Market forces are not supposed to influence the judgment of art. But the explosion in prices of post-war and contemporary art is everyone’s concern. Behind the numbers, the question is not one of profits to be made or lost, but what has become of our artistic inheritance and our relationship with the European past. If you are someone who believes that taste, quality, and historical importance should correlate to the price of art, you’ve got to be asking yourself what’s going on, and what should be done about it.
It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but although art prices have risen across the board, they have not risen evenly. Post-war and contemporary art has come to occupy a huge and unprecedented place in the market, while prices for French, Italian, and other European art from the sixteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries have stagnated (the stock of Impressionism, which took a hit during Japan’s economic slump in the 1990s, is again holding its own). Everywhere we can see the evidence of this sea change, from the introduction of contemporary art auctions, to the rise of the international contemporary art fair, to the deaccessioning of older art to fund contemporary acquisitions.
Older does not always equal better, of course, but should contemporary art really fetch the extraordinary prices we have all been reading about? As the dealer Richard L. Feigen recently wondered in The Art Newspaper, should a Damien Hirst sculpture really bear a price tag comparable to that of the Halifax Titian, one of the world’s last Titian portraits in private hands (and still on the market)?
The market is buzzing over the records set last spring for contemporary and post-war art: $70-million-plus for a Warhol and a Rothko in the spring auctions, and $80 million for a Warhol in a private sale. Meanwhile, the summer’s Old Master auctions went slack, especially for work estimated over $2 million. Then in late August, as the story goes, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull sculpture, a gaudy bauble called For the Love of God, was sold to an anonymous group of investors, according to Hirst spokesmen, for the asking price of $100 million. This was on top of a reported $260 million in sales from Hirst’s White Cube Gallery show.
These numbers should give everyone pause. Maybe contemporary collectors just don’t realize how far their money will go in the arts of earlier periods. Or maybe they just don’t want to know, believing that older art simply does not relate to their modern lives. While many dealers are happy to sit back and cash in on the frenzy, not everyone is content with the current situation. Something has got to give. And today the most interesting dealers are the ones who hope to draw public taste back to an appreciation of older work.
Since moving into a grand townhouse on East 71st Street a few years ago, the dealer Lawrence Salander of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries has been leading the revival of interest in “pre-war” European art. Born into a family of antiques dealers, Salander has a deep affection for the work he shows. At times he can sound like a street preacher, an evangelist thumping the bible of Pontormo and Tintoretto.
The importance of his gamble should not be underestimated. Unlike the small dealers who traditionally handle older art, Salander has the muscle and visibility to affect the market. As a dealer, he also has an eye for under-appreciated value, with a history of anticipating shifts in public taste. A few decades ago, for example, Salander took an interest in the figurative painters of the New York School when much of the art world was still fixed on abstraction.
“Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture” is the Salander exhibition that takes dead aim at the contemporary market.[1] Beginning in mid-October, the exhibition will fill all five floors and nearly every public room of the gallery’s townhouse for three months. (I was able to catch a preview of it in mid-September, when all but a handful of works were already in position.)
Produced in cooperation with the London dealer Clovis Whitfield, this exhibition brings together dozens of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, including work by El Greco, Parmigianino, and Pontormo. Nearly everything is for sale. The subtext is the relative affordability of such work compared to contemporary art. You can buy anything here for a small fraction of that $80-million Warhol.
But what of the exhibition’s coherence? Will the presentation overwhelm contemporary buyers with a bazaar of older styles? I had this concern when first confronted by the list of artists in the show. Can you describe the relationship between Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo? I can’t. Fortunately this exhibition benefits from a tight hanging, with Sarto’s Madonna and Child positioned next to Pontormo’s work of the same name. Compared to old-world museums like the Brera in Milan, where masterpieces are hidden among thousands of works, Salander has organized five centuries of art under one roof in a sensible and understandable way.
And Salander has gone one step more. In a second-floor room, the gallery has reconstructed the studiolo of one Cardinal Francesco del Monte, the patron of Michelangelo Merisi, a.k.a. Caravaggio.
