Millions for an early N.C. Wyeth Illustration

The image above is an illustration titled "Hands Up," alternatively "Holdup in the Canyon" painted for C.P. Connolly’s “The Story of Montana,” published in McClure’s Magazine, August 1906. In 2016 it was auctioned at Christie's for just under $4.5 million (details here).

This amount was far above Christie's price estimate and even greater than previous prices for works by N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth (1882-1945), considered one of America's greatest illustrators. Biographical information on him can be found here and here.

Both sources mention that he made two journeys from Pennsylvania to the West with the purpose of soaking up the spirit and details of that region from personal experience rather than second-hand via books or magazines. "Hands up" was one of many drawings and paintings resulting from those journeys.

I'm featuring it here because I'm pleased that classic American illustration is getting its due recognition as valued by the art market

Picasso & Company and the Art Price Bubble

Bubbles of the market kind are irrational. That's because the intrinsic value of what is being bought and sold is lost in the game of buying something in the hope (and perhaps for some, the expectation) that it can be sold to someone else at a good profit.

Of course the buying and selling of things, ideally gaining profit, is the basis of non-purely-socialist economies that have advanced beyond the barter stage. And while it has been asserted that something's true value is what people are willing to spend to obtain it, there is also the fact that "bubbles" occur -- the most famous being the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. In the case of tulip, stock market or art auction bubbles, the realization that a bubble has occurred implies that price and intrinsic value were out of synch.

Unlike tulips and, say, dot-com stock prices in 1999, art bubbles are harder to detect in part due to the slower pace of the market. Nevertheless, prices for paintings by a given artist usually vary over the timespan of decades.

In recent days, sensationally high prices were recorded for modernist artists at actions, especially the 11 May 2015 Christie's auction in New York as reported here and here.

Here are some paintings that comprised the bubble.

Gallery

$142.3 million - Pablo Picasso - Femmes d'Alger (version 'O') - 1955
As I discussed here, Picasso was well past his creative prime by the 1950s when the painting above was made. Aside from the fact that I consider Picasso a grossly overrated artist, I find it hard to believe that this painting was purchased for it intrinsic merits -- it almost surely was a matter of speculation.

$82.9 million - Mark Rothko - No. 10
Some people view Rothko paintings with a large dose of mystical awe. Eighty-plus million dollars strikes me as being an expensive way to get a "high."

$67.4 million - Picasso - Buste de femme - 1938
Of similar vintage to a previous record-setting Picasso, his portrait of his mistress Dora Maar.

$56.2 million - Andy Warhol - Colored Mona Lisa
I admire Warhol as perhaps the art world's consummate con-artist (that was his main artistic talent). Nearly $60 million for a silk screen print?!?

$47.8 million - Francis Bacon - Portrait of Henrietta Moraes
Ugly, but the most beautiful feature for the auction house was the name of the painter.

Seen at 2014 La Quinta Arts Festival

One of the major outdoor art shows in the western United Sates is the La Quinta Arts Festival held every March in California's Palm Springs area. I usually write about it, because attending gives me something to do while not driving my wife to and from the Indian Wells tennis tournament that's also held in the area in March.

My interest is paintings, but those comprise a distinct minority of what is on display (and for sale). The rest includes, among other things, photography, jewelery, sculpture and clothing. Some paintings are abstract art, which I generally don't blog about. So I'll mention some artists whose work is at least somewhat representational. I divided the paintings according to whether they dealt with people as subject matter or else were landscapes. There were a few still life artists, but they are ignored here.

Most of the images below are not what I saw at La Quinta. Instead, I grabbed them from here and there on the Internet with the intention of presenting something representing the artists' styles.

Gallery

People

"Three Ladies" by Tom Barnes
This is little more than a cartoon, but Barnes cranks out a lot of paintings in the same vein, so there must be a market for it.

"My Life" by Yoram Gal
Gal's works are often cluttered with expressionist takes on people. They don't appeal to me.

"Studio Gathering" by Ali Golkar
Almost-abstract humans here. Given the colors and composition, I'm guessing that Golkar is a Matisse fan.

