There are those collectors who love the art no matter how small, and there are those who won’t look at a piece if it doesn’t reach a certain size.  This “column” is for the former.  Having addressed the merits of collecting small art works before, I would now like to further the discussion by drawing your attention to two highlights of this spring auction season.  They demonstrate both the highs and lows of collecting miniature Picassos.  Well, just the current high, not the real highs—some of those were most recently sold a couple of years ago (see Does Size Matter?).

First the low: the 1919 gouache and pencil, Nature morte à la guitare that went for a giveaway 60,000 Euro hammer price, or around $90,000 US all told:

This is one of many still lifes that Picasso created around this time, most of them smallish works on paper generally depicting a guitar on a table in front of a window, a view out the window of his Parisian apartment.  The most famous of these works on paper is in the Berggruen Museum.  We, too, have a beautiful one (Le Guéridon, 1920), in which the window is shown at its most abstract.  OK, the one at hand does not compare to either Berggruen’s or ours or to a number of other absolutely great ones in the Musée Picasso, either in terms of beauty, layers of meaning, humor, or size (this one is 12.7 cm or 5” in height).  But it is nonetheless a wonderful and amusing work in its own right.  At first it may appear deceptively simple.  But note how the blue sky cleverly becomes the table’s front legs and also the bottom half of the guitar, how the bottom of the curtains doubles as the back legs of the table, and how the head of the guitar is really an extension of the tabletop.  Interestingly, a cardboard and paper sculpture that was included in the monumental “Cubist Picasso” show at the Musée Picasso in 2007 is clearly related to the work at hand, though even smaller:

It’s apparently impossible to know whether the chicken came first or the egg, but each is a tour-de-force in different ways.  The humor of the legs of sky and curtain in the gouache does not translate into the three-dimensional work.  But the negative space of the body of the guitar is a pretty good joke in the sculpture, which is lost in the painting.  And, as if the void between the blue margins of the guitar were not enough, the guitar’s soundhole is an actual hole in the tabletop itself!  So each medium has its own advantages in best conveying the jester’s wit….

Here’s the high, Femme au ballon (Woman with a Balloon, 1929):

Ten years later, we find Picasso wading among his surrealist bathers in the South of France.  Although most of them are pencil drawings, almost all of which are in the collection of the Musée Picasso, there are a few large blockbuster museum paintings, notably the man-eater at the MOMA, Baigneuse assise au bord de la mer from the following year:

Because they’re almost all in museums, large or small, paper or oil, it is amazing to find any such work for sale, much less an oil.  So what if it’s small (21.4 x 11.5 cm, 8 3/8 x 4 ½”)—it’s nonetheless a fantastic piece.  Last week it fetched $649,700 all in, a respectable price in any market I should think, not just for this shaky one.   Or perhaps it’s not really shaky anymore.  We’ll see….

Before I sign off, here’s something strictly for your amusement—hopefully not your derision—a collage I made to console myself when I didn’t manage to bring the above gouache home:

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A collector on whose behalf I am about to bid at auction just posed the following question: how many years back has the art market now retreated? To provide a satisfactory answer, one would have to do a formal statistical analysis, for which I have neither the tools, time, nor inclination.  Shooting from the hip, most people last November were saying 2006, and the market has certainly improved and partially stabilized since then, at least for the time being.  Having just perused representative auction catalogues from years past, I fear that 2005 is closer to the mark on average for Picasso prints.  But, mostly, I find it impossible to generalize in any meaningful way, because Picassos of different media and different price strata have behaved differently.  Rare and highly desirable prints still achieve high prices.  Good paintings still skyrocket (just look at the recent sales of Picasso’s musketeers on canvas), and great paintings still set world’s records (not for Picasso perhaps, but for Matisse, for example, as well as others).  And the YSL sale achieved such high prices that you’d never have known we were in a recession if that were the only economic indicator at which you looked.

