One of the most celebrated artist/collector confrontations of the 20th century occurred at Sotheby’s (then called Sotheby Parke Bernet) in New York on October 18, 1973, when taxi-magnate Robert Scull was selling 50 paintings from his well-known collection of Pop Art. Pop had captured the public imagination during the latter part of the 1960’s, and the Scull auction was the first of what would become contemporary art auction events, with celebrity attendees and artists receiving major press coverage. Robert Rauschenberg was one of the hottest artists to emerge in the 1960’s, and his painting Thaw was among the works being sold by Scull. The collector had purchased the painting for $900 fifteen years earlier. At the auction, it sold for $85,000. (What would it bring today — $15 million? Readers are encouraged to contact me with their ideas.) The proceeds from the sale, of course, would go completely to Scull, the painting’s owner, and Rauschenberg was incensed. “For Christ’s sake,” he declared, giving the collector a not-so-friendly shove, “you didn’t even send me flowers! I’ve been working my ass off for you to make that profit!” Scull answered, laughing, “How about yours that you’re going to sell now? I’ve been working for you, too. We work for each other.” Rauschenberg was having none of it. “You buy the next one, OK?” he demanded. “At these prices. You buy the next one.” Scull placated him, and they ended up hugging, but the issue has remained a sore point with artists. Three years later, due to lobbying by artists such as Rauschenberg, the State of California passed the Resale Royalty Act,...
There’s a pleasant fantasy, held even by those who should know better, that goes something like this: You’re on a day trip in the country, and you happen across a little auction being held in a tent in a quaint village. A small painting that attracts you is being offered, and you purchase it for a nominal sum. A few years later, Antiques Roadshow comes to your city, and on impulse you take your painting for examination by their expert. She takes one look at your painting, gasps in disbelief, and stammers, “Why, it’s a long-lost masterpiece by Michelangelo! You’re rich beyond your wildest dreams!” I call this a fantasy because it ain’t gonna happen. In the first place, the attics of begone days are largely empty, and in the second place, any venue, including a tag sale, will be quickly scanned by “pickers,” people who closely follow such things and who know what they’re looking at. Your chances of finding a lost masterpiece are approximately those of finding a real 5-carat diamond on the tray of costume jewelry at a rummage sale. You’ll be far better off working with a dealer you trust and paying a fair price for a good painting. Nevertheless, people continue to dream. I once knew a collector I’ll call Bill. I say he was a collector because I think he had once or twice plunked money down for a painting, but he was forever worrying about paying too much for a work of art. Several times, when I showed him a painting, Bill would tell me that he’d had the opportunity to buy...
Almost forty years ago, working for Ira Spanierman Gallery, I was participating in the San Francisco Art and Antiques Show. Regional antiques shows were a major opportunity to acquire works for our New York-based gallery. In those days before cell phones, we took out ads in the local newspaper and enlisted a local answering service to take the calls. The ads invariably got a lot of response from people who were certain that they owned masterpieces – think of it as a very low-tech forerunner to Antiques Roadshow. I viewed many works, usually in the trunks of cars in the parking lot, since the owners were not allowed to bring items onto the show floor. Occasionally, however, it was not possible for the owner to bring the work to me. Once, responding to a message, I found myself speaking with an elderly gentleman who told me, “I’m 82 and want to settle my estate before I die. I have four large paintings by Frederic Remington.” He couldn’t get them into his car, so I made an appointment to drive down to his Palo Alto home the following morning. Arriving in Palo Alto the next day, I was greeted by the owner, who invited me inside and then asked me to have a seat while he went through the research he had conducted on the paintings. My heart sank. It is always a bad sign when a painting’s owner insists that you listen to a lot of “research” authenticating a painting before he will allow you to actually view the piece. Sure enough, when I was finally shown the paintings,...
One of the now-normal occurrences of life in this Age of the Corona Virus, at least for those of us who watch the nightly news, is our newfound entry into the personal spaces of the talking heads who must broadcast remotely from their homes. These intrusions into their private lives, voluntarily accepted as they are by the participants, have occasioned much comment, some of it snarky, on sites such as Room Rater. A typical rating there: “Cozy room, warm colors, animal art, but could use an updated paint job on the green wall. 6/10” for NBC correspondent Cynthia McFadden. My wife, Roberta, early on noticed the artworks that often appear behind the participants and suggested that I write a blog about them. Accordingly, I sent emails to many participants, asking them to tell me the names of the artists whose works are on their walls. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to write,” I told them. “I certainly have no intention of criticizing anyone’s taste. But these little windows into what we hang on our walls provide a springboard for a discussion of the art we choose and how we choose it.” I received a fair number of responses to my queries. Philip Rucker of The Washington Post has a landscape by Robert Andriulli which he bought at a gallery in Baltimore. Peter Berns, CEO of The Arc, an organization which works on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, has an abstract painting by Edna Kurtz Emmet, an Israeli artist now living in Baltimore. Two responders have paintings by their parents: A.B. Stoddard of RealClearPolitics has...
Economists may not have caught on yet, but the art market has often made a pretty good canary in the coal mine. There seems to be something in the air that the art market senses a few months before everyone else. In 1989, for instance, the gallery I worked for was having its best year ever. The first half of 1990 continued the trend, and then suddenly it seemed like someone had turned off a tap. Things were absolutely dead. The recession that would drive George H.W. Bush from office officially arrived a few months later. On the other hand, in 1983 we had been getting our brains kicked in. Inflation was sucking all the disposable money out of the market, and oil prices had collapsed. Then one day a collector walked into the gallery, bought a $140,000 painting, and wrote me a check then and there. A couple of months later, the Department of Commerce announced that the recession had ended two months earlier on Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 PM. My collector had walked in at 2:01. I’m exaggerating, of course, but I have often marveled at the close if slightly anticipatory tracking between the art market and the general economy. People with the disposable income to spend six-figures on a painting are not worried about getting laid off on the assembly line, and yet some unseen spirit begins to whisper that now is not a good time to spend money on art. The art market, like the rest of the economy, is currently grappling with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Art galleries have been closed to...
I got the kind of call last month that no dealer, appraiser, or art lover in general ever wants to get. A client called me to say that his home had been destroyed by a fire. He had managed to rescue some of his collection, but most of it had burned completely or had been damaged. He was going to need my services as an appraiser once things had been sorted out. For the works that had been totally destroyed, the process would be fairly simple. He had an up-to-date insurance appraisal for his collection. If his destroyed Cassatt, say, had been appraised at $200,000, then his insurance company would pay him that amount less any deductible. But what about those cases where the painting had been only partially damaged? That is where he needed me to conduct a damage appraisal. A trained conservator can repair tears and other damage so that it will be invisible to the naked eye. For the Monet shown below (this is not one of my client’s paintings), the edges of the ripped canvas could be joined by a lining on the back of the painting and the “scar” concealed by careful inpainting. Assuming there was no previous damage to the painting, the repaired painting will still have 99 percent of its original paint, and the condition could fairly be described as “good,” which is defined as “unrestored with no apparent damage to the original condition or restored/conserved/stabilized with concern for preserving the integrity of the work.” The painting, after careful conservation, will look just fine to any casual viewer. The repaired tears, however,...
