Louis Michel Eilshemius, Nude Women on the Beach, 1907, Oil on board, Questroyal Fine Art, LLC.  Click to inquire.

Edgar Degas, Après le Bain, Pastel Counterproof, Galerie Michael.  Click to inquire.

FADA’s inventory borrows from this lineage with modern and contemporary interpretations of the classical pose. Interestingly, most of the artworks of the bath involve female subjects.  Whether justifying the nudity of women or perhaps trying to evoke the tenderness between mother and child, the bath scene requires added interpretation when dissecting the relationship between the male artist and female subject.  Included are nudes by female artists.

 
Lorser Feitelson, Bathers, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

Sally Swatland, Bathtime, Oil on panel, Rehs Galleries, Inc.  Click to inquire.

Nonetheless male nudity, examined in a recent exposition at the Musée d’Orsay, is often utilized to exaggerate the heroism or athleticism of its subjects-and will be the subject of next week’s post.  Comparing and contrasting the male and female nude body and their positions often involves a meditation of historical and contemporary body ideals.

Lillian Genth, Nude by a Waterfall, Oil on canvas, Guarisco Gallery.  Click to inquire.

John Van der Banck, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, a Portrait, Ink on paper, Denenberg Fine Art. Click to inquire. 

The idea of artists being trained defeats contemporary notions of the artist’s free spirit.  Just as one goes to medical school in the hopes of specializing in a certain field, official beaux-arts academies in Europe mentored students in certain painting subjects.  While seventeenth-century France saw historical painting as the top-tiered pursuit, certain monarchs often hand-selected portraitists from these institutions which they supported to immortalize their being.

Ammi Phillips, A Portrait of Jeanette Payne, Oil on canvas, Godel & Co. Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

The influence of portraits of kings and nobility, from the hand of Van Dyck to Gainsborough, trickled down to the United States in the form of moralistic portraits of the middle class.  While John Singer Sargent’s glamorous portraits of New England’s elite were often evocative of the Grand Manner style, Thomas Eakin’s portraits of academics often sought to enhance the complexity of his sitter’ personalities.  

Edward S. Curtis, Geronimo – Apache, Photogravure, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Émile Bernard, Portrait de Madame Schuffenecker, Oil on canvas, Guarisco Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

The introduction of photography as a medium for portraiture-even up to today’s iPhone shots, reveals that sitter’s are even more so conscious of their representation.  Which aspects of one’s personality does one wish to display through portraiture? How does an artist’s manipulation of a pose convey ideas about their sitter’s nationality, social standing, gender-or even beauty norms?

Andy Warhol, Portrait of Isabelle Adjani, 1986, Screenprint, Leslie Sacks Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

How do you wish to be depicted? What catches our eye in other sitters’ portraits across all centuries?

Robert Aaron Frame, Elenor #2, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

Edgar Britton, Clowns’ Dressing Room, Oil on linen, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Carrying over from last night’s mischievous festivities, this post is an homage to an institution dedicated to frights and thrills all year long-the clown.  The lore of the clown, synonymous with traveling carnivals can often be seen in two lights.  A clown entertains, but there is an additional layer of sinisterness-perhaps propagated through television (read: American Horror Story: Freak Show) associated with their act.  

Armando Romero, the Circus, Marble, Tasende Gallery.  Click to inquire.

Regardless, clowns can be seen as misunderstood, tragic figures, recalling the Italian Commedia dell’arte who were masked individuals performing in the streets.  They were often subjects in French Rococo works by Jean-Antoine Watteau, such as his famously melancholic Pierrot.  Similarly, Picasso often painted the Harlequin, whom he identified with, and which was inspired by his interactions with circus families.

Byron Browne, Clown with Mask, Oil on canvas, Levis Fine Art, Inc.. Click to inquire.

Jean-Richard Goubie, Le Cirque Francais (Set of 7), Oil on canvas, Guarisco Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

Although connotations of the clown have changed, their clothes and make up, and outsider personalities have carried over today. Why have artists across time been fascinated with the figure of the clown? Perhaps artists identify with their loner persona? 

Charles Bell, Tinker Toys and Clown, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire.

David Gilhooly, Strawberries and Cream and Frogs, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire. 

