Even if reports of the death of the blockbuster exhibition are somewhat exaggerated, it’s true that galleries are having to change the way they stage big shows, says Ivan Lindsay

OVER THE SUMMER, the National Gallery and Royal Academy in London announced their autumn exhibitions, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (9 November–5 February) and Degas Dancers: Eye and Camera (17 September–11 December). The news, along with the announcement that, to capitalise on the huge influx of foreign visitors expected in London for the 2012 Olympics, the Tate Gallery will stage extensive exhibitions of works by Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and even Damien Hirst, reopened the debate as to the importance and effectiveness of such exhibitions and whether they remain a viable way to show art to the general public.

While attendances at exhibitions indicate a steady popularity with the public and provide a crucial source of income for museums in the way of admissions, sponsorship, catalogues and sales from the shop, people are tiring of the scrum at such shows. Curators themselves have been complaining of museum fatigue and academics have been suggesting that blockbusters are damaging art. Colin Tweedy, the chief executive of the Prince of Wales’s Arts and Business charity and a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery, claimed in an interview earlier this year that ‘the blockbuster model is killing art… it’s not the right way to see the great artists. In the next five years museums will stop doing these exhibitions because they are too much trouble. It’s an old model. The curators of culture have to think in a different way.’

Tweedy pointed to the recent Gauguin exhibition at the Tate Gallery, which broke records for advance ticket sales but left many visitors disappointed because of the sheer number of people there. ‘Nobody liked it because nobody could see it,’ he said. It is true that if there were fewer than a dozen people in front of a painting on a weekday you were lucky.

In response to this, the National Gallery, trying to avoid what it terms ‘gallery rage’, has reduced the number of admissions at the Leonardo show from the 230 per half-hour it’s allowed by health and safety regulations to 180. Other than making a good soundbite, it is hard to see where the expression ‘gallery rage’ has materialised from, as what is apparent is more a weary exhaustion as art lovers bump into one another, politely apologising as they shuffle around.

The demise of the blockbuster exhibition has been predicted ever since Roy Strong announced in the Eighties that the Victoria and Albert Museum would no longer put on such exhibitions in order to concentrate on developing its own collections. Visitor numbers collapsed along with income, and major exhibitions had to be rapidly reintroduced.

The genre has been around for a long time: the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace attracted more than six million visitors with 13,000 exhibits, and the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857 saw more than a million visitors for 16,000 exhibits. In 1863 the display of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding presents at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) proved popular, as did the major display of Italian art at the Royal Academy in 1930.

While improved air travel from the mid-20th century has made it easier to move large paintings around, there is a general fatigue among museum directors over the issue of large exhibitions and an increasing resistance from both museums and private collectors to lend. The major risks to an artwork are in transit. The Leonardo exhibition has put together seven of the fifteen authenticated paintings by the artist, which is a credit to the curator Luke Syson, who has recently been poached from the National Gallery by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he starts in January.

The current writer has no love of the scrums at such exhibitions but will have to go in order to see the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (more often referred to as Lady with an Ermine, above right), the mistress of Milan’s ruler Ludovico Maria Sforza, who was known as ‘il Moro’ or ‘the Moor’. This beautiful painting of a woman turning to her left and holding an ermine, which normally requires a trip to Krakow to the Czartoryski Museum, has always been coveted and, after being stolen by the Nazis, spent some time in the collection of Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland in the Forties.

The Portrait of a Man by Raphael, which was also commandeered by Frank from the Czartoryskis at this time, was never seen again, but the Leonardo was thankfully recovered by Allied troops, who found it hidden in Frank’s country home in Bavaria after the end of the Second World War.

Among all the discussions about the future of such exhibitions, what is certain is that they are becoming increasingly hard to organise. Ann Dumas, one of the organisers of the Degas exhibition, has said that an earlier exhibition at the Royal Academy, The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and His Letters, which proved a great success, took more than five years to organise. Curators have to overcome political issues, restitution problems, museum and private collector reluctance to lend, rising costs of insurance where government indemnity cannot be granted, and transport, staffing, sponsorship, security and logistical issues.

They also have to find a new message to try to convince museum directors, owners, sponsors and the public that they have something fresh and new to put across. In describing the current Degas exhibition Dumas says: ‘We hope people will revise the notion that Degas was just a painter of pretty dancers. He was in a way conceptual and an extremely radical, highly innovative artist, in tune with the technological developments of his time.’ 

DESPITE MUSEUM FATIGUE and rage, the complaints of the public and the forecasts of the demise of the blockbuster, an examination of the figures attending exhibitions published annually by The Art Newspaper indicates that the public are still flocking to the exhibitions that attract their attention, making the careers of successful curators, improving the prestige of the museums involved and drawing tourists to the leading exhibiting cities, such as London, New York, Tokyo and Paris.

The Louvre in Paris is the world’s most visited museum, with 8.5 million visitors per annum. Successful exhibitions regularly attract more than 500,000 visitors, such as Pablo Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (April–August 2010), with 703,256, and Post Impressionism: 115 Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay at the National Art Centre Tokyo (May–August 2010), with 777,551. With ticket prices often in excess of £10 (the full-price ticket for the Leonardo exhibition is £16), even allowing for concessions, these exhibitions can provide an income of more than £5 million, clear motivation for cash-strapped galleries.

Critics complained in the late 19th century of the astonishing range of exhibitions crowding London at any one time, from major artists at the leading galleries to smaller peep-shows of oddities and circuses. Critics are making similar complaints today. Even if exhibitions such as Monet’s Water Lilies are losing their momentum, it seems the blockbuster is here to stay, and what might be changing is its content. Photographic exhibitions such as London’s National Portrait Gallery’s current show Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits are gaining in popularity and museums are trying to concentrate on drawing exhibitions from their own holdings to cut costs. The Metropolitan’s successful 2010 Picasso exhibition was drawn entirely from its own holdings.