"Hat Club" by Rebecca Molayem
More cartoonishness. It must sell well enough, perhaps because of all those colors.

"The Mystery of Her Shadow" by Marcio Diaz
I wonder if Diaz was influenced by Chuck Close, in that he builds up images from fairly uniform little shapes. In this case, the shapes are little circles about the size and shape of reinforcement stickers used for punched paper placed in ring binders.

Landscapes

California landscape by Donny Hahn
The style here is 1920s, where the subjects are partly outlined. Retro, but pleasant.

"Magenta Hills" by Erin Hanson
Lots of strong color here along with some expressionist brushwork. Restrained, contemporary Fauvism? Whatever it is, something is wrong (I blame all that magenta and red).

"Spring in the Mountains" by Diane McClary
More overdone reddish tones, but more acceptable than the previous painting. Still, the colors are too fake, and the sun angle implied by the mountain shadows isn't carried over in the foreground.

Napa valley scene by Beverly Wilson
Wilson also really likes magentas and purples, but she deals with them better than Hanson and McClary.

"Mangrove Harbor Morning" by Tom Swimm
Yes, it's possible to paint hard-edge landscapes. Swimm's work is little too crisp for me, but he is a competent painter in that style.

"Serenity" by Teresa Saia
I thought Teresa Saia was the star of last year's show, as I wrote here. And that charming lady does it again in 2014.

El Paseo Art Scene, 2014

I seem to find myself in the Palm Springs, California area every March while my wife is at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. When not being her taxi driver, I goof off various places, including the El Paseo, a fancy shopping street in Palm Desert. There are plenty of art galleries there, and my visits sometimes serve as grist for blog posts such as here and here.

I tend to focus on representational paintings, so while browsing on a Friday Art Walk evening, I took notes on names of artists whose work caught my attention for one reason or another. Not all the images shown below were on display when I went gallery-hopping; but I want to indicate what those artists were currently doing.

Gallery

"Summer Heat" by Mark Bowles
A number of Bowles' paintings at first glance seem to be color-field exercises. But on closer examination, they are actually abstracted landscapes.

By Vanni Saltarelli
I wrote about Saltarelli here, but thought it worthwhile to show you something more recently displayed. He dashes things off, including sketchiness with more painterly passages, to put it in artist jargon.

"Black Imperial" by Kent Scaglia
Hyper-realism probably based on a photo (note the reflections he incorporates on the side of the fender). But I'm a car guy and an automobile history buff, so what's not for me to like here.

"Rainy Day Solidarity" by Jeff Jamison
The lack of facial detail on the subjects bothers me, despite whatever rationalizations are offered for this.

"At the Rialto" by Bruce Cody
Cody has painted a number of small paintings such as this, dealing with small-town scenes from Texas or the mountain states.

"Spartan Camping" by Jason Kowalski
Kowalski paints in the same subject vein as Cody. But the painting above is a bit different. I viewed the original, and was impressed by the brushwork Kowalski used to build the image.

By Eustaquio Segrelles
Joaquin Sorolla's Valencia beach scenes must resonate seriously with some Spanish painters. A while ago I posted about Ginar Bueno, whose work struck me as being both too similar to Sorolla and definitely inferior to the master's work. Segrelles uses the same subject matter, but his style is more solidly constructed than Sorolla's, making his paintings easier for me to accept than Bueno's.

"Gossip" by Michael Carson
I dealt with Carson's change of style here, but thought I'd include an image of a painting of his I saw at the most recent Art Walk.

Teresa Saia, Best at La Quinta

I don't often go to art shows. From my point of view, most of what I see at them in the way of paintings (my main interest) is mediocre. Plus, the shows I do visit have evolved to become largely arts-and-crafts shows with a lot of photography thrown in and comparatively few paintings. When I was a lad, such shows seemed to have lots of paintings. Sic transit something or other.

A show I now visit fairly regularly is the La Quinta Arts Festival, held in the city of La Quinta in the Palm Springs area of California early in March each year. I visit it because my wife spends two weeks watching the Indian Wells tennis tournament and, when I'm not in the taxi driver role, I try to occupy my time as best I can. So the art show takes up part of a morning and keeps me away from coffee shops.

