There are two kinds of collectors that can make a dealer tear his hair. The first kind don’t know exactly what they want; they’re just in the mood to buy something. “I’ll know it when I see it,” they tell you. You end up pulling out paintings of every conceivable style and subject, but none of them seems to fit the potential clients’ ideas of what they want to see hanging on their walls. The second kind know exactly what they want and won’t consider anything else. It may be a particular color scheme – they want something mostly purple for over the sofa. It may be a particular subject — a King Charles Spaniel, a view of Venice, or a still life of raspberries. Raspberries and Venice are fairly easy to come up with; King Charles Spaniels, less so. Unlike me, who can tell a bulldog from a chihuahua but not much more, dog fanciers know precisely what their favorite breed looks like and are quick to tell you that what you’re offering as a painting of an English Setter is actually a Llewellin Setter, and you ought to be ashamed of your ignorance. Small wonder that there are art dealers specializing only in dogs. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a particular color or subject when you’re looking to buy art. As I tell collectors, it’s your home. You have every right to buy something that will give you nothing but pleasure when you see it hanging on your wall. If a particular dominant tone in a painting will catch the light in your room just right and...
As we watched the news of the deep freeze in Texas, our horror at the images of people burning furniture to stay warm and lined up for hours trying to buy food was made doubly shocking, whether we realized it or not, because of the unconscious perception most of us carry around of Texas as a broad-shouldered, can-do state, tough as an oilfield roughneck. Texans themselves carry a sense of being larger than life and will miss few opportunities to demonstrate it. In the art world, nothing symbolized this Texan self-aggrandizement more than the Western Heritage Sale, an annual event from 1975 to 1985 that was held at the world-famous Shamrock Hotel in Houston. A black-tie affair, hosted by former Governor John Connally and some of his friends from the oil patch, the sale had alternating lots of contemporary cowboy art, thoroughbred horses, and prize-winning Santa Gertrudis bulls. (They didn’t sell the actual bulls, just “straws,” as they are called, of the bulls’ semen.) The bidders at the Western Heritage Sale may have been as expensively-coutured as attendees at one of the evening Impressionist sales at Sotheby’s or Christie’s in those days, but any resemblance ended there. Attending the Western Heritage Sale, I always found the greatest cognitive dissonance in the spectacle of elegant ladies sipping champagne as they strolled between livestock pens, the odor of manure overpowering the delicate scent of expensive perfumes. Once inside the ballroom, attendees were seated at banquet tables, and the liquor flowed freely. At New York art auctions, the auctioneer calls the bids in a plummy voice, “One million. I have one million. ...
Back during the days of the Reagan Administration, I was participating in the Tri-Delta Antiques Show in Dallas. Among the artworks on display in my booth was a cast of Frederic Remington’s iconic bronze The Bronco Buster. An older gentleman visiting the booth examined it for several moments and then turned to me. “My grandfather had one of these when I was a boy, and he told me he was leaving it to me,” he said. “Oh, really?” I answered. “Well, if you still have it, I’d love to talk with you about buying it.” “Have it?” He fumed, “I never got it! My mother gave it to the White House!” Now, every time he turned on the evening news, there was President Reagan in the Oval Office, and there in the background was the sculpture that my visitor felt rightly belonged to him. It is a mercy that my visitor probably shuffled off his mortal coil years ago, given all the aggravation he would have suffered during the period since our chat, because through every administration, Republican or Democratic, persons viewing an image of the current inhabitant of the Oval Office could be assured of seeing The Bronco Buster sitting somewhere in the background. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Federal statute mandating that it be always on view. I’ve been thinking about Remington since I viewed a recent webinar on the traveling exhibition “Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington,” which is currently on view at the Amon Carter Museum. The speakers at the webinar were Maggie Adler, the curator of American art at...
This past March, as the reality of the Coronavirus began to make itself felt in the United States, I sent out an email entitled “Art in an Uncertain Time” in place of my normal blog. Galleries were being shut down, and dealers were working remotely. I quoted Eric Baumgartner of Hirschl & Adler Gallery who had written me from his home office, “We are trying to stay productive and busy, but I must say that I am hesitant to reach out to people about something so trivial and unnecessary as fine art right now when everyone is in full-on survival mode.” Nobody knew what would happen to the art market. Nobody ever does, really, but things seemed much more apocalyptic in March – was this the beginning of the end? Yet the dire scenarios did not come to pass. Some galleries failed, but many have survived. People still wanted art. Like the rest of the retail economy, art dealers dealt with the challenge by upping their games. Websites were made more sophisticated, more online outreach to collectors was begun, and galleries were open on an appointment-only basis to a few socially-distanced clients at a time. Art fairs in new virtual formats became more specialized in the galleries they presented and more targeted to specific demographics. In my conversations with fellow dealers over the past few months, I have found no one excited, but everyone admits to doing some business. With their operating expenses slashed to the minimum, dealers are surviving. The virtual art fairs are enabling enough sales to justify the outlay. Collectors can still fall in love with...
This past May, I wrote a blog about the art seen on the walls of talking heads from the news shows, broadcasting from their homes since the pandemic began. My wife, who suggested that I write the post, was struck in particular by the painting on the wall by the Washington Post’s Phil Rucker. I contacted several nightly news program guests, asking them to tell me about the artworks seen in the background, and a fair number responded. Phil graciously told me that the painting my wife liked was by Robert Andriulli, and that he had bought it at a gallery in Baltimore. Phil’s taste evidently corresponds with that of a lot more people than just my wife, for I received several queries about Andriulli’s work from people who aren’t on my blog list but found my post while researching Phil’s painting on Google. I thought such interest merited a blog on the artist, so I tracked down Bob Andriulli and gave him a call to ask about his work. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1948, Andriulli received an M.F.A. in painting from The Pennsylvania State University. He taught at Bowdoin College, Seton Hall University, and Penn State before teaching for several years at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania, from which he retired a couple of years ago. As an art student, Andriulli flirted with abstraction but found representation more to his taste. He really doesn’t draw a line between the two. He remembers one of his teachers telling him that one of the most important aspects of representation is its abstraction. By that, the teacher meant that...
If you’ve been crazy about dinosaurs since you were a kid and you have several million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, mark your calendar for October 6. That’s the evening Christie’s in New York is selling the 40-foot-long skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, called “Stan” after his discoverer. The estimate for Stan’s 188 bones is $6-8 million dollars, which seems conservative, given that the last comparably complete specimen sold for $8.4 million at Sotheby’s in 1997. What makes Stan’s sale unusual is the venue. Several auction houses hold specialized sales of fossils from Paleolithic times, but Stan is being offered in Christie’s invitation-only evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on October 6. The skeleton will just be one of the lots, sharing the virtual easel with a major Cezanne watercolor and with Jackson Pollock’s Red Composition, the most important Pollock drip painting to come on the market in a couple of years. It is being sold by the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, and has an estimate of $12-18 million. Christie’s has gone all-out for the dinosaur’s pre-auction display: it has removed the interior wall that obstructs the view from its oversize windows on 49th Street so that the dinosaur will be viewable around the clock from the sidewalk. Except for the removal of a wall to allow viewing by a long line of viewers (social distancing will doubtless stretch the line around the block), the over-the-top marketing recalls Christie’s drum-beating for the Leonardo da Vinci painting it sold almost three years ago (see my blog https://www.reaganupshawfineart.com/fits-and-starts). In that sale, the Leonardo was paired with a Leonardo-derived...