There is no doubt that a pressurised, crowded museum is not the best way to see art, but it does give the chance to see work that is normally difficult to access. A better way to view art is to pick a quiet London gallery such as the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square or the Dulwich Picture Gallery, seek out a couple of paintings by an artist who interests you and slowly absorb them. Try to extract the essential qualities of an artist and articulate what makes a painting special. Major exhibitions, in one form or another, despite their detractors, will remain a feature of life in the cultural capitals, but the best way to study art is still quietly and privately. Degas himself said: ‘Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.’ That presumes you can see the painting in the first place. 
Leonardo image courtesy of National Gallery. Degas image on loan from the Honorable Earle 1 Mack Collection

Ivan Lindsay is an art dealer and contributing editor at Spear’s

When Spear’s hosted a debate on what makes a masterpiece, none of the participants could agree. Ivan Lindsay was there — but now he has the floor to himself

AT THE MASTERPIECE Fair in London, Spear’s organised a breakfast panel to discuss ‘What is a Masterpiece?’ The discussion, at Le Caprice in the Masterpiece tent in the grounds of Wren’s own masterpiece, the Royal Hospital, was lively because no one could agree on the answer. This is perhaps not surprising, as it is as difficult a question to resolve as ‘What is art?’ Some of the panel were of the opinion that a masterpiece has to be an actual artwork by an important artist and precious, rare, beautiful and moving, whereas others felt it should have a broader application that could be applied to cars, furniture and contemporary design.

Most artists produce poor quality art that never approaches a masterpiece, work that is banal, mediocre and forgotten within a generation. A few good artists produce good art that, having found a formula that sells, they stick to without ever producing anything great. Very few artists produce great work. For painters, these select few can be divided into those who consistently produced masterpieces, who tended to have a small production and limited patronage, such as Manet and Bacon, and Duccio, Mantegna and Giotto from earlier times, and artists who were only sometimes great, such as Picasso, Matisse, Monet and Constable. The latter were always experimenting and, as such, sometimes they succeeded and sometimes not.

Webster’s offers a current definition of ‘masterpiece’ as ‘a supreme intellectual or artistic achievement’, whereas the original meaning of the word was somewhat different, originating in the Middle Ages as a benchmark to judge the work of craftsmen in the guild system. Most trades, including confectionary, goldsmithing, knife-making and painting, allowed a tradesman to submit a work when his peers believed him ready to produce work of sufficient quality for him to sign it and to be judged a master.

Whereas in its original usage masterpiece status was conferred by fellow craftsmen, judgement is now made by art critics, connoisseurs, museum curators and dealers. Whether these people are as well qualified to judge quality as a craftsman’s colleagues is another topic for debate. Some argue that the expression is used so often, and in such a wide context, that it has been debased to include just about anything, usually with the aim of conferring a superior status on an object for the purpose of making a sale. Others maintain that applying it just to major artworks by great artists is a misapplication of the more recent usage of the word and argue that it should include works from all the different fields of manufacture and craftsmanship, more in line with its original meaning.

I lean towards using the word less as opposed to more, and employing it in its more contemporary usage to describe major artworks by the most famous artists whose reputation has increased through the only true measure of an artwork’s merit, the passage of time. A master interprets his own vision, whether an idea or something he saw, in a way that is usually skilled, profound, interesting, perceptive, passionate and harmonious.

A masterpiece is timeless in the way it resonates with generation after generation and appeals to people irrespective of their language, religion or background. It often serves as a window on the past. A master absorbs the spirit of his time and transforms his experience into a universal one. Often people are aware they are in front of a masterpiece and yet they cannot articulate how they know this, as the energy that emits from such a work is metaphysical and therefore indescribable.
PERHAPS THE BEST way to consider a masterpiece is to examine a couple of examples. Rembrandt’s portraits of Jacob Trip (left) and his wife Margaretha de Geer (below left) hang side by side in London’s National Gallery with a wall to themselves in the Rembrandt room. They are painted in Rembrandt’s rough later style that he developed after his bankruptcy of 1656.

The portraits were probably executed after Jacob’s death in 1661 as a memento organised by Margaretha for their children. As such, Rembrandt had to base his likeness of Jacob on other earlier portraits by fellow artists such as Nicolaes Maes, while Margaretha was painted from life. Jacob Trip sits in a chair wearing a cap, white scarf and coloured shift while holding a stick. One of the richest men in Europe, having made a fortune in mining, iron manufacture, arms manufacture and arms dealing, he gazes coldly back at the viewer with the steely expression of a man used to getting his own way.

The smaller, vibrant study Rembrandt made of Margaretha is also a masterpiece, although, amazingly, the attribution to Rembrandt was doubted for many years by the so-called Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). The RRP was set up by the Dutch government to clear up once and for all the disputed attributions to Rembrandt. An amazingly incompetent and arrogant committee, it took no one else’s views into consideration and just went through Rembrandt’s oeuvre making frequently flawed attributions to Rembrandt or otherwise.

Margaretha is depicted head on, looking at the viewer. She is wearing a white ruff, a black cape and an odd hat and is holding a white handkerchief. Her hands are strangely masculine and heavy. Rembrandt was perfectly capable of painting a good hand if he wanted to, but in his portraits he often reduces everything except the face to peripheral detail to focus the viewer’s attention on the face. Her skin is parchment soft and her watery eyes gaze unseeing back at the viewer. Her clothes are 30 years out of fashion — she must have kept them from the time when she had been interested in such matters and pulled them out especially for the portrait.

Life as the wife of Jacob Trip must also have been an interesting journey, and she resonates with an energy that is both resigned towards the end drawing near and yet facing it with a calmness and peace that many people know from their own grandparents in their final years. These two paintings remain fascinating and moving on many different levels.

Just around the corner in the National Gallery hangs Rubens’s portrait of Susanna Fourment (below), painted some 40 years earlier, in around 1622, on the occasion of her second marriage. This painting is known as Le Chapeau de Paille (The Straw Hat), which is curious as she is wearing a felt hat with feathers on it of a design that was popular for both men and women in Flanders in the 1620s.

Susanna stands wearing a formal evening dress with cape and precious diamond-drop earrings, which were probably a gift from her father, the rich silk merchant David Fourment. The painting demonstrates the accomplishment and bravado that Rubens was capable of infusing into paintings of close family members. There is a hint of sadness in her expression, perhaps over the recent demise of her first husband. Susanna’s younger, prettier sister would later marry Rubens, who was good-looking, a linguist, a diplomat who negotiated peace treaties for his king, a lover of life, a successful artist with a studio that at times housed over 50 assistants, and he lived in a palace on one of Antwerp’s finest streets.

These three great paintings have been considered masterpieces since the day they were painted. Today they remain much loved and enjoyed by thousands of people every day. While many argue that if you believe something is a masterpiece then it is one, this argument sounds as ridiculous as saying you are a brain surgeon because you believe you are one. (Scalpel anyone?) Perhaps the time has come to stop debasing this expression by making it all-inclusive and to raise the bar once again and use it only for artworks of major importance by leading artists who belong to the rarefied canon that includes the best artworks ever created.