And then, one must consider day-to-day, seemingly random variability. The art market could be easily reduced to facile analysis in the aggregate given number-crunching capabilities, but there is too much random variability to predict what will happen in any given case.  Just last month I bought a linocut (Femme accoudée, Bloch 922) on behalf of another collector last month for 80.5K at Christie’s NY, and but two days later another impression in similar condition sold for 62.5K at Sotheby’s.  So, go know!   I’ve seen plenty of instances in which the prices achieved at auction later in the week for other impressions of the same prints were both higher and lower than elsewhere in the same city a couple of days earlier.  But I was not proud of this turn of events, and wished that my crystal ball had been clearer.  Yet, had we behaved differently, the outcome of the first  auction would have changed, and the outcome of the  second auction could have changed.  That is, who knows where the bidding would have stopped for each of these impressions, had we dropped out of the bidding for the first one in favor of bidding on the  second!  In any event, my client was thankfully adult and was not disturbed, at least not visibly.  It also helped that we picked up a smaller linocut that day for a song (though that’s a long story).   Anyway, this day-to-day variability is certainly not unique to the current market.  All it takes is two to tango at auction, and there’s no telling in advance what any two people are capable of doing.

In the end, I feel it’s more a question of what you feel like paying, within reason, to put something on your wall, in proportion to how much you love it, and to what extent you are constrained, or choose to be constrained, by these uncertain economic times.

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What is it with me and Picasso bronzes?  Judging by my last two unsuccessful attempts, it looks like I’m fated to be the eternal underbidder.  Last year I did my best to catch a small dove, but it got away for around 217K or so (http://ledorfineart.com/blog/?p=100 ).  This time around, I was hot on the tail of the 1903 sculpture, Picador with the Broken Nose:

The picador’s broken nose is a metaphor for the human condition.  All of life’s pain and suffering are concentrated in this misshapen shnoz.  Yet the picador bears his life’s burden proudly, gazing upward with an undaunted stare. His lips perhaps betray world-weariness and resignation, but at the same time the upturned lip suggests a snarl, hinting at his remaining fighting spirit.  The eccentricities of the head and neck add interest by referring to the absent anatomy.

Picasso made but five sculptures in his Blue and Rose Periods, his first known sculptures. In my opinion, the Broken Nose, is the best of the lot.  The arguably better known sculpture is the larger Rose Period Le Fou (The Jester, 1905, 41.5 cm, Spies 4):

To my eye, The Jester is a very nice work but a bit too backwards looking, a relatively unoriginal, Symbolist effort devoid of tension.  It could almost have been made by Rodin.  Not so The Broken Nose, the far more riveting bronze and one fairly dripping with that Blue/Rose Period feel.  And it is certainly more rare.  Yet The Jester has a million-dollar price on his head.  So imagine my surprise when I learned that the Nose’s pre-auction estimate was a giveaway 30-40K!  Not being flush at the time but not wanting a great bronze to escape again, I instead interested two friends and clients in it.  The tension mounted when my friendly auctioneer at Christie’s reported, “Diana Widmaier Picasso just came in to the viewing and expressed shock at how low our estimate on this work is.  She said other casts have sold for as much as $300,000.”  I was sure the gig was up, yet it sold for only 72K, an amazing bargain in my book.   I would surely have bid it up further had I been bidding for myself.

Picasso is arguably the greatest sculptor in modern times.  This is all the more an accomplishment since he didn’t make many.  Numbering under 700, Picasso sculptures are rare, certainly compared to the sum total of his work, around 35,000 pieces. Despite their magnificence and relative rarity, the prices of his sculptures have until recently remained comparatively low.  It has been said that it takes a fair number of works to make a market.  If there are so few pieces that they are nowhere to be seen, collectors may not know what they’re missing.  You can’t trust that everyone will have a full library of Picasso’s various catalogues raisonnés, including Spies.  Without a threshold minimum exposure, it’s hard to generate interest.   I believe this theory applies to the Picasso sculpture market.  It certainly got a late start.  As Werner Spies put it, “Picasso’s sculptures long numbered among the best-kept secrets of twentieth-century art.  Almost none of them were shown in exhibitions; the first retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit in 1932 showed only seven sculptures.” (W. Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, p. 14).

Few of his sculptures have hit the big time, largely because the majority of them are in museum collections or in city squares.  Recently, however, they have taken a major leap forward in price.  I’m thinking of two in particular, the smaller dove for which I was the underbidder, and then there’s the big bird that sold last year at Sotheby’s NY for just over 19 mil (La Grue, 1951-52, painted bronze, edition of 4, not in Spies but in the sculpture catalogue raisonné currently in preparation by Diana). She’s a nice old bird, but nothing like the chimp and her infant that brought in $6,719,500 US in 2002 (La guenon et son petit, 1951, bronze, height 21.3”, 54.1 cm, edition 6):

I imagine these lovable chimps would go for several times that today, certainly more than Big Bird.  But, then again, f there were any justice in the art market, I think the Broken Nose should be a million dollar sculpture, or two million.  A year ago, it would have fared much better, proving Diana right.  A sign of the times….