The show management cites magazines that claim it to be one of the top such shows in the country, though I'm not sure how such findings are made. Like other such shows these days, most of it deals with sculpture, photography, clothing, jewelry, furniture and perhaps a few other things I can't recall. In any case, I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate the quality of such items. For the most part the paintings fall into what I consider the "pretty good" range from a technical standpoint. Subject matter tends to be skewed to what the artist has found to be salable. That's because, so far as I can tell, the artists exhibiting at La Quinta do art as a full-time job.

Along with the matter of artists selling their wares, prizes are awarded. This year's winners are mentioned here. Leading the pack is Teresa Saia, who is a fellow Seattle dweller. I wandered by her tent, spotted the blue ribbon and noted that quite a few of her paintings had already sold (this was the morning of the second day of the four-day show). She was busy talking to other people, perhaps potential buyers, so I moved on to view other displays.

I remembered Saia's works from last year because they were richly colored landscape and cityscape pastels that at first glance seemed like oil paintings. But this year she had some nice thinly-painted oil landscapes on view that in some respects reminded me of Bernie Fuchs' landscapes (here are some examples of his work). Unfortunately, I could find no Web images of Saia's oils of the kind I saw.

For once, I agreed with the judges, because I thought Saia's works were the best on view at La Quinta. Here are examples of her work. The first three are pastels, a fragile medium in my opinion. Of the final two, one is definitely an oil, the other looks as though it might be. Note that she tends to show scenes from a viewpoint looking towards the sun.

Gallery

The Light Within - pastel

Landscape pastel

Reflecting pool pastel

Morning Pasture - oil?

Evening Light - oil

Art News from The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has been evolving its Saturday/Sunday edition. A few months ago some morphing yielded two new sections. One is titled "Off Duty" and it deals with fashion and lifestyle matters. The other is "Revue," dealing with everything from longer pieces related to recent news events, to science developments, the arts and books.

* * * * *
I noticed a lot of good stuff in the 7/8 May edition. Off Duty had a cover piece devoted to fashion magnate Ralph Lauren's car collection, part of which is on show at the Louvre in Paris. Well, not the Louvre Louvre, but instead the Musée des Arts Décoratifs part -- you know, way out there at the western end of the north wing along the rue de Rivoli.

Anyway, Dan Neil, the WJS's pit bull automobile reviewer interviewed Lauren in Paris, trying to make him confess there might be a tennsy bit of synergy in play between the exhibit and Lauren's commercial empire. Lauren pretty much sidestepped the issue, but Neill did allow in conclusion that Lauren was indeed an actual "car guy."

Gee, I could have told him that. I've been to two Pebble Beach Concours d'Élegance and saw Lauren up close both times. One year he was standing by his Bugatti Atlantique, the other he was helping a bunch of guys pushing his 1939 Alfa Romeo around the 18th Hole site; rolls up his sleeves when need be, he does.

* * * * *
Over in Reviews it was reported that Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's "The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 B.C." was auctioned at Sotheby's for $29.2 million. Forty years ago one could hardly give his paintings away. We're making progress, realism fans!

* * * * *
Art writer Karen Wilkin reviewed the book "Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter" by Patricia Albers. It seems that Mitchell was a piece of work, whatever her Abstract Expressionist abilities might have been. But the part of the review that caught my attention was this paragraph:

Ms. Albert's book is not the place to turn for an understanding of art. It is punctuated with extended, over-written and yet imprecise descriptions of paintings that fail to evoke particular images despite the self-consciously "vivid" prose and lists of colors. A discussion of "the gorgeous Canadian paintings" made in 1974 is typical. "The diptych Canada V beguiles with the bosky masses, its incantatory lights and darks, its use of white around the cut between the two panels, and its oddly right colors (pale mint, white claret, and the color of night)."

