Many years ago, my wife and I were having supper at the home of friends. After supper, Tim said he wanted to show me something. I followed him outside to be met by a two-foot-high stack of unstretched canvases that Tim had pulled out of the garage. They were paintings that had been done by a late friend who had been Tim’s college roommate. Tim had been left the paintings and had lugged them around since his friend died, and he now wanted to know if I had any suggestions on what to do with them. I picked through the pile. Tim’s friend had painted as a hobby, and the works could be described as vaguely Abstract Expressionist. I told Tim that I had no idea what could be done with the paintings. No contemporary dealer I knew would be interested in handling the work of an amateur artist. There was something, however, that could be done with the paintings, and a few years later, after Tim had died of cancer, his wife Linda did it. She dragged the canvases out onto the lawn, doused them with lighter fluid, and tossed a lighted match onto the pile. Tim may have had a sentimental attachment to his friend’s work, but Linda didn’t, and she needed the space in the garage. Stephen Remick Burning Old Paintings, courtesy Saatchi Art I’ve been thinking about Tim and Linda because I’ve recently encountered a similar situation, one which almost every dealer encounters. A very nice lady has been trying to get me to meet her at a storage locker to view a bunch of...
Magazzino Italian Art, a terrific small museum that opened in Cold Spring, NY a few years ago, currently has on view an exhibition of works by Costantino Nivola (1911-1988). Nivola was born in Sardinia, the son of a mason, and attended art school near Milan. He went to work as a designer for Olivetti in Milan, but fled fascist Italy with his Jewish wife in 1938 as war approached. They came to New York and settled in Greenwich Village. Nivola pieced together a living, working as art director for several magazines and doing other design projects. In 1948 Tino, as he was called, was able to buy a farmhouse in Springs, a village on Long Island near East Hampton which had already been discovered as an inexpensive place to live by several Abstract Expressionist artists, most notably Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. There Tino and Ruth created a home that was really an environment, with house and garden intermingling with each other, and they raised a family. (Nivola’s grandson Alessandro is earning rave reviews these days for his performance in the Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark.) Nivola’s big break came in 1954 when he was commissioned to design the showroom of Olivetti’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Olivetti wanted something that would get attention from passersby, and Nivola certainly delivered, with marble floors, modern furniture, and cast stone wall reliefs of his own design. (The reliefs are no longer there. When the showroom closed, they were donated to Yale University, where they are now installed.) Nivola continued to do public commissions in New York and elsewhere,...
I like to say that there was only one truly creative genius in the whole of art history: the first caveman (or woman) to draw a mastodon on that cavern wall. All other artists have been stealing from him or her ever since. I’ve been reminded of this assertion lately while working on a series of lectures on American art that I’m giving for the Lifetime Learning Institute at Vassar College. Reviewing the biographies of the noted artists of the Colonial Era and the first years afterwards, I was struck time and again at how difficult it was for a would-be artist to learn his craft back then. Art needs other art, unless you’re the prehistoric genius mentioned above. Books were expensive and difficult to come by, but a budding poet in Colonial America had a chance to learn his craft from the works of Shakespeare or Milton. At the very least, he could undoubtedly lay hands upon one of the masterpieces of English prosody: the King James Bible. But what could painters see? The masterpieces were in Europe. If you were in Boston, you came up against the Puritans’ suspicion of visual art, a consequence of the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. If you were in Philadelphia, you had to battle the Quaker aversion to anything that was not deemed plain and modest. There were no magnificent church altarpieces or frescoes to encounter at Sunday worship, no princes displaying works in their palaces. John Singleton Copley, writing as a young artist in 1766, complained in a letter to Benjamin West, who was working in England, “In this Country...
My wife and I just got back from two weeks in California, visiting our daughters. As always, Roberta and I were struck by the beauty of the California landscape. It brought back a question I have occasionally pondered: why bother to paint landscapes in California? I mean, a Californian can simply look out his or her window and see soaring mountains, dramatic shorelines, and wildflowers everywhere. How can an artist hope to compete with all that? Yet artists have been trying for well over a century, and places such as Sausalito, Carmel, Laguna Beach, La Jolla, and many more have become famous as artists colonies. The first artists to achieve real note in the 20th century were the California Impressionists – Guy Rose, John Marshall Gamble, Edgar Payne, William Wendt, and many more – several of whom had studied in France, particularly at Giverny, where Monet had his famous garden. Guy Rose (1867-1925), View of Wood’s Cove. Oil on canvas, 24 x 29 inches. Photo courtesy Bonhams Impressionism became extremely popular in California and persisted there as a style long after its reputation had faded elsewhere. Indeed, California Impressionism has been described as “the Indian Summer of American Impressionism.” The reaction, when it came, came hard. By the mid-20th Century, California Impressionists were dismissed by art historians who deigned to notice them, particularly on the East Coast, as illustrators whose sweet images belonged on chocolate boxes, not in museums among “serious” modern artists. An indication of how low their reputations had fallen was to be seen in the mid-1970’s when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art deaccessioned several...
In Chicago in the mid-1950’s, Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) was acknowledged as the “Queen of Bohemian Artists.” She grew up in Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago, the daughter of itinerant opera singers, but she became a painter, not a musician, though she had real musical chops, as her reputation as an improvisational jazz pianist attested. With her second husband, music critic Frank Sandiford (Dizzy Gillespie played at their wedding), she was an active participant in what might be called Chicago’s South Side art scene. The parties held in their rambling old house were the closest thing to Gertrude Stein’s fabled Parisian salons a generation earlier. One might encounter jazz musicians such as Sonny Rawlins, singers like Sarah Vaughan, surrealist painters like Marshall Glasier, or authors such as James Purdy, who immortalized Abercrombie in his book Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. She was also the inspiration for jazz pianist Richie Powell’s composition “Gertrude’s Bounce.” The year she died, 1977, she had a retrospective at the Hyde Park Art Center. I was in Hyde Park at the time, attending grad school at the University of Chicago, but I didn’t see the show. Even if I had heard about it, I might have dismissed it as a show of some retardataire regional painter from the old days. Although she had briefly studied figure painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, Abercrombie’s main training had been received at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, an institution for students seeking careers as commercial artists, and she had worked as an illustrator for Sears in early adulthood. She went on to work...
I got a query through my website the other day, seeking an appraisal of some real estate. Thanking the sender for his interest, I told him that I am an art appraiser and am not qualified to appraise real property. I directed him to the professional organizations whose members specialize in real estate appraisals. But what makes someone qualified to be an art appraiser? In matters of real estate, there are state laws requiring this or that certification before someone can set himself up as a real estate appraiser. In matters of personal property appraisals for the IRS, however, qualifications have been much more nebulous. 50 years ago, the only qualification required for doing an appraisal for tax purposes was to not have been disqualified for such appraisals. Over the past 40 years, however, there has been a major push to professionalize the practice of appraising. Following the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 90s, when large numbers of American savings institutions failed due to bad loans that had been made on properties that had been grossly overvalued, Congress authorized the establishment of The Appraisal Foundation. That foundation in turn has developed the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) a guide which appraisers must follow. To be accepted by the Appraisers Association of America, I had to take a two-day class and pass a test in USPAP, among other requirements. That, however, was only the beginning. Ever since my initial qualification, I have had to take a class every two years to update myself on any changes to USPAP in the intervening period. I am also...