Contemporary art historical scholarship often reflects upon the functionality of art. While DADA artists of the twentieth century elevated everyday objects, as seen in Marcel Duhamp’s Fountain, to a higher fine art status; artists or workshops throughout history have sought to make ordinary materials-plates, vases, etc.-visually extraordinary.  FADA’s comprehensive inventory of modern and contemporary art highlights major artists’ inheritance of these forms, as seen in the mediums of tapestry and ceramics.

Fernand Leger, Anciens constructeurs (Les Constructeurs sur fond bleu), Tapestry, Jane Kahan Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

Fernand Leger’s tapestry Anciens constructeurs (Les Constructeurs sur fond bleu) in the collection of Jane Kahan Gallery, is a marriage of a Renaissance tapestry’s purpose (which kept castles insulated) and a modern aesthetic.  

Pablo Picasso, Face no. 202, 1963, Ceramic, Galerie Michael.  Click to inquire. 

Pablo Picasso, AR 277 Face in Oval, Ceramic, Rosenbaum Contemporary Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

Similarly, Picasso ceramics, in many of FADA gallery inventories, replaces a plate’s original function to that of an artwork.  While modern and contemporary artists may be seen today as  deconstructing the physical elements of an actual painting, creatives throughout time have always sought to imbue meaning into an object through decoration.

Franz Bischoff, Ceramic Vase with Grapes, Ceramic, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire. 

Mary Frances Overbeck, A Lady, Ceramic, Eckert & Ross Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Moonlit Landscapes From a Tormented Painter’s Lucid Moments

Antiques By EVE M. KAHN

 OCTOBER 27, 2016

Ralph Albert Blakelock’s “Rising Moon.” Credit Ralph Blakelock, Questroyal Fine Art

Although the landscape painter Ralph Albert Blakelock spent two decades in mental hospitals in and near New York, he still managed to keep working. Starting around 1900, as he cycled in and out of lucid periods at the hospitals, he captured scenes of moonlit skies, glades of leafless trees and multicolored streaks of clouds. For art supplies, he had to forage. He dismantled window shades and wooden cigar boxes to create fabric and panel backings for his paintings. He formulated watercolor pigments with tobacco juice. His paintbrushes were made from cat hair that he wired into bundles.

From Nov. 11 through Dec. 10, Questroyal Fine Art gallery in Manhattan will show about 125 works in “Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Great Mad Genius Returns.” (Prices for works start at around $10,000.) Some scenes on view had originally belonged to hospital staff members and to friends and relatives who visited him at the institutions. During a preview of the exhibition, Louis M. Salerno, an owner of the gallery, explained how Mr. Blakelock (1847-1919) added textures to his thick paint layers by scratching them with stones and meat skewers and running them under water. Blood red signatures are scrawled in the corners of some canvases. It is unclear how many of his paintings survive. He destroyed many of his own major pieces. In his lifetime, admirers and forgers started copying his landscapes to sell to collectors fascinated by his determination to paint despite bouts of depression, mania and paranoia. Myra Platt, a descendant of Mr. Blakelock’s who has served as the family’s historian, said that relatives who knew about his life story had not wanted to discuss the subject. In the early 20th century, there was too much stigma attached to his impoverishment and mental illness, she said. Researching his biography and his paintings, she added, is “like weaving together a giant tapestry of intersecting threads.”

Mr. Blakelock, a son of a British immigrant carpenter, grew up in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. In the 1860s, he toured the American West, where he painted tableaus of American Indian dancers, tent encampments and horseback riders. At 29, he married Cora Bailey, a daughter of a prosperous varnish manufacturer in Brooklyn. The couple had 10 children, and they shuttled among the homes of various relatives. Although he painted prolifically, he drew little attention from dealers, critics, curators and patrons. The demands of supporting his family aggravated his psychiatric problems, the journalist Glyn Vincent said in a 2003 biography, “The Unknown Night: The Genius and Madness of R. A. Blakelock, an American Painter.” Mr. Blakelock began grandiosely adding price tags of millions of dollars to the backs of his paintings. He based his images on scratches in his enameled bathtub; started carrying around an antique dagger; and draped himself in embroidered sashes and belts with trimmings that his wife described as “long strings of beads and trinkets of all sorts.” He was removed from his family home and taken to an institution for the final time on the same day that she gave birth to their 10th child. Around 1915, a young New Yorker who loftily called herself Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams started visiting him at the hospitals. (Her real name was Sadie Filbert Adams.) She described herself as a philanthropist, and she promised to help the destitute Blakelock family by marketing his works. But she actually used proceeds from the sales of paintings to pay for her hotel bills, “her staff of assistants, her fashionable clothes and costly luncheons about town,” Mr. Vincent wrote. Mrs. Adams isolated Mr. Blakelock from his relatives and friends; sometimes she refused even to let them know where he was. She occasionally encouraged him to paint, in the hopes of generating some valuable masterpieces. (In his lifetime, collectors resold his paintings for thousands of dollars each, but he did not benefit.) Mrs. Adams, as she gradually fell under suspicion of abusing him physically and financially, returned Mr. Blakelock to one of the mental hospitals. When she dropped him off, he was emaciated and shivering; a few months later she retrieved him. In 1919 he died mysteriously while in her care, with bloody wounds on his face.

