As a young dealer of American art, I sometimes looked enviously at dealers in Old Masters and French Impressionist art. Not only did they have excuses for frequent trips to art fairs in Europe, but they also had a worldwide clientele. The major Impressionist and Modern sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were black-tie, invitation-required, champagne-fueled, evening affairs with plenty of what the daily papers called “celebs” in attendance. You might find a Hollywood movie star, a Japanese industrialist, and a member of European nobility pursuing the same work of art. American art was, however, the Rodney Dangerfield of the art market. Our auctions were decidedly daytime affairs, with bankers from Toledo and oilmen from Texas holding up their paddles while we dealers stood at the back, sipping lukewarm coffee from Styrofoam cups. It seemed that nobody outside America wanted 19th and early 20th century American paintings. There were a few exceptions – the Japanese liked Andrew Wyeth and Grandma Moses, and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza put together a formidable collection of American art – but such collectors were rare. The fact that European collectors were uninterested in American art until the second half of the 20th century, however, has turned out to be a blessing for me in one respect: dealers in American art never have to worry about lawsuits from the heirs of European Jewish collectors. At the recent national conference of the Appraisers Association of America, Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman for the Americas, gave a talk called “Expanding Dimensions of Provenance.” The Nazis, as is well known, plundered Jewish collections in Germany and the European countries they...
In 1978, Roberta and I joined our friend Buzz Spector to found White Walls: A Magazine of Writings by Artists. One of the few publications dealing with word-and-image art, it soon began to attract submissions by some notable artists in the field. One evening as we sat around a table examining submissions for the second issue, Roberta held up a submission. “We’ve got to publish this,” she said in a tone that brooked no dissent. Not that there was any dissent, as Buzz and I were likewise struck by “Spell,” our introduction to the work of Rosemary Mayer. I have been thinking recently about Rosemary, who died in 2014, because she’s been having quite the posthumous career lately. In the past couple of years, exhibitions of her work have been held in New York, Germany, and England. A recent visit to the gift shop of MoMA P.S. 1, the Long Island City venue of the Museum of Modern Art, revealed two books by or about her on sale. I recently received Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching, a handsome new monograph on her life and works. Monograph cover.Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter und Franz Konig. No artist achieves a posthumous career without champions, in this case Mayer’s niece, the art historian Marie Warsh, and Mayer’s nephew Max Warsh. What they have been able to do for their aunt is all the more remarkable because of the ephemerality of Mayer’s art. Born in 1943 in Ridgewood, then part of Brooklyn (it is now part of Queens, go figure), Mayer majored in Classics at the University of Iowa, but on her return to...
Two stories about art captured the general attention this past month. The first embodied every thrift store visitor’s dream, something that has kept the Antiques Roadshow franchise in business since 1977. It invites visions of “That could happen to me!” A woman who has remained anonymous was browsing in a New Hampshire thrift shop in 2017. Poking through a dusty stack of paintings in search of an old frame that she might restore, the shopper came across a painting of two women in conversation. Liking the antique frame, she purchased the piece for four dollars and stuck it in a closet at home until she had time to deal with it. When she finally examined the painting carefully, she found a label on the back with the name N.C. Wyeth and another label mentioning a book called Ramona. N.C. Wyeth. Senora Gonzaga Moreno and Ramona.Photo courtesy Bonhams Skinner. The owner did some online research and discovered that the painting was indeed by Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), one of the foremost artists who worked in the Brandywine region of Pennsylvania, and the father of Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was a popular book illustrator in the first half of the 20th century, and this painting had served as the frontispiece for the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a 19th century writer and early crusader for the rights of Native Americans. N.C. Wyeth is a big deal for collectors of American illustrators today. Thirteen of his paintings have sold at auction for over a million dollars. The highest price, just under $6 million, was achieved at Sotheby’s five years ago. While Ramona...
As any retailer will tell you, presentation is everything. Painters, as retailers hoping to sell objects they make, have to consider how those objects are best presented. If a painting is to be framed, what kind of frame will present it to best advantage? Not framing a painting is also an aesthetic choice. I’ve written before about the role frames play in our perception of a painting (see previous blog here). The issue came up for me again this week when Roberta and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape. The show follows five artists – Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand – as they painted the evolving suburbs west of Paris during the 1880’s. It’s worth a look, both for the paintings themselves and as an example of the ways that such paintings have been framed. When I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, I sneered at Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings bearing Louis-style gold frames. I had read Felix Feneon, a critic who was close friends with several of the Neo-Impressionists, and I knew from his writing that the only proper frame for such works was a simple white frame, with just enough vermillion and chrome yellow added to the mixture to keep the white paint from being too cold. But a trip to the Art Institute revealed Impressionist paintings in Louis-style frames to beat the band, and even Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte bore such a frame. What was wrong...
I received a lot of comments from museum directors and curators on last month’s blog, agreeing with me that changing social mores have caused a re-evaluation of what gets presented in museums today. The art market follows this trend: paintings depicting Native Americans as ignorant, bloodthirsty savages are much harder to sell than they were 30 years ago, and their fair market value has consequently decreased. On the other hand, paintings that depict Native Americans in a sympathetic light have risen in fair market value. A telling example can be found in a sale at an auction in Nevada last month. Western art, in addition to being offered at the New York auction houses, has its own specialty auction houses, and the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (which, though it bears the name of its original venue, has been held in Reno for years) is one of the 800-pound gorillas of the Western art market. Its annual summer sale is attended by all of the major Western collectors and dealers, and record prices for Western artists’ works have often been achieved there. Howard Terpning (born 1927) has long been the dean of living Western artists, with several works previously bringing seven figures at auction. The painting below was sold for $2,360,000 last month, a record for the artist. Howard Terpning (born 1927). Paper That Talks Two Ways – The Treaty Signing, 2008Photo courtesy Coeur d’Alene Art Auction I think that Terpning’s choice of subject was the major factor contributing to the record price. Just as politicians in Congress do today, a Native American tribe is discussing a proposed treaty that...
