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,...
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...
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...
