John Singer Sargent famously said that a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. Two portraits have been much in the news lately, as the National Portrait Gallery announced that its portrait of Barak Obama by Kehinde Wiley and its portrait of Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald will be going on a coast-to-coast tour to five museums. Visitors coming specifically to see the portraits have doubled the National Portrait Gallery’s annual attendance since they were unveiled there in 2018. Sargent’s comment is indicative of the power struggle, implicit or not, between the artist and the sitter as to how they really look and how they are to be depicted. President Obama alluded to such a struggle in his remarks at the unveiling. Wiley had become famous for his paintings depicting young African-American men in poses derived from Old Master paintings. His initial thought was to depict Obama in the trappings of royalty, or as the President said, to “elevate me and put me in these settings with partridges and scepters and thrones and shift robes and mounting me on horses. And I had to explain that I’ve got enough political problems without you making me look like Napoleon. We’ve gotta bring it down just a touch.” And the artist did. The two portraits are now property of the nation, but there would be a hot market for them if they were able to be sold. A hot market is a rare exception for portraits in general. Unless the sitter is famous or infamous, George Washington or Jesse James, most collectors are not interested in displaying a...
Roberta and I were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, enjoying an exhibition entitled Epic Abstraction that consisted of large-scale abstract works by important 20th century artists. Among the paintings we admired was Sam Gilliam’s Carousel State, a 22-foot-wide acrylic. Born in 1933, Gilliam grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He was encouraged in his artistic leanings by his teachers beginning in grade school and eventually went on to earn a Master’s degree in painting from the University of Louisville. In 1962 he moved to Washington, DC, which has remained his home ever since. Critics have seen him as belonging to the second generation of the Washington Color School, a group of abstract painters who worked there in the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of whom used the technique of pouring or otherwise applying diluted oil paint onto unprimed canvas, allowing the pigment to saturate the support. Carousel State dates from 1968, a period when Gilliam abandoned the wooden stretcher and created works which drape over their supports or hang like curtains from the wall. It was such works that brought him national recognition, and Carousel State is undoubtedly one of the largest and most important works from this series. Like any art dealer visiting a museum, I always read a painting’s wall label from the bottom up. That is, I want to see who owns the painting, and this information is usually given in the last line. If the painting is owned by the museum, then I’ll never be able to offer it for sale. But if it’s only on loan to the museum, then I make a note of the collector’s name. He or she just might be willing to sell it one day. ...
“The art business is not something you can equate to any other business. They’re not selling stocks and bonds here. They’re selling fine art.” Thus spoke dealer Helly Nahmad in a recent New York Times article entitled “The Fickle Salesroom,” which reported on a 40 percent drop in sales of impressionist and modern art at auction this November, compared with the sales of six months ago. The art market may not be like the stock exchange, but that’s not for want of trying. At the annual meeting of the Appraisers Association of America a couple of weeks ago, I heard speaker after speaker talk about new realities in the art world, several of which are attempts to wrestle an unruly market into something with which an investor can be comfortable. The situation has long been in the making. In 2002, the Mei Moses Indices were developed by two Stern School of Business professors. These indices attempt, in the words of Sotheby’s, which acquired the company three years ago, to produce “objective art market analysis to complement the world-class expertise of [Sotheby’s] specialists.” Sotheby’s goes on to explain that “the Sotheby’s Mei Moses indices control for differing levels of quality, size, color, maker, and aesthetics of a work of art by analyzing repeat sales.” It sounds all very scientific, but I have my doubts. As has been pointed out by critics, indices such as Mei Moses overstate return and underestimate risk. For one thing, most art sales don’t make it into databases such as Artnet or Askart, as they’re made privately. Second, repeat sales at auction account for less than...
Any art dealer knows that the size of the painting he or she is offering is going to be an important factor in getting a collector to purchase the artwork. Collectors with loft-style walls may make exceptions for large contemporary paintings, but dealers in older art encounter real resistance when offering a painting larger than, say, 30 x 40 inches. Collectors protest that they just don’t have the wall space. This collector resistance is a factor in appraising as well, a point brought home by two recent occurrences. The first was a tour of Radio City Music Hall with a group from the Appraisers Association of America. The men’s and women’s lounges of the building are decorated with some impressive artwork, none more impressive than the 1932 Stuart Davis painting entitled “Men Without Women” in the downstairs men’s lounge. It’s a huge and lovely work, almost 11 by 17 feet in size. As appraisers, my colleagues and I couldn’t help asking ourselves, “What’s it worth?” We knew that important Davis paintings have brought real money at auction – twelve of them have sold for over a million dollars each, and the record price, $6,847,200, was set only a year ago. But what is the Radio City painting worth? On the plus side, it’s instantly recognizable as a Stuart Davis painting, an attractive composition with large, simplified forms – pipes, cards, gas pumps, barber poles, and the like – juxtaposed with each other. On the other hand, the palette does not have the vibrant reds, blues, yellows, and greens that characterize his most popular paintings. Perhaps Davis was constrained by...
As part of a group from the Appraisers Association of America, I visited the studio last week of sculptor Chaim Gross (1902-1991). The building in Greenwich Village now houses the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. It’s definitely worth a visit – the ground floor houses the sculptor’s studio, with his and his wife’s living space on the floors above. The studio, with many examples of his sculpture, also contains his tools and unfinished works which give real insight into Gross’s working method. The walls of his home are filled, salon style, with dozens of paintings by important American artists, many of them friends of the sculptor – Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Raphael Soyer, Jacob Lawrence, and many more. Along with the famous names, there are many works by artists who were fairly well-known 50-75 years ago but today are known only to specialists – Byron Browne, Paul Burlin, Nikolai Cikovsky, Lawrence Lebduska, and Sol Wilson, to name but a few. My question here is, into which group does Chaim Gross fit today? Gross, the son of a timber appraiser, was born in 1902 in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. World War I brought attacks and counterattacks by Russian and Austrian forces. At one point, the young Gross was dragooned by the Austrian forces into collecting the dead after a battle. Following the war, Gross studied art in Budapest. Deported by a new Hungarian regime determined to rid the country of Jews and other groups deemed foreigners, Gross studied briefly in Vienna and then emigrated to the...
My two-year-old granddaughter, Veronica, was sitting at my dining room table last week, having some strained pears and admiring Water Garden #1, a painting by the late Paul Gardere. It’s a large, complicated piece by an artist who was also large and complicated. Paul was born in Haiti in 1944, part of the educated Creole elite who ran the nation and sent their children to be educated in France. Paul’s father died when Paul was a boy, though, and with the rise to power of Papa Doc Duvalier, it became dangerous to be part of what had been the ruling class. When Paul was 14, his mother brought him to the United States. Four years later, he won entrance to New York’s renowned Cooper Union Institute, whose alumni include George Segal, Alex Katz, Tom Wesselmann, and many others. He went on to get an MFA and become an established artist. The memory of his homeland called to Paul, however, and several years later he took his wife and young son back to Haiti, where they lived for seven years and had a daughter. For the rest of his life, Haiti and the cult of Vodou would play a large part in Paul’s art. In Water Garden #1, we see the influence of Haiti in the totemic central figure, the use of glitter (which is found in Vodou flags and decorations), and the topography of the island, which is literally represented by the map that forms the gray background to the piece. But Paul also had a thorough education in European and American art history, and quotes from canonical artists...