–
Ivan Lindsay
Lindsay Fine Art Ltd
405 Kings Rd
London England
SW10 0BB
+447798500897
www.oldmasters.net

The Canary in the Mineshaft

Where the art market leads, the stock market often follows. If what’s been going on at Sotheby’s lately is any kind of indicator, there are hard times to come, says Ivan Lindsay
FOLLOWING THE RECENT two-week marathon of art sales at the leading auction rooms and a difficult three nights for Sotheby’s, the Sotheby’s share price has turned down, halting a breathtaking ascent that took it from its 2009 low of 7 to its recent high of 54 on the New York Stock Exchange. The fall took the share price down to 40, a loss of more than 20 per cent in a month and a half. In the past, such drops in the Sotheby’s share price have been an early warning of trouble ahead in the art market and also for the broader stock market.

Since Sotheby’s was listed in 1988 it has been sold off early in the Nikkei, dot.com and recent mortgage bubbles, proving itself a lead indicator. Most recently, for example, Sotheby’s stock started to fall in November 2007, rapidly dropping by more than 40 per cent, while the broader stock markets did not start to sell off until some months later and only achieved major declines by late 2008.

Sotheby’s share price is a reflection of the health of the company, the trend of the art market and the general direction of the stock market. Since the last of these appears still to be up, investors must be concerned about the art market and the health of the company. The recent news that appears to have spooked investors is probably partly the less-than-stellar recent sales results and partly Sotheby’s announcement of its first-quarter sales results on 9 May.

The quarterly results followed on from record figures for 2010, the best for Sotheby’s in its 267-year history apart from 2007. The 2010 consolidated sales were $4.8 billion, the operating income was $274 million and the balance sheet showed cash at the year-end of $483.7 million. Bill Ruprecht, the president and CEO, seemed pleased with ‘a much lower risk profile than in the previous peak years of 2006 and 2007’ and called the results ‘a remarkable achievement’.

The first quarter has traditionally been a loss period for the company, but Sotheby’s reported a net income of $2.4 million for the 2011 first quarter and Ruprecht said: ‘This is one of our best first quarters on record… Sales are up year to date by 31 per cent.’ Less impressive were the operating costs, which, having been reduced in the downturn, rose by 16 per cent. Sotheby’s and Christie’s both tend to over-expand in the giddy bull markets of the art world and then have to slash costs in downturns.

In addition to the increase in operating costs, it may be that some of the less than transparent business practices that have emerged in this boom are starting to concern investors. It seems that when the art market is on fire, and with fierce competition from other auction rooms for business, it is tempting to start pushing business practices to the edge. This famously led to the price-fixing scandal of the Nineties, when the chairman of Sotheby’s was prosecuted and jailed.

More recently, it is the ‘irrevocable bid’ that is attracting adverse attention. This is the practice in which the auction room extracts a third-party guarantee that a person will bid at a certain level at the sale. In return, the guarantor is promised either a fee or part of the upside if bidding continues above their bid. If no higher bid is made, they buy the painting at that price.

Needless to say, this has a skewing effect on the auction and, while probably technically legal (although untested in the courts), the sale cannot be said to be a public auction. Allan Schwartzman, the leading New York art adviser, was recently quoted in The Economist, saying: ‘These sales are no longer auctions. To attract material at the top end, auction houses pre-sell the material to “irrevocable bidders”. They are deliberate, orchestrated events.’

Such sales create misleading benchmarks that override the normal rules of supply and demand. The odd sheikh from Qatar or tycoon from Ukraine might believe he is actually participating in a real auction but others, closer to the action, are increasingly concerned about the real value of some of the more widely traded artists.

Take Warhol, for example. On the surface, all looks dandy for Andy and works by the artist accounted for a staggering 25 per cent of the week’s takings in the recent contemporary sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury, totalling $181 million. That $181 million was made up of 54 works by Warhol. Nothing was left to chance and a small group of auction-room staff, dealers such as Jose Mugrabi and Larry Gagosian (sometimes in partnership), and collectors such as Peter Brant, Eli Broad and Steve Cohen are buying and selling and supporting prices by underbidding.

Mugrabi bought his first Warhol shortly after the artist died in 1987 and is believed to have 800 of his works. Gagosian entered the Warhol market in the mid-Eighties and was also closely involved in the markets of most of the other contemporary artists being sold.

Pink Panther (1998) by Jeff Koons, image courtesy of Sotheby’s. 

ONE OF THE major Warhols in the sales was Sixteen Jackies, a posthumous collection of small 1964 portraits of Jackie Kennedy, fifteen of which were bought from Warhol’s estate. The arrangement of the sixteen ‘Jackies’ had nothing to do with Warhol and was actually put together by the owner and seller, Brant, who was advised by Jeff Koons. The piece was supported by bidding from Mugrabi, who, with his sons, also underbid two other Warhol paintings at Sotheby’s and bought two more at Christie’s. The piece sold for just $18 million on the reserve against an estimate of $20–30 million.

Elsewhere, Sotheby’s had clearly overestimated several of the major lots that failed to sell, such as Lichtenstein’s Half Face with a Collar (unsold at $11 million) and Freud’s Naked Portrait Standing (unsold at $6.75 million). Koons’s Pink Panther, apparently one of his more important works, shows a porcelain bust of a blonde woman clutching one of her breasts in one hand and a model of the cartoon feline in the other.

Sotheby’s gravely informed potential purchasers that it was from an edition of three, the other two being in the hallowed halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and that this example came from a prestigious private American collection. It sold on an irrevocable bid for $15 million, having been expected to go for $20–$30 million. This did, however, represent a huge increase on the $1.8 million it fetched at auction in 1999.

In conclusion, it appears that the art market is currently overhyped and being manipulated, and investors in Sotheby’s are taking their profits. They may also sense problems coming in the economy and feel that this will be felt early in the art market and have an impact on Sotheby’s figures. As Goldman Sachs said recently, ‘Equity prices are a lead indicator of GDP growth and react strongly to expectations about the future.’ Only time will tell whether the Sotheby’s stock price correction is just a pause as the market catches its breath after its dizzying increase since 2009 or is the start of a serious correction. If its past performance can be any indication, then it might be time to exercise some caution.