Agreed, that is pretty turgid. My personal problem is that I have an aversion to just about any written description of a painting. Ditto descriptions of music. Music must be heard and paintings (or their reproductions) viewed if they are to be comprehended at all. A few apt remarks and a decent amount of background information are usually okay, but otherwise my eyes glaze even if there's a reproduction right above all that text.

* * * * *
As a final note, the section also had a short piece about Modernist collector Peter Brant. Among other quotes from him is this: "The thing is, when you look at a great work of art, it has to evoke in you something that's troublesome. If you hate it, it's probably a better indicator than if you just think it's OK. An artist is supposed to be telling you something that's not obvious or something you've not thought about in that way before."

Shh. Please don't mention this to Monet, Renoir, the Hudson River School or even poor, ignored Alma-Tadema.

Painting Types on Offer in Carmel-by-the-Sea

When I'm visiting California's artsy Carmel-by-the-Sea, I seldom fail to scoop up a copy of the pocket-sized Carmel Gallery Guide, a publication published every season or two. The current (Fall/Winter 2010/2011) edition has an interesting addition. Besides lists of galleries and artists, it now lists genres and which galleries offer such items.

Exactly what a genre is and which paintings belong to it is a matter of judgment. Nevertheless, I thought it might be interesting to post the genre names and the number of galleries claiming to sell examples. Bear in mind that a gallery can stock paintings in more than one genre.

Here is my tally (data first, categories as listed in the publication, my comments in brackets):

• 3 -- 19th & 20th Century European
  
• 7 -- Early California & American Historic
  
• 11 -- European Contemporary (Landscapes, Cityscapes & Figurative)
  
• 31 -- American Contemporary (Landscapes, Cityscapes & Figurative)
  
• 1 -- Marine Life [Wyland Galleries only for this one]
  
• 13 -- American Modern, Abstract Impressionism [not Expressionism?!?]
  
• 4 -- European Modern and Abstract
  
• 7 -- Plein Aire Artists (Contemporary)
  

Carmel is a conservative place so far as painting is concerned, not at all like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Probably not like the USA as a whole, either.

The American Contemporary category was tops, at 40 percent of the instances. American Modern and European Contemporary had 17 and 14 percent, respectively. Modernism, if tightly defined as American Modern and European Modern and Abstract held a 22 percent share.

Even given the not very precise and sometimes confusing categories, modernism doesn't seem to be hugely popular in Carmel galleries according to these very rough statistics. Nevertheless, it tends to confirm the impression I get strolling around town that hardcore and even soft-core modernism is not strong there.

Abstract Calendar Art

So there I was, waltzing through the local Barnes & Noble book superstore to grab a cuppa at their captive Starbucks stand when lo! I beheld three long racks devoted to calendars for 2011.

A quick eyeball estimate revealed something on the order of 250 selections, of which around 70 were devoted to art as the main topic. (Other subjects included cars, airplanes, sports, pets, comics, movie stars, nature and even one calendar whose theme was "posters for peace and justice" which might be classed as art even though it wasn't positioned with that grouping.)

Of the art-related calendars, there was one whose theme was abstract art. Closely related were calendars devoted to Paul Klee (main works are a blend of Surrealism-lite and semi-geometric abstraction), Mark Rothko (whose late work dealt with swathes of color) and Ryan McGinness (jumbles of images and design elements that result in an abstract overall effect). Then there were calendars featuring Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Marc Chagall -- all of whom did work that can be considered more representational than not. (Yes, Chagall is kind of a borderline case. His classical works sprinkled images of humans and other recognizeable objects across the surface of a canvas in an un-natural manner.)

Doing the math, I come up with a little more than five percent of the calendars dealing with art featuring abstraction and about ten percent explicitly related to modernism. These percentages fall to about a quarter of those numbers if the entire calendar selection is considered.

What we have here is what I'll call an anecdotal measure of the acceptance of modernism by a literate, middle-class-and-over audience. Anecdotal because there are no statistical controls and because I have no knowledge of the process by which those calendars were selected for that particular B&N store. The store in question is located less than a mile from the University of Washington and within three miles of some of Seattle's most upscale neighborhoods (Laurelhurst and Windemere, to be specific). B&N seems to allow store managers to tailor stock to fit the locality. For example, this store has a good selection of art books whereas other Seattle B&Ns are more lacking. But I don't know if this applies to seasonal items such as those calendars; for all I know, each Barnes & Noble is sent the same general selection.

