I ran into Robert Simon at an Appraisers Association reception recently. Bob is one of the preeminent dealers of Old Master art in America, and I took the opportunity to ask him about the current state of the Old Master Market. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, to learn that Old Master collecting is being shaped by many of the same factors that currently affect the collecting of 19th and 20th century art by museums. I say “museums” because the vast majority of Old Master sales are to museums. Public institutions have been under pressure to expand their collections by acquiring works by women and artists of color, and that pressure has been applied to the field of Old Masters as well. Works by Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun have sold for over $5 million and $7 million, respectively, in the past five years. Artists of color working in Europe during the 15th-18th centuries are understandably rare — I can’t think of any from the Renaissance and only a handful from the 18th century – but when such works come on the market, there is a bidding war. Paintings from that era by white artists that include persons of color as subjects are also in high demand, but the people depicted have to be shown as individuals, not as “types.” Dealing Old Master works, however, has challenges unlike dealing in 19th and 20th century art. To state the obvious, most masterpieces long ago passed into the collections of museums, and even if a dealer acquires a major work from the wall of some nobleman’s castle, getting an...
Summer normally brings family parties on the deck for Roberta and me, and at a recent such get-together I was talking with my nephew Greg, about whose boyhood enthusiasm for collecting baseball cards I have written. Greg, now middle-aged, long ago put his baseball cards aside and now collects illustrations and other collectibles from popular culture. He has a particular fondness for Batman. Greg had read my blog about baseball card collecting in 2017, and he told me that the advice on collecting that I tendered then still guides his collecting. “Guys at work know that I collect this stuff, and they’re always asking me, ‘Greg, I have a chance to buy a Superman action figure for $25.00. What do you think? Will it go up? Is it a good buy?’ I always tell them that nothing is guaranteed to go up. If they like something and want to live with it, they should buy it, but forget about trying to buy low and make a killing later.” He went on, “I have some very nice things that I enjoy living with. I paid top dollar for them, to get the best. I never intend to sell them, so it doesn’t matter what happens to the market.” Top dollar in Greg’s case is very much below top dollar for works by important contemporary artists, but collecting principles should remain the same. Alas, too many people – I won’t call them “collectors”; they’re the artworld equivalent of day traders – haven’t read my blog. A recent front-page article in The New York Times by Zachary Small and Julia Halperin detailed the...
When Norman Rockwell died in 1978, Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes briefly discussed the artist’s place in American art. Hughes acknowledged that Rockwell in his last years had moved beyond the soda-fountain-American-flag-and-Mom’s-apple-pie subject matter that had made him a household name over the years in which his illustrations regularly appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Rockwell’s world view had darkened in the 1960’s. His later works had dealt with school desegregation and with the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. “But these did not represent the essential Rockwell as far as his public was concerned,” wrote Hughes. “What they wanted was a friendly world, shielded from the calamities of history and the endemic doubts that are the modernist heritage, set down in detail, painted as an honest grocer weighs ham, slice by slice, nothing skimped; and Norman Rockwell gave it to them for 60 years. He never made an impression on the history of art, and never will. But on the history of illustration and mass communication his mark was deep, and will remain indelible.” So things seemed in 1978, at least to one important critic. But the art world was already changing. The modernist paradigm had proved unsustainable – I mean, after you’ve pared everything down to Minimalism, what else is there to do? – and a move back to figuration was already underway. Pop Art had brought back the figure, albeit in an ironic fashion, with artists such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist using images and painting techniques derived directly from what had...
“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” the painter Ad Reinhardt once famously opined, and it’s true that the physical accommodations that sculptures demand have made them problematic for many collectors. They take up so damned much space, and their weight, for anything larger that a table-top piece, means they’re pretty much going to stay wherever they’re plopped. This inconvenience is true for institutions as well as for private collectors: a church the size of St. Peter’s in Rome can handle a 14-foot-high sculpture such as Bernini’s Saint Longinus; most American churches can’t. This means that large-scale sculpture usually works best out-of-doors. Baroque princes had formal gardens with occasional sculptures sited at strategic points. Contemporary sculpture, however, often finds itself in a park devoted to the art. Roberta and I live within an easy hour’s drive from two such parks. Storm King Art Center, established in 1960, occupies almost 500 acres of beautiful landscape outside New Windsor, NY. An hour north of New York City, it attracts around 200,000 visitors a year from all over the world. The collection is world-class, featuring a Who’s Who of major contemporary sculptors such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, and many others. Mark di Suvero, E=MC2, 1996-1997. Steel, 92-3/4 feet high.Collection Storm King Art Center. Photo by author. Storm King is an environment that rewards Abstract-Expressionist inspired, testosterone-fueled sculptures. The environment practically shouts, Go Big or Go Home. George Rickey is a wonderful sculptor, but compared with di Suvero’s behemoths, Rickey’s 14-foot-high sculptures, displayed in a grove of trees, seem...
Can something horrible be made beautiful? It’s a question that came to mind after Roberta and I recently visited The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is a non-profit organization founded in 1989 to provide legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who were denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case. Through the efforts of EJI’s attorneys, several persons wrongfully convicted have been exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused. A memorial project began in 2018, and EJI now has three memorials in Montgomery to the victims of slavery and racial violence: The Legacy Museum, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (commonly known as the Lynching Memorial, as it lists the names of all known lynching victims), and, open for the past three months, The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. A visit to any of those sites is a moving experience, but I want to talk here about The Legacy Museum. More of a historical museum than an art museum (though it does have a gallery exhibiting the works of Black artists responding to racial injustice), the museum uses a variety of media to record history of slavery: interactive maps showing the routes of slave ships from Africa to the Americas, slave holding cells inhabited by holograms of actors in the roles of enslaved persons who describe their ordeals during the Middle Passage, transcriptions of the accounts of Black families being separated for sale, images of lynchings,...