After the recent contemporary sale at Sotheby’s, the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, expressed his gratitude to the ‘collector community’ who had ‘supported the sale’. It remains to be seen whether that was life support.

The recent round of London art auctions confirmed the strengthening art market and were notable for the reappearance of the Russians who have been absent for the last two years. Sotheby’s and Christie’s brought in a combined US$495m for their evening and day sales of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art with Sotheby’s adding an extra US$150.6m from the George Kostalitz collection and Christie’s US$37.5m from a stand – alone sale of Surrealist art.

During the credit crunch the Russians, who had borrowed heavily against their shares in the bull market, suffered from margin calls after the collapse of the Russian stock market. Allied with falling commodity prices they retreated from the London art and property markets. Now they have returned stronger than before and Kroll are busy doing credit checks on a new generation who have arrived in London with deep chequebooks. Asad Meerza, the leading private property broker who specializes in Mayfair and Belgravia and currently has 4 houses in Belgrave square and several of the better known Mayfair hotels on his books says, “In the last couple of years the top families from the middle east like the Royal families from Qatar and Saudi Arabia have dominated this market but in the last 6 months the Russians have re-entered the bidding and won several landmark buildings.” A Russian is amongst the bidders for the 1.3 acre £150m Piccadilly Estate which overlooks Green Park and includes the old home of Lord Palmerstone at 100 Piccadilly which was for many years the Naval and Military club(known as the ‘In’ and ‘Out’)and is being sold by receivers from the distressed portfolio of Simon Halabi.

At the art sales the Russians won of many of the top lots including Bonnard’s 1923 Terrasse a Vernon at £7.2m, Van Dongen’s portrait of the actress Lili Damita of c. 1926 at £3m and Magritte’s thoughtful 1941 nude L’Aimant at £4.7m. They were also in the bidding for the 1912 Les Arbres en Fleurs by Natalia Goncharova and were definitely bidding and believed to have been successful on the top lot at Sotheby’s, Picasso’s 1932 Portrait of his mistress Marie – Therese Walter which went for £25.2m.

Survival in post soviet Russia requires a keen instinct for detecting artifice and the Russians were conspicuously absent from the contemporary sales preferring artists with substantial track records of value. The contemporary market has made only a partial recovery from its 70% drop in value and to the Russians, Jean – Michel Basquiat’s childlike scribbling reminds them of childlike scribbling, Jeff Koon’s vacuum cleaners look like something they could buy from a hardware store and his inflatable dolls look like, well, inflatable dolls. They are not the only ones cautious of this market and Souren Melikian, writing in the International Herald Tribune, observed after the recent sales that although, “For the moment, contemporary art is on a roll…….The day one of the pundits discovers that the king has no clothes on, all the glib talk of marketing teams telling investors how savvy they are will not prevent tens of millions from melting like butter in the sun.”

The Russians also carried off several Bacon’s including the 1964 Triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud at £23m. Bacon has been sizzling in general recently although the artist himself had long periods in his career when he struggled, writing to his dealer in the 1950’s, “Is it possible to make me a small advance? I am quite broke and canvas and paints are terribly expensive…….If I can’t sell anything….I will get a job as a valet or cook.”

Baconski has become popular with the Russians since Roman Abramovich bought his 1976 Tripych in May 2008. Abramovich, often a trend setter in oligarch circles, had never been known to show any interest in art before the arrival of his current girlfriend, the svelte and glossy Dasha Zhukova, daughter of Alexander Radkin Zhukov, the oil magnate and arms dealer. Dasha explained to Abramovich that she wasn’t that impressed with Chelski, football was boring and that buying some art would be a sound investment and good for his reputation. Abramovich, showing an intuition that has taken him from selling plastic ducks out a grim Moscow apartment to one of Russia’s leading businessmen, rang up Sotheby’s and asked them what were their most expensive paintings coming up? The result was that in their next sale he bought the Bacon Triptych for US$86.3m and Lucien Freud’s Benefits Supervisor sleeping for US$33.6m.

Abramovich has close ties to Prime Minister Putin who also makes sporadic but spectacular forays into the art market. Putin has nearly completed construction of his vast French Renaissance palace on the Black Sea which the Moscow Times alleges has already cost over US$1bn. In Russia many think Putin is Russia’s richest man and the recently released Wikileaks cables show that US diplomats believe he is a beneficiary of the Amsterdam based crude oil trading company Gunvor. Gunvor, meaning “careful in fighting” in Old Norse, is the 4^th largest crude oil trader in the world, turned over US$70bn in 2007 and handles 30 – 40% of the Rosneft’s oil production(the Russian oil producer which is majority owned by the Russian government). In a cable intercepted by Wikileaks, John Beyrle, the United States Ambassador to the Russian Federation said that Gunvor’s “secretive ownership is rumoured to include Prime Minister Putin”, an allegation firmly denied by Gunvor itself.

Putin doesn’t often buy art himself but “encourages” others to buy it from time to time. For example, in 2007, 450 art objects including paintings by artists such as Nikolay Roerich, Ilya Repin and Boris Grigoriev owned by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was to be sold by his wife at Sotheby’s. Reputedly a copy of the catalogue arrived on Putin’s desk a week before the sale and he put in a call to Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek businessman reckoned by Forbes to be worth US$19bn, is a shareholder in Arsenal football club and owner of John Paul Getty’s old mansion Sutton Place near Guildford. Usmanov, known as the hard man of Russian business, presumably a title not bestowed lightly, survived 7 years in an Uzbek labour camp after a conviction for “bribes and extortion,” charges he has always denied.

Uzmanov pre-empted the sale, which was then cancelled, with a bid of US$72m and said, “I want to return it to the country where it belongs, so I have donated it to the state.” The collection now resides in the Konstantin Palace in St Petersburg where Putin likes to entertain. Who actually owns it now is unknown. Mikhail Shvydkoi, Head of Russia’s Federal Cultural Agency, said at the time that the Russian state had wanted to bestow some official honours on Usmanov but that Usmanov had modestly declined.

