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...
What’s the Mona Lisa worth? The short answer is, whatever someone will pay for it. The longer answer is that nobody knows, because no one has tried to sell it recently, and you’ll never know how much a painting is worth until you try to sell it. Unless the Louvre decides to offer the Mona Lisa at public auction to the highest bidder, we’ll never know what it’s worth. Might some Russian or Chinese plutocrat pay $1 billion for the painting? I can imagine that happening, but I have absolutely no way of proving my assertion. Leonardo’s paintings have been in the general news lately because of lawsuits and threatened lawsuits involving Sotheby’s. The story is the stuff of Antique Road Show dreams – a group of New York dealers bought a painting, Christ as Salvator Mundi, for $10,000 in 2013 from a small auction in Louisiana. At the time, it was considered a painting by a follower of Leonardo. After authentication by experts, however, the painting was declared to be an original oil by Leonardo, and the dealers sold it for $80 million to Yves Bouvier, a Swiss dealer. Sotheby’s was or was not deeply involved in the sale, depending on whom you ask. Bouvier then flipped the painting to a Russian billionaire for $127.5 million. When the original group of dealers learned the resale price, they decided to sue Sotheby’s for the difference between their original sale price and the amount the billionaire paid. Sotheby’s was, in their opinion, either colluding with Bouvier to get a low price, or it was at fault for not knowing what...