Interestingly, Picasso returned to the theme of the man with the broken nose some two decades later with a small series of drawings.  Here’s a nice example:

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Looks like we won’t have a chance to see the blockbuster Gagosian show.  By now I’ve however looked through the catalogue a couple of times and am deeply impressed by the assortment of wonderful paintings he amassed for it. (I’m not so big on late Picasso prints, with a few notable exceptions.)  John Richardson’s essay was of course also quite gratifying, as usual.  This is not at all a criticism, for as Richardson somewhere says, including drawings would have of necessity greatly broadened the scope of the show.  It would, I imagine, have been difficult to assemble a suitably representative cross-section of his late works on paper, since his output in the last few years was both vast and varied.  Much of it was also truly great, as great as anything that came before it.  I adore late Picasso paintings, or many of them anyway (I confess that it wasn’t always so, so you’re absolved if you, too, underwent an inner evolution before you, too, grew crazy about Late Picasso).  But I’ve long felt that if I were marooned on a desert island and could take along but one type of Picasso—admittedly a heart-wrenching choice, it would be a drawing.  Of course it would have to be a verdant desert island in the middle of a deep blue sea with plenty of flowers to provide color so I wouldn’t have to rely on the Picasso drawings to do so.

It’s not easy to a handle on the late drawings.  The Online Picasso Project (OPP) is incomplete, and the most complete catalogue raisonné, Wofsy’s Picasso Project (PP), is comprised of small, black-and-white images, plus you have to buy them.  For those of you interested in an in depth survey of his late works (in all media, for that matter), the best way is to peruse them is by using both of these sources.  If you would like to limit your purchases, I’d recommend the books that include the years 1967-1972, which is when I feel Late Picasso peaked (although there are certainly many great Late Picasso drawings before then).  In order to do so, you’d need at least the last two volumes in the PP series, which span all but the first of these years (The Sixties, III: 1968-1969 and The Final Years: 1970-1973).

If you finish Richardson’s essay and are hungry for more, for further reading I’d like to recommend Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973, by Gert Schiff.   I think very highly of Schiff’s essay on Late Picasso, which he penned in the early ‘eighties, long before Late Picasso was fashionable, much less understood by most of us.

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Here’s what’s been going on in the Picasso market, in broad brushstrokes, and as I see it.  A number of collectors have sat on the sidelines while waiting for the art market to crash and compelling bargains to appear.  Well, many prices have come down, and there have been occasional bargains.  But the bottom hasn’t yet fallen out of the market.  Instead, the major change that has occurred has been on the seller’s side.  Sellers with whom I regularly jawbone have held their prices steady or have modestly reduced them, on the theory that it would be a mistake to let wonderful things go for nothing when the economy is sure to turn around.

The effect of the market upon the auctions has been a bit different.  Auction houses are naturally applying downward pressure on their estimates and reserves, because for them, a “bought in” (unsold lot) is a worse fate than a lot that sells for a lower price than had been hoped.  Yet consignors are holding back, so that the auctions are very thin.  Since I blogged about the London print sales, the upcoming NY sales have come online (all but the Christie’s evening sale at the time of this writing) and seem rather unexciting, with very few paintings and drawings, most of them lackluster, and not many more prints.

By this point, buyers have come to realize that there are very few real bargains and they shouldn’t sit on the sidelines waiting for them to appear while letting great works slip through their hands.  After all, the limiting factor today as in recent decades is the availability of great works, not their price.  So buyers are once again looking for compelling works at reasonable prices.  At least that’s what a number of them have told me.  And my inbox is once again full of inquiries, which had all but stopped for several months.  As the Dow goes, so goes the art market?  Only up to a point, I believe, but let’s hope for everyone’s sake that both continue to rebound!