The recent unrest in the middle east has only intensified the flow of Russian money arriving in London and President Dmitry Medvedev said last week that, “the latest revolts in the Arab World were instigated by outside forces that were also scheming to topple the authorities in Russia.” Russia is no stranger to revolution and Putin and Medvedev control the world’s largest country with an iron grip. Whilst it is easy to criticise Russia’s many faults, people in the West forget that Russia stretches from Europe to China and incorporates a plethora of peoples, cultures and religions. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader has been critical recently saying, “We have democratic institutions, but they aren’t effective, they’re used to cover arbitrary rule, abuse. Society has been broken, it’s accepted the falsehoods.” However, others point out that Putin believes, probably rightly, as did those before him such as the Tsars, Lenin, Stalin and Krushchev that to relax control would result in violent confrontations and a slide into civil war.

Although a third of Russians in a recent poll said they could see the possibility of violent protest ahead some also admitted wryly that Russians tend only to work when there is someone around with a stick whilst others pointed to the Russian expression which loosely translates as, “Russians tend to only make the Sign of the Cross after they get struck by lightning.”

Certainly on the streets of Moscow last week there didn’t seem much sign of political unrest and it is hard to see anyone worrying about anything much other than surviving in the current temperatures which recently hit -30 as a front swept in from Siberia. A headline on the front page of the last week’s Moscow Times said, “Russians in Britain Enjoy Stability and Sea Air” and went on to describe that there are now 5 Russian language newspapers published in London and an estimated 500,000 Russians living in England with the majority of the poorer immigrants working in hospitality and construction. The attraction of England and London in particular seems only to be increasing for Russians of all income groups and the auction rooms and property dealers would be well advised to keep taking on Russian speakers for the foreseeable future.

Although the world economy is stubbornly deflating, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics having just calculated September’s inflation figure at 1.14% and 2009’s average at -0.34%, many believe that the vast creation of dollars through quantitative easing has to bring inflation in the not-so-distant future. So investors are once again trying to establish whether art is a good investment in times of inflation. This is a difficult question to answer because, although it is easy to see that a painting sells for more than it cost, it is hard to establish the holding expenses such as insurance, restoration, security, transport and transaction costs, and any gain has to be indexed against inflation.

Throughout history, however, many collectors have instinctively felt that art is a good investment, without being able to demonstrate exactly how. Most investments have an income such as the coupon on a bond, the dividend on a share or the yield on a property. Such an income allows banks to lend money against an asset, confident on how the loan will be repaid. Art is like gold in that the potential gain relies solely on appreciation.

Some collectors find it distasteful to discuss art in terms of investment and like to maintain that they buy what they like and then don’t worry about it. This is all very well for minor acquisitions, but even if investment is not their primary motivation, most collectors like to feel that they are making responsible acquisitions which will prove a solid investment should they or their descendents ever have to sell. Many collectors have made their fortunes by carefully assessing the potential gain offered by each investment opportunity and would like to apply that discipline to art. The lack of clarity in the potential returns from art put many off from becoming collectors, and those that do invest have to do so with limited information.

Gerald Reitlinger wrote the first book on assessing art as an investment, The Economics of Taste, in 1961, which analysed prices of three hundred artists from 1760 to 1960. He followed it up with a second book in 1970 which surveyed the art market of the 1960s. He tried to break down time into distinct periods from 1760 onwards, making calculations as to how inflation had eroded the pound (i.e. from 1760 to 1795 he maintains the pound inflated by a factor of 12) but he acknowledged that, “travelling beyond 1900 one runs into difficulties”. Although Reitlinger established the cost of some of the most famous acquisitions of earlier times, such as when Augustus the Strong, King of Saxony (the richest buyer of his day, whose superb collection can still be seen in Dresden) bought Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in 1754 for £8,500, it is hard to say accurately what this would be worth today and how it would have compared to whatever else Augustus could have acquired at that date for a similar sum. Reitlinger tried to make comparisons from contemporary expressions such as that a man was “passing rich on £40 a year” and you could get “dead drunk on tuppence”.

The next book to examine historical art prices was Christopher Wood’s The Great Art Boom 1970–1997 (Art Sales Index, Weybridge, 1997), which examined that period and gave prices for individual artists as well as an overview. Wood concurred with Reitlinger as to the difficulty of assessing art as an investment and observed that the rampant inflation of the 1970s further distorted the figures. He pointed out that art cannot be examined as a whole and has to be broken down into sectors, each of which swings in and out of fashion and moves up or down at different speeds. He also discussed the tremendous changes he had seen in the art world. When he joined Christie’s in 1963 turnover was just over £3m and the company had no overseas offices.

Regarding fashion, Wood observed that in 1970 Old Masters were still at the top of the art buyer’s wish list, with the 1965 sale of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Titus setting a world-record price of £798,000 (bought by Norton Simon) until the record was broken with the 1970 sale of Velasquez’s Juan de Pareja (bought by the Metropolitan Museum), which achieved £2.3m. From 1970 to 1997 the market was dominated by the Impressionist and Post Impressionists, which supplanted the Old Masters, with artists such as Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin all setting records. Van Gogh in particular dominated the records in the 1980s with his Irises (bought by Alan Bond but never paid for and later resold) at £28m beating his previous 1987 record held by Sunflowers at £22.5m (bought by Yasuda Fire and Marine). With the supply of Old Masters, Impressionists and Post Impressionists drying up, the Moderns took over after the 1991 recession. Moderns incorporate the period 1900–1950 and include sub-sectors such as Futurists, School of Paris, Expressionists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Abstractionists, Cubists, Fauvists, etc. Although Moderns maintain the No. 1 position, the most recent market, although at lesser values, has been the boom of the 2000s in contemporary art, which was strong until it collapsed in 2009.

What has emerged is that rarity puts buyers off. Although a great masterpiece will always attract competition, what the market seeks is a ready supply to create a pricing structure buyers feel comfortable with and to provide enough material to make a market. Hence the success of contemporary art and prolific artists such as Picasso, whose work is regarded as a currency and has consistently dominated the art market in terms of value sold (Position No. 1, most-traded artist at auction 2009, US$121m).

The Art Newspaper recently conducted an exercise with some specific pictures to establish how they had fared against inflation and gold. Pieter Brueghel the Younger is widely sought after by collectors of Flemish Old Masters. A technically accomplished artist, he made a living out of repeating the compositions of his more talented father, Pieter Breughel the Elder. These come up often enough to be familiar to art buyers, are non-religious in this secular age, decorative and attract buyers. The Kermesse of St George, 1628, sold at Sotheby’s, London in April 1981 for £275,000. It next appeared in July 2005 when it sold for £2.2m. With inflation, the £275,000 would have been worth £785,847 and investing the £275,000 in gold in 1981 would have been worth £297,000 in 2005.