Ms. Platt said a few paintings have remained in family hands, including works by Marian Blakelock, a daughter of the artist who also became a painter and ended up institutionalized. (Unscrupulous dealers sometimes added her father’s forged signature to her canvases.) Mr. Salerno keeps finding more of Mr. Blakelock’s works to add to Questroyal’s inventory and his private collection. Among his recent auction acquisitions is a view of a moonlit glade that turned up in July at Bruneau & Company in Cranston, R.I. (It sold for $6,000.) The provenance paperwork shows that it had originally belonged to an artist who had known Mr. Blakelock, often imitated his works and came under suspicion for being one of the forgers who copied him. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln maintains an inventory of Blakelock paintings, which currently lists about 580 works that have been firmly attributed. It is based on five decades of research by the art historian Norman A. Geske, who died in 2014. Katherine L. Walter, the principal investigator for the database, said research was continuing into the provenance of paintings that have been authenticated, as well as of those that are still in attribution limbo.

A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2016, on page C24 of the New York edition with the headline: Moonlit Landscapes From a Painter’s Years of Desperation.

Original Article

A Museum’s Seal of Approval Can Add to Art’s Value

 

(Michel Witmer, a collector in New York City, was persuaded to buy a work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, an artist he had never liked, at a museum show. | BENJAMIN NORMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

 

FOR most art lovers, museums are a place to indulge a passion or seek solace from the world outside. But for art collectors like Jorge Garcia, they offer a level of objectivity about an artist’s work that galleries lack.

Not to mention what a museum curator’s imprimatur can do to the value of the art.

Mr. Garcia, a regional sales manager in Miami for an environmental consultant, says that before he buys artworks — and he has bought hundreds — he studies the artists to find out where they are from, where they studied art, what shows they have had and which gallery represents them.

But then, Mr. Garcia says, he goes further. He looks at the museum shows the artists have had, or better yet, those they are scheduled to have.

“The contemporary art market is investment-driven,” he said. “There’s a lot of demand. But it doesn’t mean all of these artists are going to be around in 10 or 15 years.”

He goes to galleries to buy works of art, but if that is all the artists have on their résumés, he asks himself, “Is it just gallery, gallery, gallery — commercial, commercial, commercial?”

Grela Orihuela, the director of Art Wynwood and a consultant for Art Miami, two art fairs in Miami, agreed that “a museum show can change the reputation of an artist.”

She added: “A museum show can be very influential for an artist. It changes the price point, the popularity, the awareness a person has for an artist.”

She pointed to Frank Stella, a painter who had a retrospective show last fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show ran for a little more than three months, and after it closed, the value of his existing work rose — even though Mr. Stella has been a well-known American artist since the 1960s.

This winter, the Coral Gables Museum in Florida is staging an exhibition of Cuban art in the 20th century. And in an attempt to similarly capture collectors’ interest in the artists exhibited there, Ms. Orihuela said, Art Wynwood is staging shows of both established and younger Cuban artists.

“We have a gallery that will do all our fair, and I’ve confirmed that the prices will be different with Art Wynwood 2017 because of this show,” she said.

Dr. Julio Ortiz, an eye surgeon in Miami, has seen the effect. He said he bought pieces by the Cuban artist Roberto Fabelo for $30,000 a few years ago. But after his work was shown in museums in the United States and Europe, similar works fetched $100,000.

“I wouldn’t say the quality is so different, but there’s more demand,” Dr. Ortiz said.

