, you got a lot of responsibility very fast. A week after joining him, I was juggling phones, wheeling and dealing, and giving a creditable imitation of an experienced art dealer. Ira had dealt in all kinds...
Branding is everything these days, and lately I’ve been wondering if I should change the name of my business from Reagan Upshaw Fine Art to Reagan Upshaw Appraisals and Fine Art. It’s not that I don’t have fine works of art to sell – I do. But appraising art has been the meat and potatoes of my business since I began to deal privately six years ago, and some of my clients for art don’t realize just how many appraisals I do. Like most of the bare necessities of life – food, housing, et cetera – appraisals aren’t inherently glamorous, but as long as people die, get divorced, or owe taxes, appraisers will be needed. And many people have no clue about what goes into calculating a value for a piece of stained canvas or a piece of hacked-at stone. Things used to be very informal when it came to appraisals. Fifty years ago, a brief letter saying simply, “One painting by Joe Smith, value $200” was considered OK. Some of the old-timers have even told me of having a pad of forms – they just filled in the details of the piece, entered their valuation, then signed at the bottom of the list, and that was that. The Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980’s, caused in part by grossly inflated valuations put on real property had an effect on all appraisals. The Appraisal Foundation, a not-for-profit private foundation, was authorized by Congress as the source of appraisal standards and appraiser qualifications. The Appraisal Foundation put together what has become the Bible of appraisers, The Uniform Standards of...