Another well-publicised and documented art investment was the New York dealer Richard Feigen’s 1982 acquisition of Turner’s The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, Restored, 1814–16 ,at Christie’s, London for £648,000. Feigen sold it at Sotheby’s New York in January 2009 for £8.3m. The original £648,000 would have been worth £1.7m allowing for inflation over the period and if invested in gold would have been worth £2m.

Artprice calculates that post-war American artists have fared equally well with every £100 invested in 1998 in Jean-Michael Basquiat, for example, being worth £655 by June 2010. Warrior, 1982, sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2005 for £1m, appeared again at Sotheby’s two years later in June 2007 and fetched £2.8m. The original £1m would have been worth £1.06m after inflation and £1.3m in gold.

Although modern art funds come out with a bewildering array of figures, the only pension fund which has made a serious foray into the art market and published figures was the British Rail Pension Fund, which invested around £40m in art, or around 3% of their holdings, from 1974 via Sotheby’s, who gave free advice as long as the acquisitions and sales went through them. The fund acquired a collection of 2,400 pieces, including Chinese porcelains, African tribal art, Old Master and Impressionist paintings, Limoges enamels, and gold and silver objects. When it sold these objects between 1987 and 1999 the portfolio wound up with an annual compound return of 11.3%, but the gains came primarily from 25 Impressionist paintings, showing the importance of a diversified art collection from an investment viewpoint.

The pension fund’s investment was made against the backdrop of 17% 1970’s inflation and had three distinct advantages over modern ‘art funds’ in that it had unlimited funds so could afford the best items, it had access to the entire market (albeit through Sotheby’s) and unlimited time to hold the objects. The conclusion many drew from this exercise was that art proves successful as an investment only if held for the long term. Maintenance and transaction costs are simply too high for it to be a short-term investment.

So, in answer to the original question, is art a genuine hedge against inflation, the answer would appear to be a qualified yes, in some cases, and only when buying with the knowledge of someone on the inside. In some decades it outstrips stocks and bonds and generally exceeds inflation. It normally outshines gold, although probably not in the last decade when gold has moved from US$200 an ounce in 2000 to over US$1,300 in 2010.

The conclusion is that anyone who really wants art to perform primarily as an investment would be better off sticking to more normal, quantifiable and easily tradable investments such as stocks and bonds. However, art makes sense as a small part of an investment portfolio that generally keeps up with inflation, provides a diversification that holds its value in times of recession or war, and provides more enjoyment hanging on your wall than the stock certificates in your safe or interest on your bank balance. The most expensive painting sold to date was Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Christie’s New York, May 2010, at US$106,482,500. This had been bought by its late owners, Francis and Sidney Brody of Los Angeles for US$17,000 in 1950. Perhaps Spears readers might try doing the maths to see how good an investment that was after inflation?

A series of sales of artworks over the last twelve months has drawn attention to the dire straits in which many of the once-powerful aristocratic families find themselves. Sellers have included: the Duke of Devonshire, who sold a £10m bronze relief of Ugolino Imprisoned with his Sons and Grandsons (1549) by Pierino da Vinci; Earl Spencer, who had a clear-out from Althorp at Christie’s on 6th–8th July totalling £21.1m, which included Rubens’ Portrait of a Commander (1614) at £9m and Guercino’s King David (1651) at £5.2m; Lord Rosebery, who sold his Turner of Campo Vaccino (1839) at Sotheby’s on 7th July for £29.7m to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Earl of Jersey, who sold his Van Dyck Self Portrait (1640) last December for £8.3m to Philip Mould in partnership with the Milwaukee collector and dealer, Alfred Bader; the Earl of Wemyss and March, who recently sold his Saint Sebastian (1591), having previously parted with his Botticelli of The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ (1490) to the National Galleries of Scotland in 1999 for £10.25m; and Lord Northbrook, who in May finally managed to complete his 2006 sales of eight paintings to the Prince of Liechtenstein after an extensive investigation by the HM Revenue and Customs into the sale was dropped.

Lord Gerald Fitzalen Howard had a mixed sale from his vast Victorian Gothic pile Carlton Towers in late 2009, commenting, “It will secure the house for the next 100 years,” whilst observing of his roof, “There’s something like a third of an acre of lead up there, 80 tons worth.” The family intend to use the proceeds to expand their hospitality business and pointed out that opening up the house to corporate events, shoots and weddings meant that many of the items were at risk from staff and guests who didn’t realise their value. Lady Gerald noted, “The ebonised cabinets only ended up with waitresses putting coffee cups on them. They were a dumping ground.”

Some owners have been amazed at what the gimlet-eyed auction room staff have managed to unearth. The Duke of Bedford, whose grandfather was a pioneer in the country house industry when he opened Woburn Abbey to the public in the 1950s, sold some items in December 2009, including a Seated Nymph (1503) sculpture by Antico which went for £1.3m. The Duke said at the time he had been surprised that a “dull, small bronze” could be worth that much, adding, “I knew where it sat, but I have to admit I have never picked it up and looked at it under a light and said, ‘that’s spectacular.’ I was staggered to hear the estimate.”

Although most owners of stately homes try and put a brave face on the situation, talking of sales in terms of reallocating capital towards income-producing assets, privately they admit that the situation is difficult. Edward Harley, president of the Historic Houses Association, which campaigns for tax breaks for its membership, says its 1,500 members are struggling to pay for, “a maintenance backlog of £260m, which is basically to keep the roof on and keep the properties weatherproof and watertight, and I believe the backlog is growing. Clearly it’s not a sustainable position and our research shows that a quarter of major house repairs are being funded by works of art.”

Stephen Deuchar, the Director of the Art Fund, which raises and distributes funds to try and save artworks for the nation, believes the rash of selling is, “a combination of a difficult economic climate for owners plus a buoyant art market at the top end, an unusual combination”. Whilst it is true that the aristocracy have been hit by the credit-crunch recession as hard as any group, with a depressed farming sector, stock-market losses and falling visitor numbers, their current difficulties are nothing new and they have been selling consistently since their decline started in the 1880s. The few families who have survived intact, mainly those with extensive London property holdings such as the Westminsters, Cadogans and Portmans, show the extent of the decline of the rest.

Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century 7,000 families, described by the author David Cannadine (The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Vintage, 1990) as a, “tough, tenacious and resourceful elite” owned four-fifths of the land of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The land provided a huge income in the form of rents, agriculture and mining. The leading families had incomes c. 1880 of: Westminster (£290,000), Buccleuch (£232,000), Bedford (£225,000), Devonshire (£181,000), Northumberland (£176,000) and Derby (£163,000). The broad acreage of the leading owners such as Buccleuch (232,000 acres) and Sutherland (1,358,545 acres) was on a scale unequalled except perhaps in Eastern Europe with the Esterhazy, Lichtenstein and Schwarzenberg dynasties in Austria-Hungary and the Yusupov and Sheremetev families in Russia. It had been that way since the Middle Ages when William the Conqueror divided up England between his men after his victory at Hastings in 1066 and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the early sixteenth century had taken the church’s 20 percent of the British landmass into private ownership.

Land ownership was the key to political power through seats in the Houses of Lords and Commons and social prestige through the vast incomes that allowed for London palaces (such as Dorchester, Grosvenor, Spencer, Dudley, Bridgewater, Portman, Wimborne and Apsley Houses ) and county seats full of art (including Chatsworth, Woburn Abbey, Blenheim Place, Longleat, Castle Howard, Hatfield, Petworth, and Knole). David Cannadine sums it up: “these people had leisure, confidence, experience and expertise: they had time to govern. Their offspring, particularly second and third sons, filled the upper ranks of the army, the church and the civil service, making these an outwork of patrician power.”

However, after 1880, an unfortunate series of historical forces began to converge. A worldwide decline in agricultural prices diminished the income from the estates at the same time as an increase in democratisation extended the vote to the urban masses. First the Gladstone ministries of the 1880s extended the franchise to 60 percent of the male electorate and later the Land campaigns of Lloyd George before WWI culminated in higher taxes for landowners and higher wages for labourers.

During WWI the aristocracy, who had always been a warrior class, signed up with relish and set off for the front with a sense of adventure. Julian Grenfell, who “loved fighting”, found it, “the best fun one ever dreamed of” and Harold Alexander called it a “terrific adventure”, regretting that with the armistice, “all good things” came to an end. However, sadly, by the end of 1914, the glamour had gone and by the end of year, six peers, sixteen baronets, ninety-five sons of peers and eighty-two sons of baronets had been killed, their losses being proportionally much higher than any other group. During the course of the subsequent fighting there was hardly an aristocratic family who did not lose a member, and one in five volunteers from this group died. In 1916, Lord Rosebery wrote, “The fountain of tears is nearly dry. One loss follows another till one is dazed.”

With their families decimated, their estates becoming uneconomic and a series of left-wing governments raising taxes against them, they started selling millions of acres. Soon the art followed and then they began to demolish the London town and the country houses. By 1939, 250 mansions had been pulled down.

An increase in merit competition, professionalism, specialisation and expertise and a rise in the status of businessmen kept aristocrats out of the Commons and their names no longer guaranteed entry into the church, army or civil service. Through the 1930s and 1940s some tried to re-create their positions in colonies such as Kenya whilst others drifted aimlessly around the Cote d’Azur. Lloyd George commented with satisfaction that their place in history would be “like the scent on a pocket handkerchief”.

Luckily they always understood the value of art and, when riding high, they diversified into artworks, filling their houses in London and the country. Selling this art sustained them through difficult times and it is what little is left of these once considerable holdings that is keeping them afloat today. The art selling started to accelerate from the 1880s. In 1878 the Munros of Novar sold their Turners and Old Masters for £100,000 and later their Raphael Madonna for a great deal more. The Duke of Hamilton sold the entire contents of Hamilton Palace in July 1882 with the 2,213 lots achieving £397,562. The Duke of Marlborough sold his jewellery and Old Masters from Blenheim Place in 1886. Major sales followed from Lord Dudley, the Spencers, the Duke of Fife, the Duke of Norfolk and in 1904 the Marquess of Anglesey sold the entire contents of Beaudesert and Anglesey castle, which included jewelled walking sticks, paste diamonds and silken nightshirts.

Between the wars and after WWII the art sales only accelerated. Despite their volunteering once again to fight in WWII, Denis Healy said at the Labour Party conference of May 1945, “The upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent”, echoing a political view that has been maintained through the meritocratic era of Mrs Thatcher and the Labour governments of Tony Blair. Thus the aristocracy have faded from public life, business life and even the gossip columns. Living on the edge of extinction, they are left with portraying themselves as the custodians of their shrinking share of the national heritage, and the recent rash of art sales should be seen in its historical perspective rather than as a new phenomenon.

The buyer of the Giacometti was widely reported in the press to be Lily Safra, the wife of the late Edmond Safra who died in a fire his penthouse (now the home of Chris and Nick Candy) in Monaco in 1999. Lily Safra will be better known to Spears readers for her recent contretemps with Mikhail Prokhorov, who agreed to buy her estate on the Riviera, Villa Leopolda, for €390m, only to ask for his €39m deposit back when the financial crisis hit. Prokhorov’s Onexim group filed a lawsuit in Nice in January alleging Safra had changed the terms of the sale but a French court ruled in May that Onexim should forfeit the deposit.

There were at least eight serious bidders for the Picasso and the group is believed to have included Kenneth Griffin, of Citadel Investment Group of Chicago, Leslie Wexner from Columbus, Ohio, Steven Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors (who already owns another Picasso in this series acquired from Steve Wynn), Roman Abramovich and Joseph Lau, a property developer from Hong Kong. However, what is most interesting about this sale is that the Chinese press are claiming the buyer was from the Chinese mainland and, if true, this marks the first major acquisition of a western artwork by a Chinese person and could herald a new phenomenon and even higher prices. The late owners of the Picasso, Los Angeles based Frances and Sidney Brody, had bought it in 1950 for US$17,000.

The buyer of the Picasso was in a bullish mood because he also set a further record in the same sale by paying US$10.1m for Georges Braque’s 1953–54 window scene of a Marseilles neighbourhood entitled La Treille. Sotheby’s private client representative for China, Xin Li, has become more active at sales, taking bids on the telephone for her clients and she recently underbid a major Matisse Bouquet de Fleurs pour le Quatorze Juillet, 1919, at US$28m.

These high-profile auction results create the publicity and excitement which drive the art market, but the major sales today are increasingly being conducted behind closed doors in private sales, a trend that has accelerated during the recession as sellers did not want to risk their paintings at auction in uncertain times. When a painting fails at auction there is a perception that there must be something wrong with it and it normally means it is unsellable for at least five years, whereas if a private sale does not work, less damage is done to the picture’s reputation.