Using museum shows to inform investments is not limited to living artists. Michel Witmer, a collector in New York City, said a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was centered on the painters represented by Paul Durand-Ruel, a Parisian art dealer at the turn of the 20th century, persuaded him to buy a work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, an artist he had never liked.

“When I went to the Durand-Ruel show, I got to learn more about Renoir and why he was so important,” he said.

Shortly after the show, he bought a Renoir at auction. “I wouldn’t have bought that piece if I hadn’t seen the show,” he said.

It may seem odd that it took a museum show to persuade a collector with the means to buy a Renoir to buy one at last. But Mr. Witmer disagreed.

“I have a home in Greenwich, and I’m fond of my friends there,” he said. “But there are people who want to buy something because they’ve seen it in the homes of well-known collectors. Going to shows in museums helps us become better individual art collectors.”

Researching artists through their museum shows, with the expectation that the prices for their art are going to soar, is a bit like private equity investing. Some pieces may take off. Others may maintain their value. But for some, the market to resell the works may dry up.

Mr. Garcia said this had happened to him. “I’ve bought stuff and I can’t sell it today,” he said. “You can’t predict. They’re contemporary artists. But I still like it.”

Nevertheless, he said, it’s worth the risk. As a comparatively small collector, he said, if he did not buy a work early, he could be priced out or excluded from buying a work even if he could afford it. “If a major collector comes in from New York or London, he’s going to get first dibs over me,” he said.

Art collectors also have the option of lending their art to museums to increase the value of their works. Ramón Cernuda, a collector of Cuban art who sold his publishing company and opened an art gallery in Coral Gables, Fla., said he had about 350 works of art but could display only about a third of the collection.

Right now, seven or eight of his paintings by Wifredo Lam, among the best-known Cuban painters, are part of a traveling retrospective that is now at the Tate Modern in London. Another 60 pieces by various artists are on loan to the art museum at Florida State University.

“We did this at first for the opportunity for other people to enjoy the artworks and for other people to learn about the artists,” he said.

But Mr. Cernuda said he understood the financial impact of his loans. “In general, it enhances value,” he said. “There is a direct relationship between value and exhibition — museums being the highest level of exhibition prestige for an artist or an artwork.”

Still, lending artworks in the hope that a museum show will increase their value carries risks.

“People who buy art and exhibit it around the world to increase its value do it because they’re told it’s going to increase the value,” said Diana Wierbicki, global head of the art law practice group at Withers Worldwide. “Their hesitations on it always come down to an insurance issue.”

One risk is that a piece will be damaged, leading to a claim for a partial loss of value. “The insurance company comes back and says it’s a 20 percent loss,” she said. “But we could say it’s a 30 percent or 40 percent loss.”

Another risk is that a work of art will be seized while on loan internationally. (A work can be seized if a country or person claims it, but it could also be taken to pay a debt.) Ms. Wierbicki said an insurance policy could include coverage against seizure, but whether the policy is enforceable depends on the country where the work has traveled.

If the insurance can be worked out, the benefits of art loans to museums can be immense. Mr. Cernuda said that after the Lam show opened last fall at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the value of the artist’s work at auction jumped over 80 percent.

“There is a very direct and inevitable link between the market and museum exhibitions,” Mr. Cernuda said.

And chasing that link will surely drive some collectors this fall.

Jim McHugh, The Orpheum Theater, Archival pigment print, Timothy Yarger Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

This post combines many of the thematic elements discussed in previous posts, demonstrating the layers of art history kept in mind when analyzing the elements of an artwork.  Most obviously, this post contrasts the interior scenes highlighted beforehand: intimate scenes of contemplative subjects in favor of a theme which incorporates the public, and therefore the accessible.  Exteriors, or the architectural identity captured by artists blends in two major disciplines: architecture and the fine arts. Exteriors, often make up the myths which precedes one’s understanding of a city.

Jeremy Kidd, LACMA 1, 2008, C-print on aluminum, Leslie Sacks Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

Gustave Baumann, Taos Placita, Woodblock, William A. Karges Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

 Archeologists or anthropologies closely study how exterior spaces are a reflection of the cultures which created them.  Additionally, further examination through an art historical lens ponders how other cultures recycle past architectural motifs in new buildings.  We love the new and modern, just as much as we love ruins.  

