My sister has been going through her attic, trying to clear it out for the inevitable day when it’s going to be time to move out of the home she’s lived in for 40 years. She recently sent me this photo: She thinks it’s our great-aunt’s, inherited by our mother. Before my sister sends this and other things to the thrift shop, she’s asking around the family to see if anyone wants them. So far, there have been few takers among our children for anything offered. Eight years ago, Richard Eisenberg wrote a much-discussed article for Forbes Magazine with a title that told the sad truth: “Sorry – Nobody Wants Your Parents’ Stuff.” Hummel figurines, “limited-edition” multiples, those commemorative medallions that were being marketed as real investments in the 1950s – as with my great-aunt’s bowl, you often can’t even give them away to Generation X. The same is true with 19th century art as well. The market for major works by members of the Hudson River School is still strong, but most such works passed into public collections long ago, and minor works, however attractive, by lesser-known members of the school can’t command anything like they once did. I recently finished an appraisal for a painting by a member of the group that had been purchased 25 years ago for almost $100,000. I appraised it for less than a third of that. Sorry, but that’s the current market. Things go in and out of fashion. Buy what you like, and let it give you pleasure. If you hit the top of the market when it’s time to sell,...
Forty years ago, I was standing in a small auction gallery in New Jersey with a paddle in my hand. I was there to bid on a painting of children by a lake by the American Impressionist, Edward Dufner (1872-1957). Born in Buffalo, Dufner enrolled in art classes at the Buffalo Art Students League at age 19. Two years later he won a scholarship to the Arts Students League in New York. At age 25, like many young American artists, Dufner traveled to Paris, where he lived for five years and studied at the Academie Julian. (Someday I’m going to curate an exhibition of late 19th century American painters in Paris who didn’t study at the Academie Julian. You could probably hang the entire show in a broom closet.) Dufner won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon and, though still in Paris, won a medal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition back in Buffalo. He returned to his hometown in 1903 and became an instructor at his old school, but New York beckoned, and he moved there in 1908 to begin nine years of teaching at the Art Students League. He did not live in New York City, however; he and his wife made their home in Caldwell, New Jersey, and the willow-lined lakes in the area soon became his favorite subject. For the rest of his life, he painted scenes of lakes with children and ducks, which were what his collectors wanted. For my taste, however, his 10 x 8-inch paintings of women or children in interior scenes are his finest achievement. They’re unsentimental, absolutely terrific, and I...
In this time when the world seems full of darkness, both natural and political, I have been distracting myself by reading Orlando Whitfield’s new book All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art (Pantheon Press). The fraud was committed by Whitfield’s American friend, Inigo Philbrick, whom he met at Goldsmith’s, a college of the University of London. From the earliest days of their friendship, Whitfield was fascinated by Philbrick’s ability to soak up art market information and to form highly advantageous art-world relationships with seemingly effortless ease. Whitfield portrays himself as a sort of Robin to Philbrick’s Batman as they begin a gallery together. In short order, however, Philbrook has moved far ahead of his friend, leaving their joint effort to work for one of London’s premier contemporary dealers. He is raking in the big bucks, his cellphone constantly buzzing with the details of complicated transactions involving artworks which trade for millions of pounds. It’s a world of Billionaires and Beautiful People who spend the year traveling on their private jets to art fairs around the world. Their only respite seems to come in December after the close of Miami Basel, when they all knock off to go skiing in St. Moritz. Artworks are bought, sold, and then resold for enormous prices, even though the buyers often do not even see the works in person; instead, the works are moved from the seller’s space to the buyer’s space at some duty-free warehouse outside Geneva. Whitfield occasionally gets invited to a reception like a poor relation, or he enjoys lunch with his friend at an exclusive club, reminiscing...
“The catbird seat” is an idiomatic phrase used to describe an enviable position, often in terms of having the upper hand or greater advantage in any type of dealing among parties. It derives from the secluded perch on which the gray catbird makes mocking calls.–Wikipedia Roberta and I are currently watching The Day of the Jackal, a miniseries based on the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth. (A movie was made of the book in 1973.) In this year’s iteration, Eddie Redmayne plays a professional assassin code-named The Jackal who is hired by shadowy employers to carry out killings of persons whom they believe to be a threat to their interests. The Jackal’s current target is a tech genius who has developed a soon-to-be released software called River, which will permit total transparency in worldwide financial dealings. The monied powers-that-be don’t want that to happen. Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal, photo courtesy Peacock Fortunately for Magnus Resch, art dealers and the owners of art world databases did not have to hire The Jackal to eliminate him when he unveiled an app in 2016 that would, he claimed, lead to total transparency in the art market. Using the app, visitors to an art fair or a gallery could scan an offered artwork with their cell phones and immediately learn the name of the artwork, its artist, its previous exhibitions and sales, and the current price being asked for similar works by competitors. Lawsuits from dealers and databases concerning copyright and intellectual property infringement succeeded in getting the app removed from the Apple store. Back when I began working for a gallery,...
Leaving aside the World War II years, which were more than just an “era,” there have been two periods in the past hundred years that have caught the popular imagination. The more recent was the Sixties in America, particularly the Summer of Love in 1968. Psychedelics, shaggy hair, and tie-dye shirts with bell-bottom pants all found their way into mainstream aesthetics and became a world-wide influence. The other period was the Roaring Twenties. The French called that period les années folles, the Crazy Years, and the center of that craziness was Paris, where French modernists escaping conformity, White Russians escaping Bolshevism, and rich Americans escaping Prohibition made a clean break with the strictures of the preceding war-blasted decade to concoct a heady scene from which emerged a new artistic style – clean, luminous, and merciless – which became known as Art Deco. Two of the best-known practitioners of the style in Paris were from Eastern Europe. One was the noted designer Romaine de Tertoff, better known as Erté. The other, Tamara de Lempicka, is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland or Russia in 1898 (her birthplace is a matter of dispute), Lempicka was the daughter of a wealthy lawyer with roots both in Warsaw and St. Petersburg. Raised in Warsaw, she began making art at an early age. At 17 she had a brief term at school in Switzerland, but left to travel with her grandmother on a long tour of Italy, where she became familiar with Old Master art, including that of Bronzino...
