The Turnaround?

Collecting

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 […]

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THE AUCTION RECORD: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Collecting

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

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Color Fixation

Aesthetics, Collecting

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

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5th Anniversary Spiel: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TWO-BIT ART DEALER

General

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

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A Steal and a Half

Collecting

I just have to write this. Amid typically stratospheric prices for good Picassos, someone just walked away with a real steal (that is, if you can call anything denominated in the millions a steal).  Picasso’s great neoclassical/sculptural painting, Baigneur et baigneuses (1920-21) just sold at Sotheby’s London, near its low estimate, for $5.8M. Not only that, but it had been bought in at a pre-auction estimate of $8-12M at Sotheby’s NY in 2004. I failed to see why it didn’t exceed expectations back in 2004, not to mention this time around. To my mind it is one of the nicest and most important oils of its genre still in circulation. If it looks familiar to you but you were not

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Other Artists, and What We Can Do About Them

Collecting

And now, for a few words about finding works for you by other artists or, for that matter, works by Picasso that we don’t already own.  I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending and that you’re still smiling by the end, but, listen up, people!  OK, I’ll cop to the charge of paternalism if you wish to invoke it when you find me trying to make sure that you exercise the best possible taste and judgment when acquiring art.  Why do I bother?  It’s risky, after all.  Unsolicited advice may not be welcome, especially if it’s critical. To date, it seems that all of its recipients have been grateful, though some have heedlessly gone on to do exactly what

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Print Market Review, Summer 2007

Collecting

Having just reviewed the Picasso painting market, let’s turn for a moment to see how his prints have been faring. In short, prices have held or gone up, but the most appreciation appears to have occurred among the most valuable prints. The particular winners of the season are the few rare proofs that were offered and, more significantly, the nicer unsigned prints. The season’s highlights include the beautiful, rare and unpublished but smallish aquatint of Françoise (Baer 907, not in Bloch), which sold with all three states for a whopping $588,000. Yet the first two states are not that beautiful in their own right, primarily interesting in depicting the progression of Picasso’s thoughts. And the third and final state last

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Does Size Matter? (Painting Market Review, Summer 2007)

Aesthetics, Collecting

Now that everyone else has opined about the last auction round, having waited my turn, I can now get in the last word. The art world seems rather pleased with itself in view of the continued price escalation, with no end in sight. Yet the intelligence of the market is still underappreciated. It’s time, it seems to me, that buyers be given their due. And of course I’m just talking about buyers of Picassos, since those are the only works I study in depth. Commentary about the intelligence of the art market in general has not been quite so favorable. For example, note the opening line of Souren Melikian’s essay: “The May sales demonstrated how unpredictable buying patterns have become.

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Guerniraq

General

A final note about the recent Minotauromachie conference. Or rather about the Q & A which followed, in which one lugubrious chap posed the question, rhetorical no doubt, to the distinguished panelists: what would Picasso have thought about Iraq? At the time I confess to having been a bit annoyed by the question. Here we were discussing the meanings of Picasso’s work on an ethereal level, aspiring to the universal meanings he achieved and not getting bogged down in mundane matters such as politics. Yet, frankly, the Bush administration forced the issue by covering the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, which hangs at the entrance of the U.N. Security Council, in preparation for Colin Powell’s fateful call to war. Someone

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