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...
Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New York two weeks ago. Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is suing the Swiss dealer who sold him this work for $127,500,000, alleging that the dealer overcharged him on several other deals, undoubtedly had the last laugh here. The sale was surrounded by controversy from the start. Was this a genuine Leonardo? Experts differed. If so, how much of the original painting remained? The work had been heavily restored. In the end, it didn’t matter. Christie’s put on a full court press in marketing the work, holding public viewings of it in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and New York. De-emphasizing the Christian theme (it is a portrait of Jesus, after all), Christie’s touted it as “the male Mona Lisa,” brilliantly linking it with what is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I witnessed some of the hoopla the New York exhibition generated as I arrived to view the American works coming up for sale at Christie’s that same week. I had to push my way past a long line of people who had waited 30 minutes to an hour for a look at the painting. The atmosphere reminded longtime New Yorkers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was on display. Over 27 million people visited the Vatican Pavilion at the fair to stand on a moving walkway and be transported past the...
I’ll be participating in the Boston International Fine Art Show from October 23-25. When preparing to participate in such venues, I always think of Samuel Johnson’s definition of second marriages: “The triumph of hope over experience.” Setting up, you’re enthusiastic, confident that the works you have carefully selected will find favor, and hopeful that you’ll meet a new collector who will develop into a steady client. Packing up on the last day of a lackluster show, you’re berating yourself as an idiot and asking why you persist in presenting art to Philistines who wouldn’t know a good painting if it ran up and bit them in broad daylight. Yet dealers go back, again and again. Why? Because art fairs in the last 20 years have become the primary commercial venue for seeing art. Dealers in contemporary art must continue to host a regular schedule of shows, since their artists demand it, but I wonder if even this will change. A dealer in 19th and 20th century art who had spent many years on 57th Street in Manhattan summed up why he was about to close his ground-floor space there and move to a smaller, less public space uptown. “Look,” he told me as we sat in his old space, “I get maybe two or three people a day wandering in here. On the other hand, the art fair in Maastricht costs me $150,000 to do, but I see 60,000 people in ten days. I’ve decided that renting a booth in a fair like that is a more efficient use of my money than paying the insane rent here.” Art...
