In my last blog, I wrote about the results of the American auctions that had occurred in the previous week in New York. Among the lessons they taught, I said, was that the market for 19th century genre and still life paintings was “dead as a doornail.” Spoken too soon. A couple of weeks after that post, the still life below by William McCloskey came up at a Grogan & Company fine art and jewelry sale in Boston. Estimated at $80,000-150,000, it sold for $488,000, including premium. McCloskey (1859-1941) studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taught briefly in Denver, and then moved to Los Angeles, at that time a sleepy provincial town with pretensions to culture. While he enjoyed an active career in California as a portrait painter, McCloskey would be unknown today except for the paintings he made of oranges and other fruit, which have proved perennial favorites over the years. In setting the estimate, Georgina Winthrop, the cataloguer at Grogan, was playing it safe. Although a similar McCloskey still life sold in New York for $782,500 in 2011, Ms. Winthrop obviously thought, as I did, that the current market for Victorian-era paintings was weak and that a conservative estimate was called for. Whether or not the low estimate and the non-New York venue encouraged collectors to think that they might get a steal, there was no stopping them once the bidding began. Six telephone bidders engaged in a bidding war, tripling the estimate. Initial reports had said that the buyers of the painting were a young couple from San Francisco who...
Is there anything more embarrassing, fashion-wise, than looking at your high school yearbook 10 to 20 years after you have graduated? Those hair styles! That outfit! What on earth were we thinking? The embarrassment gradually subsides. And, who knows, beehive hairdos, mullets, or gimme caps may one day get sufficiently retro to be recycled. These reflections were prompted by the performance of various schools of art at the American auctions last week. While 19th and early 20th century American art, as I have said in previous posts, is not nearly as sexy as contemporary art, the sales, though uneven, did show solid results in some areas. A synopsis would be as follows: modernism still strong, illustration art still strong, Western all right, Hudson River School spotty, Impressionism surprisingly iffy, and 19th century genre and still life paintings dead as a doornail. These analyses are based on market performance this past week, not artistic quality. But what causes some schools to go out of favor and others to suddenly rise? In terms of fashion, why have lush Victorian-era still life paintings gone the way of capri pants? Consider the failure of this painting to sell. This opulent still life is by Morston Ream (Morston Constantine Ream, to be exact. He and his brother Carducius Plantagenet Ream, also a still life painter, seem to have had parents who believed that children should have names to live up to.) I don’t know what Christie’s was thinking when they put a $100,000-150,000 estimate on the painting, when smaller still lifes by the artist regularly sell for four figures. The auctioneer at this sale...
There was a kerfuffle in the art world recently about an exhibition that opened in Beijing last fall and is currently on tour to three other Chinese museums. The exhibition is of the works of Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), a German artist whose monumentally-sized works deal with the heritage of 20th century Germany and in particular with its Nazi past. Kiefer’s works have brought three and a half million dollars at auction, and he is rightfully recognized as one of the most significant contemporary German artists. Kiefer had had many one-person exhibitions at major museums over the past 30 years; what made this exhibition notable was that over ninety percent of the works were owned by one Chinese collector and that the artist was not consulted in the preparation of the exhibition. The Chinese museums and the German foundation that organized the exhibition dispute that last assertion, but let’s assume that it’s correct and that the artist was given no chance to have a say in the show. Living artists have traditionally had a hand in museum exhibitions of their works, consulting with the museums’ curators on the selection artworks, working with the museums’ designers on the layout of the galleries, and giving interviews to the scholars writing the catalog. The three galleries which sell Kiefer’s work put out a joint statement that “to plan such an important showcase in China without the artist’s input is disrespectful.” Whether organizing the show was disrespectful or not, Kiefer and his dealers had no legal standing to block it. The works are the property of the collector, who can show them wherever...
Seven years ago, I was at the Montclair Art Museum viewing an exhibition called “Cezanne and American Modernism.” As the title indicates, the show traced the influence of the French artist upon American artists ranging from Maurice Prendergast to Arshile Gorky. The works were wonderful, but I found myself thinking of non-aesthetic matters as well. “Let’s see,” I mused, going down the line, “Alfred Maurer killed himself, and Patrick Henry Bruce killed himself, and Oscar Bluemner killed himself, and Arshile Gorky killed himself, and George Ault probably killed himself.” I could have been forgetting someone, but even that quick list of painters was enough to make me realize that if I had been a life insurance salesman back in the period between the World Wars, I wouldn’t have sold a policy to an American modernist artist on a bet. I’ve been thinking about that exhibition because I recently acquired watercolors done a year apart by two artists in the show, one who killed himself, and one who didn’t. Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) was born in Germany, trained as an architect there, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 25. He soon found work as a draftsman in architectural firms. Yet two years later, he was living on the streets, sleeping in Bowery flophouses, and relying on soup kitchens to keep from starvation. Drastic changes in fortune would accompany Bluemner for the rest of his life. He found work again as an architect, designed the Bronx Borough Courthouse (and was cheated out of his fee), took up painting, studied color theory, won a lawsuit over his Bronx design,...
Ellen Lanyon, a Chicago artist who later ended up in New York, often painted pictures that placed ordinary objects in dream-like juxtapositions with a decidedly spooky air. In an article on her work for Art in America twenty years ago, I wrote that I had always considered her to be your basic Corn Belt Surrealist, but that a fuller knowledge of her work had shown me she was much more than that. Ah, the danger of coining a phrase. When Ellen died four years ago, an obituary ignored the positive tone of my article, saying merely that a critic (sneeringly, it was implied) had once called her a Corn Belt Surrealist. Looking back, I see that the problem was with the term Corn Belt — no one would object to an artist’s being called a Surrealist. In my New York provincialism, I was condescending to all artists not working in New York. There was also a lingering suspicion of artists working in a realistic style. When I was pursuing my graduate studies in art history, the history of modern art read like the book of Genesis – all those “begats.” Impressionism begat Neo-Impressionism, which begat Post-Impressionism and so on, all the way down to recent years, when Abstract Expressionism begat Post-Painterly Abstraction, which begat Minimalism, at which point painting was supposed to end. The constant in the modernist version of art history was that art in the 20th century was tending inexorably toward abstraction and the flatness of the picture plane. Any artist who wasn’t in step with this progression was hopelessly retardataire, a dinosaur who hadn’t realized that...
