Earlier this month, I gave a lecture entitled “Appraising the Art of the American West” to a group from the Appraisers Association of America. I spoke about how to set valuations on artworks depicting the American West and its inhabitants by artists from the early 19th century until the present day, and I explained the various factors that make, say, one painting by Frederic Remington more valuable than another of equal size. One of the artists I discussed in my talk was Charles Bird King (1785-1862). Born in Newport, Rhode Island, King came to New York at the age of 15 to apprentice himself to Edward Savage, a now all-but-forgotten portrait painter. In 1806 King left for London to study with Benjamin West, a famous American painter who had settled there. Returning to America in 1812, King spent the next few years in various mid-Atlantic cities, making a living by painting portraits of politicians and other notables. By 1816, he was living in Washington, DC. King would be nothing but a footnote in American art history today had he not received a commission from the government in 1821 to paint the members of Native American delegations who were visiting Washington. For the next 20 years, he would paint portraits of tribal leaders as they arrived in town to be shafted yet again by the Great White Father. Those portraits aroused much interest when they were exhibited and later served as the basis for illustrated volumes which are still widely sought after by bibliophiles. In my talk, I emphasized that what often makes one of King’s portraits more popular, and...
A client called me the other day, looking for a particular print by Claes Oldenburg – “Profile Airflow (Axsom Platsker 59), cast polyurethane relief over lithograph, done in 1969. So I’m looking around – call me if you have one. But the request got me thinking about Oldenburg, who entered the pantheon of American art with his Pop Art contemporaries some time ago. Where do we put him now? Pop Art arose as an antidote to the ponderous theorizing of late Abstract Expressionism, a once-adventurous style that had hardened into a technique surrounded by a lot of pronouncements that had degenerated into buzzwords – action painting, the canvas as arena, abstraction as the apotheosis of high art, and so on. Pop Art cheerfully erased the boundary between high and low, between “real” art and “commercial” art — it was often hard to tell whether the artist was presenting an image of, say, a soup can with ironic intent or whether he genuinely admired the product and its packaging. Coupled with any knowing look was often a sort of goofy happiness, and Oldenburg’s work was the epitome of this. When he made papier-mâché replicas of items of clothing such as the life-sized little girl’s dress below, any critique of Western consumer culture is completely subverted by a sense of fun and the same sort of pride that a third grader might evince in making a similar project. A similar sense of fun pervades Oldenburg’s large outdoor commissions in which everyday objects are simplified to their essential forms and then expanded to gargantuan size, rendering them simultaneously familiar and strange. Most...
Greta Gundersen died in July of cancer. She was a private person, and I hadn’t known she was sick until a few weeks before her death. I had had the sense that something was wrong, for I had written a short essay for an exhibition she was due to have this fall and had heard nothing back when I sent it to her, which wasn’t like her at all. I met Greta fifteen years ago. A museum curator had recommended her as an artist whose work might be appropriate for an exhibition I was organizing for a New York gallery. The show was to be a multigenerational one, with 150-year-old paintings by members of the Hudson River School hung next to works by contemporary artists. I contacted Greta and asked if she could send me some images. “My works don’t reproduce well,” she told me. “Why don’t I just bring some of the smaller ones to you?” So it was that a week later I met Greta and saw her paintings. “These are great!” I enthused. “I want them for the show!” “Are you sure?” Greta asked doubtfully. “You don’t want some time to think it over?” Her response was, I came to learn, quintessentially Greta. Although a native New Yorker, through her Norwegian heritage she always carried a bit of Lake Wobegon. Landscape was the common element of the show I had planned, and I wanted to see what the paintings from different eras had to say to each other. Greta’s paintings pushed the genre about as far as it could go. They could be read as landscapes,...
My nephew collected baseball cards as a kid. His father was an avid collector of various items such watch fobs, and Greg aspired to an equivalent seriousness. He got a guidebook about the value of individual cards and kept abreast of the value of each card in his collection. He came to me once, proudly showing a card. “Look at this!” he bragged. “This card is worth eight dollars!” He was so proud of his possession that I didn’t have the heart to ask him, “Greg, do you know anyone who will actually put eight dollars into your hand in exchange for this card? Because if you don’t, it’s not worth eight dollars.” The same warning applies to any baseball card, even the “Holy Grail” of them all, the card of Honus Wagner which was included in packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes from 1909-11. (Baseball cards came with cigarettes, not bubble gum, back then.) A mint-condition copy of this card, less than three inches high, sold in a sports memorabilia auction last year for $3,120,000. Even copies in less than perfect condition bring big money. And yet, remove the card from its protective holder, take it to the mall in your town, hand it to the counter person at McDonald’s, and ask him to give you a Big Mac in exchange. Unless the counter person is extremely knowledgeable about old baseball cards, my guess is that you’ll leave hungry. In the same way, works of art derive their monetary value from the passions (and the income) of the people who collect them. When there is a large pool of...
In my last blog, I wrote about the results of the American auctions that had occurred in the previous week in New York. Among the lessons they taught, I said, was that the market for 19th century genre and still life paintings was “dead as a doornail.” Spoken too soon. A couple of weeks after that post, the still life below by William McCloskey came up at a Grogan & Company fine art and jewelry sale in Boston. Estimated at $80,000-150,000, it sold for $488,000, including premium. McCloskey (1859-1941) studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taught briefly in Denver, and then moved to Los Angeles, at that time a sleepy provincial town with pretensions to culture. While he enjoyed an active career in California as a portrait painter, McCloskey would be unknown today except for the paintings he made of oranges and other fruit, which have proved perennial favorites over the years. In setting the estimate, Georgina Winthrop, the cataloguer at Grogan, was playing it safe. Although a similar McCloskey still life sold in New York for $782,500 in 2011, Ms. Winthrop obviously thought, as I did, that the current market for Victorian-era paintings was weak and that a conservative estimate was called for. Whether or not the low estimate and the non-New York venue encouraged collectors to think that they might get a steal, there was no stopping them once the bidding began. Six telephone bidders engaged in a bidding war, tripling the estimate. Initial reports had said that the buyers of the painting were a young couple from San Francisco who...
Is there anything more embarrassing, fashion-wise, than looking at your high school yearbook 10 to 20 years after you have graduated? Those hair styles! That outfit! What on earth were we thinking? The embarrassment gradually subsides. And, who knows, beehive hairdos, mullets, or gimme caps may one day get sufficiently retro to be recycled. These reflections were prompted by the performance of various schools of art at the American auctions last week. While 19th and early 20th century American art, as I have said in previous posts, is not nearly as sexy as contemporary art, the sales, though uneven, did show solid results in some areas. A synopsis would be as follows: modernism still strong, illustration art still strong, Western all right, Hudson River School spotty, Impressionism surprisingly iffy, and 19th century genre and still life paintings dead as a doornail. These analyses are based on market performance this past week, not artistic quality. But what causes some schools to go out of favor and others to suddenly rise? In terms of fashion, why have lush Victorian-era still life paintings gone the way of capri pants? Consider the failure of this painting to sell. This opulent still life is by Morston Ream (Morston Constantine Ream, to be exact. He and his brother Carducius Plantagenet Ream, also a still life painter, seem to have had parents who believed that children should have names to live up to.) I don’t know what Christie’s was thinking when they put a $100,000-150,000 estimate on the painting, when smaller still lifes by the artist regularly sell for four figures. The auctioneer at this sale...
