My wife has a friend in his 80’s who told her that at his age any gathering of peers begins with what he calls “the organ recital.” My liver’s been acting up, one person says. My knee is killing me, adds another. In like fashion, for the last several years it’s been customary for dealers in 19th century American art to bemoan the state of the market when they meet. Oh, for the days when a painting by a lesser-known Hudson River School painter brought $50,000! Ah, remember when we could sell a neo-classical marble for more than four figures! The market’s shot to hell! Yet, as someone once said, low prices do not make a bad market – no buyers make a bad market. Valuations may change, but the market finds its new level. Ira Spanierman, my first art-world boss, used to say that the most important thing a dealer has to do is to be able to forget. That is, you deal with the market as it is today. If you’re stuck in the past, remembering what a particular artist’s work used to go for, whether higher or lower than his prices today, you’re not going to be able to participate in the market. You might as well close up shop. The auction houses have done a good job of conditioning consignors to the realities of the present market, and their auctions of American art this month bore this out. Gone were the hundreds of lots that could make an auction last three hours or more. Instead, Sotheby’s and Christie’s had more curated sales that could be...
An estimated 1.7 trillion images were produced in 2017. Think about that figure. Actually, you can’t think about that figure; you can’t even really get your mind around it. The estimate comes from a book on photography published a couple of years ago. With the continued spread of smartphones to all corners of the world, the number of images produced every year must be into double-digit trillions by now. We are swamped each day by a tsunami of images, and it’s easy to forget how miraculous image making once was. I like to say that there was only one truly original artist in history – the first caveman or cavewoman who drew a mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from him or her ever since. Lascaux Caves, France, c. 15,000 BCE Yet, while making images is a distinctly human activity, something we did even before our species emerged from their sheltering caves, actual images have been comparatively rare until recent times. How many images did medieval European peasants see in their lifetimes? Perhaps a painting over the altar or a mural if the village church was rich enough. Perhaps images on large pieces of canvas used by storytellers at fairs. Later on, as printed images spread, the humble folk might have a rough woodcut in their cottages. But highly-accomplished images outside of church were seen only by the privileged and their servants. In the 19th century, new printing techniques brought fine art within the means of the general public, and newspapers became expected to provide illustrations for their readers. Improved still cameras made photography...
Suppose I came into a possession of a box of junk from my childhood that my mother had neglected to throw out. Included in the box might be an old baseball from my Little League days. What would that baseball be worth? Nothing, of course. You couldn’t even play ball with it — it would be so brittle that it would probably not survive a good whack of a bat. But suppose I could convince you that this old baseball was the very ball that Roger Maris hit over the wall for his 61st home run in 1961. What would it be worth then? Form and color can make an object beautiful, but only a story can imbue an object with magic. It has increasingly become the job of an auctioneer to attach a story to an object. At the annual conference of the Appraisers Association of American three weeks ago, Bruno Vinciguerra, the CEO of Bonhams, declared, “We’re in the business of passion.” If you want to get a record price for an object, said Vinciguerra, you need to present it as part of a compelling story, and you need to persuade a potential purchaser that he or she can be part of that story. It strikes me that the hunger such a tactic feeds is analogous to the selfie. I recently visited the Diego Rivera exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Twenty years ago, visitors might have been content to view Rivera’s paintings and purchase a postcard or two of their favorite works. Not anymore. The smartphone has done more than allow viewers to...
Ever heard of Lynne Drexler? Up to a couple of years ago, you might be excused for not knowing of her. Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1928, Drexler moved to New York in the 1950’s and studied with noted modernists Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. She was a second-generation participant in the Abstract Expressionist movement and had a solo show in 1961 at Tanager Gallery, a well-regarded artists’ cooperative gallery which was part of the downtown scene. Lynne Drexler, 1960 But that was pretty much it. She married another artist, taught at various schools around the country, and moved back to New York in 1967, becoming just another of the myriad artists working in the city without representation by a respected commercial gallery. Drexler and her husband bought a summer place on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine in 1971, and by 1983 she was separated from him and living on the island full time. She died there in 1999, leaving behind a studio full of paintings. Her auction results in the 15 years following her death were very modest, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, selling mostly at New England auction houses. Since 2019, however, her market has exploded. What’s going on? I was talking with a friend, an important collector and a money manager who brings the same finger-to-the-pulse awareness to the art market that he brings to the stock market. He has the courage of his convictions: he bought his Drexler painting privately in the low six figures a little over a year ago, paying over twice what the auction record for...
I was manning a booth at an antiques show in Denver many years ago when a man came in, carrying a manila envelope from which he removed a photograph of a painting. “I’ve got a Winslow Homer that I want to sell,” he informed me. I was always interested in acquiring a Winslow Homer painting, so I examined the photo carefully. “Has Lloyd Goodrich seen the painting?” I inquired. Goodrich, a noted scholar and former head of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was in the process of compiling the catalogue raisonné for Homer’s work. “LLOYD GOODRICH!” the man said, practically spitting in disgust. He went on a rant against Goodrich, who had declined to include his painting in the catalogue, questioning the scholar’s knowledge and honesty. He began pulling papers out of his envelope. “Here’s a paint analysis! And the canvas dates from Homer’s lifetime!” And on and on. He pursued me across the booth as I backed away. I finally got rid of the man, explaining that, whatever his beef with Goodrich, I had no standing in the matter. I wasn’t going to sell a work that was not going to be included in the catalogue raisonné. It would have been an invitation for a lawsuit down the line. I was reminded of my antiques show visitor by an article by Sam Knight in a recent issue of The New Yorker. “An Uncertain Image” tells the story of a European collector who owns what he believes to be a painting by the British artist Lucien Freud. The collector bought the work in 1997 as “attributed to Lucien...