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After talking with a prospective client yesterday, it occurred to me that he was nearing a decision between three or more Picasso linocuts and aquatints without the benefit of viewing any of them in the flesh.  And that, despite the fact that all or nearly all of the art was in the inventory of dealers (myself included) within several miles of his home.  Mulling this over after our conversation, I felt that I should encourage him, and, while I’m at it, the rest of you Picasso lovers and collectors out there to actually see the art.  It tends to be much more powerful when seen in person than when viewing photographs of it.  I shop at a distance all the time and am very familiar with most Picasso prints and many of his drawings and paintings, yet I am usually thunderstruck by the power and beauty of the art when I see it up close, much more so than looking at its photographs.  Even the art on our walls is striking to me every time I stop and look at it, which is many times a day, despite the fact that I have stared at each piece thousands of times by now.  The photos are useful, because they reproduce the design and sometimes the color of the art reasonably well, but they fail to provide the scale, resolution, texture, depth, and perhaps other factors that make direct viewing so much more powerful.  You’d think that a photo of an original print should pretty much convey the same impact, since both are two-dimensional, but, either paradoxically or for the reasons I’ve listed above, that’s just not the case.  In the end, looking at photos of art should serve as but a guide, a first step.

If the geographic circumstances of your prospective acquisition are not as favorable as my client’s, make sure your dealer of choice offers you the opportunity to receive the art “on approval” following prepayment.  Terms vary from dealer to dealer.  Some offer to refund your money if you return the art within a 7-day grace period.  We offer 30 days, more than enough time to get an independent appraisal and to make sure it “goes” with your proverbial red couch.

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What, the Dow’s up a lousy 20% and suddenly everyone’s buying art again?  In the past investors usually behaved as if they consider art more as a hedge to the securities market, or so it has usually seemed to me.   (Of course for a collector, the investment potential of art is mostly a rationalization—we collectors know the main reason to acquire art is for love!)  I suppose the correct answer is both yes and no.  Art serves as an investment hedge up to a point, but when spending has frozen across the board in times of uncertainty such as these, then very little of anything gets sold.  Prior to last week, the Picasso print market had seemed to have lost more steam than the drawings and paintings market.  This makes sense, since prints generally attract a clientele of lesser means than collectors of Picasso paintings.  Much has already been written about the fact paintings sales have continued to be very strong throughout this recession, at least as far as the most important and prized paintings are concerned.    A number of modern and contemporary artists have set world’s records with these choice works.  (By contrast, many mediocre and even more poor works went unsold.)

But the tide may be turning, if last week’s print sales are any indication. Sotheby’s London sale sold 78% of its Picasso lots, and at Christie’s London, Picasso fared even better, with 87% of the lots sold.  Perhaps these stats are less meaningful because of the small size of the sales: only 23 Picassos in each of them (not counting the afters, which don’t really count, as far as I’m concerned).  Even I bid on a print. (And didn’t get it!)  Well, let’s hope these sales augur well for the economy at large.

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When clients ask me to appraise their Picassos, I first explain that the auction record is a more useful guide for valuation than gallery prices. There are a number of reasons for this. A gallery can mark a piece up just as high as it wants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the piece will sell at that list price, or that it will even sell at all. On the other hand, the auction record clearly represents the achieved price and reflects a market consensus as to the value of the work. Second, if you want to sell the work back to the gallery from which you bought it, you can be sure that the owner would want to pay no more than the current auction record would support, which of course may be nothing like what you paid him originally. My question of the day, however, is just how meaningful is the auction record? Is it the end-all and be-all of value determination as I’ve seen argued at times? Let’s take a look.

The beauty of art is subjective, to some extent anyway. If you value a work higher than the market does, it’s certainly theoretically possible that you are right. In the strictest sense, that’s how all purchases of art occur: at auction, the successful bidder is willing to pay one bid increment more than the other bidders. In a gallery, the buyer is willing to pay the required price, whereas, in general, earlier shoppers were not. The question really boils down to this: can the market price and the value of the art be wide apart, by more, or even much more, than a single bid increment? After all, it could be argued that at times buyers seem to lack taste, and those with arguably better taste may not have the wherewithal to buy.

For practical purposes, the answer has to be “no”. Fundamentally, it takes two people to determine the value of a work of art, namely the buyer and the seller of a completed sale. An owner of an artwork can proclaim its value and be unwilling to part with it for less, but that’s not a meaningful proclamation unless someone agrees to meet his price.