Statistical and methodological uncertainties aside, what I saw makes me wonder how far hard-core modernist painting and graphic arts have actually penetrated to the general public after more than a century of "education" by all the various promoters of modernism as the "appropriate" art for our times. If that B&N is even a remotely decent example, even in educated neighborhoods people reject modernism in the privacy of their kitchens, dens and other places where calendars are hung.

Art Auction Trends

The cover story on the Weekend Journal section of the Wall Street Journal for 14 May is about some post-1870 painters who are performing better or worse than previously for the auctioneer's gavel. (At the time this is written, the article can be found here.)

Highlighted "winners" are Alexander Calder, Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns and graffiti-spawned Jean-Michel Basquiat. Downsliders mentioned are Pierre Bonnard, Richard Prince, Kees Van Dongen, Damien Hirst and Edvard Munch.

Some highlights from Kelly Crow's article include:

But the playing field has been transformed by recession, and dozens of other top artists have been boosted or derailed by the boom-and-bust cycle. Some of the biggest stars from the art market's peak, such as Richard Prince and Damien Hirst, have been largely absent from auctions recently.

On the rise are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Salvador Dali, names that a few years ago were unfashionable in some art circles. In recent years, some Western buyers dismissed their work as passé —crowd-pleasing but uninteresting. New art collectors, however, tend to gravitate to the European Impressionists that are pretty and accessible. Newly wealthy Asian buyers have been bidding up Renoirs and Monets. ...

Dealers say Renoir's soft-focus depictions of Victorian women and children are a favorite of Asian collectors, who have begun buying up iconic pieces from the Western canon. They're starting, as many new buyers do, with the broadly appealing Impressionists. Renoir's prices are lower than those of older peers like Monet.

[Regarding Calder...] The Philadelphia sculptor of kinetic abstract sculptures has floated above the recession. He had a banner year in 2009, with a record $41.5 million worth of his art selling at auction, according to Artnet, a firm that monitors sales. Six of his priciest pieces sold during the doldrums, including the 1934 mobile, "Five Pieces of Wood," which Sotheby's in London sold last June for $4.2 million. On Wednesday, another pair of mobiles sold for a combined $5.2 million.

American collectors say part of the reason for the strong sales was that the artist had been undervalued for too long, a fact that became clear as other art prices dropped. ...

Now, Basquiat's asking prices have dropped to between $2 million and $6 million and American Baby Boomers appear to be rushing back in to take advantage of the lower price tags. ...

Last fall, this Dutch master of Fauvism [Van Dongen] seemed poised to enjoy a surge when Sotheby's in New York sold his creamy spare portrait, "Young Arab," for a record $13.8 million. Russian buyers were flocking then to his emerald-and-navy portraits of women. Since then, however, Russian collectors seem to have shifted back to homegrown favorites with a similar palette, like Natalia Goncharova, and U.S. buyers haven't stepped in to fill the void. ...

During the peak years of 2006 and 2008, prices for Mr. Prince's work soared. In 2008, the artist's works sold for a combined $68.3 million at auction, but signs of trouble began to emerge: That year, at least nine pieces sold for less that their low asking prices, indicating that buyers and sellers were no longer in agreement on where his auction prices should be set....

Mr. Prince has one group of influential supporters: museum curators. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis recently mounted major Prince shows.

I'm perpetually astonished at the high prices modernist and PoMo artists command, though I'm not surprised about the French Impressionists. As this book suggests, they have been a "safe" investment for many decades.

And I'm curious about Van Dongen being mentioned. In most histories of post-1900 painting, he's been more a footnote than a highlight, so I hadn't realized that some of his works command very nice prices. I find Van Dongen the man interesting and have an odd ambivalence about his art; I probably shouldn't like it, yet I can't ignore it. One of these days I must write a post about him if for no other reason than to get my thoughts better sorted.