Fine art appraisers typically use what is called the Sales Comparison Approach when calculating a value; that is, the appraiser looks at what similar paintings by the artist have sold for and then derives from those sales a value for the work being appraised, allowing for differences in size, subject matter, condition, and other factors. But what do you do when the artist being appraised has no auction records?It is a problem I had to solve last year when I was appraising works from the estate of Margo Pelletier (1951-2016). Born in Bangor, ME, Pelletier showed an early interest in art, and her parents encouraged her studies of painting, sculpture, and photography. She attended the Boston Museum School and the Hartford Art School before receiving her BFA from the Cooper Union for Science and Art in 1988. Pelletier was active in left-wing New York politics and was a co-founder of the artist advocacy group Progressive Culture Works. In the late 1970’s, she worked with the May 19th Communist Organization in Brooklyn, eventually leading their propaganda facility, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective. After an action to protest Apartheid in 1981, Pelletier was arrested and spent six months in the city jail on Rikers Island. Those six months, more than any other experience in her adult life aside from identifying as post-queer, shaped the foundation of her work to come. In the early 1990’s Pelletier was one of the founding members of the artists’ community at 111 First Street in Jersey City, NJ. By the end of the decade, she had become interested in the medium of sound and began studying...
“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Mark Twain said in 1897, replying to queries from American reporters who were investigating reports of Twain’s death on a visit to England. It’s the same with the art world: troughs inevitably follow peaks, and doomsayers proclaim the end of the market. 2025 had been unexciting, when it was not horrendous (see my post from three months ago), and the current economic uncertainty had everyone feeling jittery. What a difference a few months make. The November-December auctions did well across the board. Record prices for paintings by Suzanne Valadon and Frieda Kahlo. An auction of Picasso ceramics where almost every lot doubled its estimate. A single-artist sale of David Hockney prints based on his iPad drawings that absolutely shot the lights out, with individual prints bringing well into six figures. Old Master prints are selling well. It looks like happy days are here again. The fall sales are a lead-in to the annual art circus in Miami Beach. Miami Basel is most prestigious of the art fairs in December, but there are a host of satellite art fairs in that city. The general public can visit Miami Basel on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but major collectors and celebrities get in three days earlier, and most of the big sales are made before the fair opens its doors to mere hoi polloi. Speaking to several friends who exhibited at one of the Miami fairs, I found that most of them had done very well. Having to remove sold paintings and rehang your booth with paintings you were holding in reserve always brings...
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...
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...
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...