To some extent, the auction price is influenced by the auction estimate.  In general, the auctioneer and the consignor have a conflict of interest: the auctioneer wants a low estimate and the consignor the opposite.  A high estimate may scare bidders away and therefore be bad for everybody.  But it is particularly bad for the auction house.  If the lot fails to sell, the consignor has lost little.  He may not have succeeded in liquidating his asset, much less in making a handsome profit, but still he owns the art and gets to take it home with him.  On the other hand, the auctioneer has nothing to show for it except a few dollars in fees, small compensation for bringing down the percentage of sold lots.  The percentage of the lots that were sold is one of the most pivotal measures of the success of an auction and is one of the primary factors an informed consignor considers when deciding where to consign.  The auction house therefore eyes it closely and does everything possible to minimize the number of lots that get bought in.  Clearly, its most powerful tool in accomplishing this is by keeping down the estimate and the reserve.  (The reserve is the lowest price the consignor has agreed to sell the art for.  It cannot be higher than the low estimate, but it can be considerably lower, depending on how desperate the consignor is to sell.)  Though the auctioneer may try to nudge the estimate down, he does so at the risk of losing the consignment, because the consignor is likely to shop his piece around for the highest estimate.

The auction record however has its limitations. The price achieved at auction may to some extent reflect the careful calculation of collectors and dealers who have done their due diligence, but it may in part also be the product of split-second decisions made by frenzied, ill-informed or just passionate bidders. The price of a given work is set in a matter of seconds by those who happen to be flush at the time and who had the time and inclination to arrange for bidding. Yet their budgets may be limited, and their bidding may be following complex algorithms in which acquiring one piece limits the amount of funds left for another. Other people around the world, who may value a piece differently, may not have involved themselves in the auction and therefore had no effect on the prices achieved.

In fact, in many instances it seems that there’s very little sense in the auction record. Some things sell for “wholesale” prices, some for wildly inflated prices way above retail. Examples abound, but let’s just mention two. An example of a wildly inflated price was the 2005 sale of an impression of Minotaure caressant une dormeuse (Bloch 201), one of the nicer etchings of The Vollard Suite, for $186,000. There were probably half a dozen dealers seated in the room who would have lined up to sell the same print to the winning bidder and the underbidder for half that price. The opposite occurred recently with the wonderful and very important 1937 drawing, Au bout de la jetée:

(yes, I know it’s not for everyone…), which first sold at Christie’s NY for $408,000 in November, 2005, way above the silly pre-auction estimate of $60-80,000. In the same room exactly two years later, however, it went for $241,000. Does that mean that the drawing declined in value, in a market of skyrocketing prices for Picasso works on paper that had essentially doubled in value in the interim? I don’t think so.

Equally irrational is the herd mentality one encounters, particularly with respect to original prints, since there is usually ample auction precedent for any given sale.  The price of a print is usually well established by the auction record.  Once a relative price for a print has been set by one or more auction sale, it’s hard to nudge its standing relative to the general Picasso print market.  Yet, the demand for certain Picasso prints is, in my estimation, greatly exaggerated whereas some gems are quite undervalued.

Still, the auction record has an important influence on the prices that anyone apart from a frenzied collector is willing to pay. Those who choose to ignore it do so at their own peril. Like me, for example. I recently paid a hefty premium to the dealers who had bought a work on paper less than a year before at auction. Am I insane? Am I really a frenzied collector in art dealer’s clothing? My rationale was that the dealers had gotten a huge bargain at auction, and I thought their price was reasonable. But I knew at the time of my purchase that surely every informed buyer would wave the auction record in my face. In this purchase decision I also accepted the absence of color in the work, despite the knowledge that most folks desire color. But I stepped up to the plate because I felt the piece triumphed along all the other parameters by which one judges a work: beauty power, and also importance, rarity, size, condition, visibility at a distance, and the presence and prominence of the signature. It’s hard to get this entire checklist to read “yes” without the price going through the roof. Speaking of color, a lot of it doubles or triples the value of a Picasso, roughly speaking. Clearly, the more positive your mental checklist is, whether or not it is conscious, the more likely it is that you will end up taking the art home with you. In the face of ever-diminishing choices, it’s hard to get all of one’s ducks in a row, so I’m willing to settle for a few wayward ducks, especially if I don’t at all compromise on the ultimate standard, the beauty and power of the art.

And as a prominent dealer once confided to me, if the work is exceptional, she never hesitates to overpay, because exceptional works are hard to come by. The market will catch up, and, even if not, eventually at least one buyer will realize that it’s worth the price, with your surcharge.

In the final analysis, the auction record is just one factor, albeit an important one, that must enter the calculus of whether or not to buy a work of art at a given price. In a way, it’s like Churchill’s take on democracy as the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest. So is it time to break free of the auction price stranglehold?  Well maybe…at times…judiciously…and at your own risk!