The centerpiece of Salander’s show is a work called Apollo the Lute Player. It comes to New York for the first time with a backstory worthy of a pulp novel. Clovis Whitfield bought this work in 2001 from Sotheby’s in London, where it was identified as “Circle of Caravaggio.” Subsequent cleaning and analysis have led several experts to declare that this is in fact the work of the master himself. (Sotheby’s still disputes the revised attribution.) If so, it would be one of three versions of the same image now in circulation, with the most famous one in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and a second in the Wildenstein Collection.
Subtle differences among the paintings make the latest attribution plausible. The identification of the Salander Lute player, which was acquired by the Duke of Beaufort in 1726 and was located at Badminton House, Somerset, for nearly three hundred years, hinges on a description given by the baroque painter and art historian Giovanni Baglione. In calling it “the most beautiful work [Caravaggio] ever painted,” Baglione singles out the reflection in the vase and drew-drops on the flowers beside the Lute player. These are characteristics particular only to Salander’s painting.
Baglione was right. From the shading of the subject matter to the details of the lute strings, this is a stunningly beautiful work —an amazing accomplishment by anyone’s hand. If it is indeed a Caravaggio, this painting will be the first one up for public sale in the United States in a century. Certainly, Apollo the Lute Player will be the subject of much discussion before the exhibition is over. But will it sell for as much as a Damien Hirst? To borrow the title of Hirst’s $100-million skull: For the love of God, I hope so.
Just around the corner from Salander-O’Reilly, Knoedler has made its own calculation. Can an eighty-two-year-old abstract painter, who studied at The Arts Students League in the 1930s and with Hans Hofmann in the 1940s, capture our imagination with a body of work painted in 2006 and 2007? In the past couple years, Michael Goldberg has gone after massive canvases as large as ninety inches high with the vigor of someone a quarter his age and the attitude to match. In an interview with John Yau from May 2007, Goldberg concludes: “Whether it’s shit or not, I firmly believe that what I’m doing is important work, and I still think that.”
Knoedler believes it too, inviting Goldberg to show at the gallery for the first time.[2] Goldberg builds up bold abstract compositions that begin with predetermined marks and end in handmade effects. He starts each work with a grid and fills in with additional lines and pools of color. Goldberg uses large oil sticks, massive crayons in a prepackaged selection of colors. The effect can resemble a collage made of construction paper. Sometimes, the color combinations fall flat. In his most recent paintings, Goldberg has also taken to drawing his stripes in a ripple pattern. The gesture seems forced, too cute for a tough-talking octogenarian, especially one doing important work. When the touches come “Michael Goldberg: New Paintings” opened at Knoedler & Company, New York, on September 11 and remains on view through November 3, 2007. naturally, Goldberg’s compositions can shimmer. Take Paestum and Lindos, both from 2006. With references to cartography and science, these poetic works strike me as nautical visions—Odysseus at sea, perhaps, or in Goldberg’s case the rime of the ancient mariner.
A few blocks north on Madison Avenue, James Graham & Sons has mounted a challenge of its own. For fifty years or more, illustration was mocked as a lesser craft not worthy of serious attention. In recent years, this has started to change, as collectors have turned their attention to the golden age of illustration, from the early part of the century to the mid-1960s.
A contemporary painter named Duncan Hannah views this period as fertile material for his own work.[3] Somewhere between genuine admiration and ironic detachment, Hannah creates paintings that re-imagine English book illustrations of the pre-war years. With titles like The Shipwreck Boys on Regent’s Canal (2007), Hannah composes genre scenes without a story to surround them.
This might sound twee, a form of literary kitsch for the Shakespeare & Company set. Or maybe it is just old-fashioned nostalgia for a literary culture now passed. In one series of paintings, Hannah recreates the colorful, dog-eared covers of classic Penguin paperbacks (“one shilling and a sixpence”) on canvas, including The Inimitable Jeeves (2007; sorry, readers, already sold). But the best works here are the ones that need no further introduction. Leaving Monte Carlo (2006), of a steamer pulling out to a glassy sea, is a wonderfully contained, elegiac painting. Like the great illustrations of the past, this is an image that says it all, no captions required. “Duncan Hannah: Wanderlust” opened at James Graham & Sons, New York, on September 7 and remains on view through October 6, 2007.
Notes
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- “Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture” is on view at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, from October 17, 2007 through February 1, 2008. Go back to the text.