Colin Campbell Cooper, The Yellow House, Oil on board, Redfern Gallery. Click to inquire. 

Edward Borein, Church at Laguna, Etching and drypoint, Thomas Nygard Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

Which architectural elements define a space: secular or religious?  Exteriors are the subjects of our Instagram posts and provide the cornerstones of our dreams of new places. Whether an idyllic New England house or the terraces of Paris-exteriors and the details making up the space are sumptuous markers luring us into spaces, or sometimes keeping us out!

Walter Elmer Schofield, At the Crossroads, Oil on canvas, Avery Galleries. Click to inquire. 

Constantine Kluge, Montaigne et George V, Oil on canvas, Rehs Galleries.  Click to inquire. 

Terri Kelly Moyers, Black Bird, Oil, Nedra Matteucci Galleries.  Click to inquire.  

As the world is abuzz with intel from the Fifty Shades of Grey movie set, it seems appropriate to examine the infamous color shade within FADA’s inventory.  The density of the color, its mundaneness favored by Scandinavian minimalism, nevertheless makes a statement in artworks.  

  Linda Touby, Sydney’s Door 5, Oil and wax on linen, Timothy Yarger Fine Art.  Click to inquire.    

  Edward Borein, A Goatherder with His Flock, Ink and gouache on illustration board, Thomas Nygard Gallery.  Click to inquire.  

The so called color without color nevertheless is integral in Romantic masterpieces, teasing total blackness in the infinitely murky clouds.  Additionally making an appearance in impressionistic works of the changing city-scape, the shade of repaved sidewalks and soaring sky scrappers; the color grey perhaps emits a mood of impersonality.    

  Anna Hills, Moorland – Lamorna, England, Oil on canvas, Redfern Gallery.  Click to inquire.       

  N.C. Wyeth, Rebel Jerry and Yankee Jake, Oil on canvas, Surovek Gallery.  Click to inquire.  

Famously revealed in Whistler’s works, most notably of his mother, grey is shown to have an elegance in its stoicism.  As the color of the modern world, what does grey say to you?  

  Arnold H. Ronnenbeck, Untitled (Mining Town , Colorado), c.1930, Lithograph, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire.    

Jeanne Reynal, Martha Graham, 1975, Mosaic, Levis Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

“Instead of being painted on the canvas, the figure began to emerge from the canvas. I never dreamed I would experience work like Sandorfi’s during my lifetime.  More to the point I never dreamed that I could be his agent that introduced him to the United States. Opening up an entirely new art world and market during the first Art Miami Fairs, where crowds were competing for his paintings.  We sold everything.”

-Jane Kahan

Characterized as “one of the most representative European artists of the transition from the mid-20th to the 21st century,” Hungarian artist Istvan Sandorfi (1948-2007) is examined in an extensive museum retrospective of his work at MEAM Barcelona.  FADA member Jane Kahan Gallery, located in New York City, was Sandorfi’s early primary dealer and lent eight works to the retrospective. While the scope of Sandorfi’s entire artistic career is explored in the exhibition, Jane Kahan Gallery’s close personal relationship with the artist and his practices enables an intimate understanding of his hyperrealist techniques. 

Gallerist Jane Kahan of Jane Kahan Gallery and Istvan Sandorfi

Additionally, Jane Kahan Gallery has contributed to the scholarship and encouraged public recognition of Sandorfi by showcasing his works at art fairs as well as mounting an exhibition of the artist in 2002.  Accompanying the 2002 exhibition catalog is an interview conducted between gallerist and artist. Jane Kahan’s questions reveal her intricate knowledge of the artist as she inquires about the methods and influences behind his dreamy oil canvases. He responds almost as fastidiously as his perfectly smooth canvases.

Istvan Sandorfi, L’Oeuil de Beata, 1996, Oil on canvas, Jane Kahan Gallery. 

While MEAM Barcelona’s retrospective of Istvan Sandorfi has perhaps solidified his artwork within the context of modern art history, Jane Kahan Gallery’s continuing support of the artist at the climax of his work reflects a gallery’s integral role in aiding the trajectory of an artist’s career.

“La Percee d’Isophobe,” 1997, Oil on canvas.  One of the eight canvases lent by Jane Kahan Gallery and exhibited at MEAM Barcelona.