Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New York two weeks ago. Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is suing the Swiss dealer who sold him this work for $127,500,000, alleging that the dealer overcharged him on several other deals, undoubtedly had the last laugh here. The sale was surrounded by controversy from the start. Was this a genuine Leonardo? Experts differed. If so, how much of the original painting remained? The work had been heavily restored. In the end, it didn’t matter. Christie’s put on a full court press in marketing the work, holding public viewings of it in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and New York. De-emphasizing the Christian theme (it is a portrait of Jesus, after all), Christie’s touted it as “the male Mona Lisa,” brilliantly linking it with what is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I witnessed some of the hoopla the New York exhibition generated as I arrived to view the American works coming up for sale at Christie’s that same week. I had to push my way past a long line of people who had waited 30 minutes to an hour for a look at the painting. The atmosphere reminded longtime New Yorkers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was on display. Over 27 million people visited the Vatican Pavilion at the fair to stand on a moving walkway and be transported past the...
Earlier this month, I gave a lecture entitled “Appraising the Art of the American West” to a group from the Appraisers Association of America. I spoke about how to set valuations on artworks depicting the American West and its inhabitants by artists from the early 19th century until the present day, and I explained the various factors that make, say, one painting by Frederic Remington more valuable than another of equal size. One of the artists I discussed in my talk was Charles Bird King (1785-1862). Born in Newport, Rhode Island, King came to New York at the age of 15 to apprentice himself to Edward Savage, a now all-but-forgotten portrait painter. In 1806 King left for London to study with Benjamin West, a famous American painter who had settled there. Returning to America in 1812, King spent the next few years in various mid-Atlantic cities, making a living by painting portraits of politicians and other notables. By 1816, he was living in Washington, DC. King would be nothing but a footnote in American art history today had he not received a commission from the government in 1821 to paint the members of Native American delegations who were visiting Washington. For the next 20 years, he would paint portraits of tribal leaders as they arrived in town to be shafted yet again by the Great White Father. Those portraits aroused much interest when they were exhibited and later served as the basis for illustrated volumes which are still widely sought after by bibliophiles. In my talk, I emphasized that what often makes one of King’s portraits more popular, and...
A client called me the other day, looking for a particular print by Claes Oldenburg – “Profile Airflow (Axsom Platsker 59), cast polyurethane relief over lithograph, done in 1969. So I’m looking around – call me if you have one. But the request got me thinking about Oldenburg, who entered the pantheon of American art with his Pop Art contemporaries some time ago. Where do we put him now? Pop Art arose as an antidote to the ponderous theorizing of late Abstract Expressionism, a once-adventurous style that had hardened into a technique surrounded by a lot of pronouncements that had degenerated into buzzwords – action painting, the canvas as arena, abstraction as the apotheosis of high art, and so on. Pop Art cheerfully erased the boundary between high and low, between “real” art and “commercial” art — it was often hard to tell whether the artist was presenting an image of, say, a soup can with ironic intent or whether he genuinely admired the product and its packaging. Coupled with any knowing look was often a sort of goofy happiness, and Oldenburg’s work was the epitome of this. When he made papier-mâché replicas of items of clothing such as the life-sized little girl’s dress below, any critique of Western consumer culture is completely subverted by a sense of fun and the same sort of pride that a third grader might evince in making a similar project. A similar sense of fun pervades Oldenburg’s large outdoor commissions in which everyday objects are simplified to their essential forms and then expanded to gargantuan size, rendering them simultaneously familiar and strange. Most...
Greta Gundersen died in July of cancer. She was a private person, and I hadn’t known she was sick until a few weeks before her death. I had had the sense that something was wrong, for I had written a short essay for an exhibition she was due to have this fall and had heard nothing back when I sent it to her, which wasn’t like her at all. I met Greta fifteen years ago. A museum curator had recommended her as an artist whose work might be appropriate for an exhibition I was organizing for a New York gallery. The show was to be a multigenerational one, with 150-year-old paintings by members of the Hudson River School hung next to works by contemporary artists. I contacted Greta and asked if she could send me some images. “My works don’t reproduce well,” she told me. “Why don’t I just bring some of the smaller ones to you?” So it was that a week later I met Greta and saw her paintings. “These are great!” I enthused. “I want them for the show!” “Are you sure?” Greta asked doubtfully. “You don’t want some time to think it over?” Her response was, I came to learn, quintessentially Greta. Although a native New Yorker, through her Norwegian heritage she always carried a bit of Lake Wobegon. Landscape was the common element of the show I had planned, and I wanted to see what the paintings from different eras had to say to each other. Greta’s paintings pushed the genre about as far as it could go. They could be read as landscapes,...
My nephew collected baseball cards as a kid. His father was an avid collector of various items such watch fobs, and Greg aspired to an equivalent seriousness. He got a guidebook about the value of individual cards and kept abreast of the value of each card in his collection. He came to me once, proudly showing a card. “Look at this!” he bragged. “This card is worth eight dollars!” He was so proud of his possession that I didn’t have the heart to ask him, “Greg, do you know anyone who will actually put eight dollars into your hand in exchange for this card? Because if you don’t, it’s not worth eight dollars.” The same warning applies to any baseball card, even the “Holy Grail” of them all, the card of Honus Wagner which was included in packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes from 1909-11. (Baseball cards came with cigarettes, not bubble gum, back then.) A mint-condition copy of this card, less than three inches high, sold in a sports memorabilia auction last year for $3,120,000. Even copies in less than perfect condition bring big money. And yet, remove the card from its protective holder, take it to the mall in your town, hand it to the counter person at McDonald’s, and ask him to give you a Big Mac in exchange. Unless the counter person is extremely knowledgeable about old baseball cards, my guess is that you’ll leave hungry. In the same way, works of art derive their monetary value from the passions (and the income) of the people who collect them. When there is a large pool of...