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What is it with the art market’s color fixation?  Yes, I know, every room needs a bit of color.  But does that justify throwing good money after bad colorful art?  And in a down market, no less.  Take the following small (34.9 x 27.9 cm, 13 ¾ x 11”) watercolor, the 1906 Coupe, cruche et boîte à lait:

The Sotheby’s auction catalogue described it as “a seminal expression of the artist’s genius.”  I think it’s more like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Though the auction cataloguer did not allude to this, one could place this still life in the context of Picasso’s explorations in his Cezannian proto-cubist phase. But even if so, it is only of academic interest.  It is not a painting that holds its own.  Rather, it assumes significance only by relation to a contemporaneous body of work.  Yet it exceeded the auction estimate of $220-280,000 US to sell for $452,000 (premium included).  I can see no reason why it commanded such a price apart from the fact we Picasso collectors are starved for color.  Otherwise, I just don’t get it.

Especially when you contrast that sale with the following bought-in lot at Christie’s two days later, the 1970 Nu debout et nu assis:

Though slightly smaller and by no means one of the best late Picasso drawings, it is much more interesting, not to mention“prettier”,  than the above watercolor.  Its pre-auction estimate of $400-600,000 seemed high, especially this season, but the buyer of the watercolor above in all likelihood could have had it for the same price.  Go figure….

I suppose the discrepancy could be explained by the absence of “efficiency” in the art market.  Market efficiency in other commercial sectors, notably securities and real estate, has been much debated over the years.  With art, however, there’s little question.

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Our fifth anniversary in the business of selling Picassos came and went without much fanfare. In fact, it occurs to me that I don’t know exactly when it is. Sometime around April, I suppose—let’s call it April 1. The uncertainty about the date is attributable to having started this business without an opening or any other inaugural event, which I suppose one would more likely encounter in a storefront gallery than a private dealership such as ours. Rather, somewhere around this time five years ago, we simply set about building on our twenty-year-old collection by acquiring the best Picassos we could find in our budget, established a presence on the web, and started developing our reputation, one click at a time.

To mark our anniversary, I thought I’d take a moment to share some current thoughts on the subject of how our collecting has evolved. Increasingly the focus of our acquisitions has been the very top-notch, crème de la crème, 10/10, premium, museum quality (but museums, pack rats that they are, will take anything, come to think of it!), dramatic, sensational masterpieces. As such, I must report that it is very difficult, and ever increasingly so, to find works for sale on the market today of this caliber and in our price range and at reasonable prices. It’s therefore taken quite a while to assemble our small assortment of paintings, drawings, and prints. At times, I’ve even had to resort to the sin of paying a premium just to get the best available work. That’s the way it goes….

Some of the prints we have bought reflected my earlier effort to get the very best for the price level, and include some of the lowest price levels because of the idealistic notion of updating President Hoover’s platform of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” with the added goal of “a Picasso on every wall”. Most of those have sold, and I have no present plans to replace them. Today, I tend to buy fewer but pricier pieces, aiming for the biggest  blockbuster (read quality, not size) within our shooting range. With our extensive network of contacts, I have the ability, however, to source Picassos of all media and in all price ranges for our clients, so one needn’t be shy in expressing a desire for works that do not appear on our catalogue page.

Despite having set our sites on the crème de la crème, that is not to say that I’m unwilling to bend this standard in favor of a particular client’s taste, at the client’s insistence of course. But when I’m shopping for us, I don’t do much bending. Perhaps not every piece we buy would be considered a “masterpiece” in the conventional sense, but when I look at its particular place in its own genre, such as, for example, the Contrée etching (Bloch 362; http://ledorfineart.com/B362_contree.html ), each work is at the top. Further on this example, though I concede that the Contrée is not for everybody (at least it doesn’t seem to be since it’s not a commercially popular work), I wager that if one were to take the time to really look at it, there’s a good chance one would emerge with as superlative a view of it as ours.

Most of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you. Thanks for working with us. Without you, in words Sandra Bernhardt has made famous, we’re nothing! We appreciate the business, and I love the site feedback and the exchange of scholarship and opinion. Here’s to the next five years! I’d say fifty, but that would presuppose the next generation going into the family biz. That would be OK, but only after they complete medical school. -Kobi

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