O’Keeffe’s art is currently having a moment. Not Georgia O’Keeffe’s – that’s as popular as it’s ever been. No, I’m talking about the art of her little sister, Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe (1889-1961), which scored a huge success at Christie’s last week. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Ida studied art with the same teacher as her older sister and a younger sister, Anita, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where the family had moved when she was 13. The sisters’ family was artistic – both grandmothers had been artists, and yet another sister, Catherine, was also a painter – but family finances were often pr ..read more

It was the spring of 1985, and seven women artists were still pissed. The previous summer, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had held an exhibition entitled, “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” to inaugurate the museum’s newly renovated building. The exhibition had included the works of 165 artists, supposedly the best of the best. Only 13 were women. The women who met the following spring had participated in a picket line across the street from the museum during the exhibition’s run to protest the exclusion of female artists, but New Yorkers are fairly oblivious t ..read more

A reader of this blog recently sent me an article from Bloomberg News entitled, “Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen Over 1,000 Percent.” That statement is undoubtedly true, although, as with all “hot” tips on Wall Street, by the time the tip reaches the general public, insiders have already made their profit and moved on. New buyers will pay much higher prices. The savviest contemporary collector I know transitioned his buying from Black art to Native American contemporary art at least three years ago. It’s easy to get cynical about the art market. Is Native American ..read more

On December 21, a few years back, I attended a Winter Solstice celebration. The leaders of the celebration were a bespectacled, self-identified Native American, who looked and dressed like everyone else except for the birch-bark headdress he was wearing and the drum he carried, and an English woman wearing a bird costume. They were well-meaning sorts, but I soon left the ceremony and came home feeling disappointed. That evening I pondered the winter solstice and what it means to us today. There’s no denying that the shortest day of the year can arouse something deep within us. For thousands ..read more

As a young dealer of American art, I sometimes looked enviously at dealers in Old Masters and French Impressionist art. Not only did they have excuses for frequent trips to art fairs in Europe, but they also had a worldwide clientele. The major Impressionist and Modern sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were black-tie, invitation-required, champagne-fueled, evening affairs with plenty of what the daily papers called “celebs” in attendance. You might find a Hollywood movie star, a Japanese industrialist, and a member of European nobility pursuing the same work of art. American art was, howeve ..read more

Two stories about art captured the general attention this past month. The first embodied every thrift store visitor’s dream, something that has kept the Antiques Roadshow franchise in business since 1977.  It invites visions of “That could happen to me!”  A woman who has remained anonymous was browsing in a New Hampshire thrift shop in 2017. Poking through a dusty stack of paintings in search of an old frame that she might restore, the shopper came across a painting of two women in conversation. Liking the antique frame, she purchased the piece for four dollars and stuck it in a c ..read more

As any retailer will tell you, presentation is everything. Painters, as retailers hoping to sell objects they make, have to consider how those objects are best presented. If a painting is to be framed, what kind of frame will present it to best advantage? Not framing a painting is also an aesthetic choice. I’ve written before about the role frames play in our perception of a painting (see previous blog here). The issue came up for me again this week when Roberta and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape. The show follo ..read more

I received a lot of comments from museum directors and curators on last month’s blog, agreeing with me that changing social mores have caused a re-evaluation of what gets presented in museums today.  The art market follows this trend: paintings depicting Native Americans as ignorant, bloodthirsty savages are much harder to sell than they were 30 years ago, and their fair market value has consequently decreased. On the other hand, paintings that depict Native Americans in a sympathetic light have risen in fair market value.  A telling example can be found in a sale at an auction in ..read more

The Appraisers Association of America is releasing a new edition of its handbook Appraising Art next spring. I was asked to contribute a chapter on appraising the art of the American West. Since finishing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about how different my contribution would have been if it had been written, say, 30 years ago. Much of the advice I give now would have been the same then, such as the fact that you need to compare apples with apples: paintings of European subjects by artists who are commonly classed as Western artists bring a fraction of what their Western subjects bring. A p ..read more

I was on a business swing through the Midwest recently and visited the Art Institute of Chicago to view Salvador Dali: The Image Disappears, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of the artist most associated in the public mind with Surrealism.  It was a strong show, displaying works from the 1930’s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career.  Paintings like the one below, included in the exhibition, would make his name. Salvador Dali, William Tell, 1930, Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Image courtesy Wikiart. Born in the Catalonian region of Spain in 1 ..read more