Until twenty years ago the auction rooms were wholesalers. Debts, divorce and death brought paintings onto the market, which the rooms then auctioned to the dealers, who bought 95 per cent of the works, which they then offered on to private buyers and museums. Go back even further to the post-WWII art market and it is unrecognisable. Catalogues were slim modest soft-back volumes which published brief picture descriptions with no illustration and no estimate. Attributions were often optimistic and dealers were expected to make up their own minds as to a picture’s merit and value.

However, as the 20th century drew to a close the rivalry between the auction houses intensified as they desperately tried to take market share off each other. In the late 1990s Christie’s and Sotheby’s resorted to price fixing to try and maintain their margins and Sotheby’s is still smarting from the public humiliation it suffered when caught. Christie’s managed to come clean to the US authorities just before Sotheby’s tried to do the same thing to them and gained immunity, whereas Sotheby’s chairman, Alfred Taubman, and its chief executive, Diana Brooks, were found guilty of conspiring with Christie’s to fix commissions. Taubman served ten months of a one-year sentence and Brooks was given a $350,000 fine, six months’ house arrest and a thousand hours of community service.

In more recent times, as well as trying to win market share off each other, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have gone after the share controlled by dealers. Clare McAndrew, the founder of Art Economics, calculates the art market’s most recent peak turnover in 2007 as US$65bn, of which around half is controlled by dealers. Before, when clients considered whether to sell at auction or privately, dealers offered the advantage of a discrete private sale. Sellers often have a preference for a quiet sale because of tax or family issues.

In response to this the auction houses have developed specialist teams to deal with private sales so they can now offer clients the option of a private sale or an auction. To develop this business Sotheby’s bought Noortman Master Paintings, a leading dealer in Old Masters, for US$56.5m in 2006, which allowed them a stand at the Maastricht Fine Art Fair. Christie’s bought the Old Master dealers Hall and Knight in 2004 and the contemporary dealer Haunch of Venison in 2007. Figures for private sales are growing rapidly at both auction rooms. In 2007 Christie’s had private sales of US$542m and Sotheby’s US$730m. In 2009 Christie’s private sales activity grew 3 per cent to 12.5 per cent as a percentage of its global turnover and Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s European president, expects this figure to grow to 20 per cent in the next three years. Pylkkänen says, “We’re much more than an auction room now.”

This push into private sales has already affected the turnover of the dealers. Christopher Gibbs, Sampson and Horne, Hotspur, and Jeremy have auctioned off their stock, and Heim, Colnaghi, Agnews, Leggatt , Partridge, Segoura and Salvatore Romano are either no more or have restructured, changed ownership or downscaled.

In the past, as well as selling to clients, the dealers also used to teach them about art and this means that today’s art buyers have less knowledge than ever before, which is changing the type of art in demand. It may well be that in the future the auction rooms will regret the day they decided to weaken the dealers, as increasingly it is only the most obvious art that they can sell. This art has to be instantly recognisable from across the room, have no hidden meaning, project an impact that strikes the viewer in the gut and require no previous knowledge or education in art; hence the appeal of 2009’s ten top-selling artists at auction: 1. Picasso (US$121m), 2. Andy Warhol (US$106m), 3. Qi Bashi (US$70m), 4. Henri Matisse (US$69m), 5. Piet Mondrian (US$58m), 6. Albert Giacometti (US$51m), 7. Fernand Leger (US$50m), 8. Edgar Degas (US$43m), 9. Raphael (US$42m), 10. Claude Monet (US$40m).

The auction rooms have now had to employ staff who know how to sell art. An advantage of auctions is that the fixed sale date forces buyers to make up their mind. The auction rooms now often use a combination of the private sale followed by auction. They market an artwork for three months or so and then put it up for auction, forcing potential buyers into a decision. In a soft market such as 2008 and the first half of 2009 dealers had a problem in that buyers did not feel they were going to lose a painting by making low offers or delaying. In the past the auction rooms needed: – auctioneers who knew how to work a room, accountants to do the books, specialists to catalogue and organise the sales and good-looking glossy-haired young aristocrats to man the front desks and tour the yachts, villas and stately homes looking for business. Now they have had to add some salesman to the mix because selling art is a specialist skill.

Nobody needs art and art sellers have to understand the essential difference between normal money and art money. Normal money acquisitions can be quantified against something similar, a car against a similar car or a house against a similar house, but art is unique and to buy great art a buyer has to be brave and suspend all his normal frameworks of value. Many businessmen who made their fortune by tough negotiating find this a hurdle, buy cheaper artworks and end up with second-rate collections. Art money is fun money, outrageous money, showing-off money, keeping the score money, which is why those who do not have it can never understand it and find the prices of major pieces so astonishing.

Art sellers have to try and understand the motivation of a client. As Noel Coward once observed, people normally have two reasons for doing anything, the reason they tell you and the real reason. The late art dealer Ernst Beyeler observed that “Passion, speculation, intuition, or the desire to acquire a status symbol” were the main reasons for buying art and said that his major client, David Thompson, with his “slicked-back hair and Clark Gable-style moustache would try every trick in the book when it came to negotiating: kindness, charm, pretence, bluff, passionate outbursts, gales of laughter, the confidential approach…”

With turnovers in excess of US$500m in private sales, Christie’s and Sotheby’s can now be said to be the largest dealers in the world, a trend that is accelerating and dealers have to learn to adapt to the new reality or face oblivion.

The Getty’s beautiful garden vista overlooking the Pacific will have some competition, after the museum’s acquisition of this sweeping view of Rome by J.M.W Turner, for £29 million GBP

The biggest news coming out of London earlier this month was, without a doubt, the new record at auction for J.M.W. Turner. His “Modern Rome–Campo Vaccino” is off to Los Angeles, having been bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum (bidding at Sotheby’s through the London dealers Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox) for £29 million GBP.

There has been some speculation that it could have gone for more if there had been a worthy rival in the bidding. (see sales comments by  the Art Market Monitor below) One would have thought that there would have been several, as Sotheby’s not only bestowed great anticipation for the work, putting it as the final lot in their sale, but also gave it a relatively conservative estimate of £12-18 million. It takes a lot for such a figure to be considered temperate, but “Campo..” was touted as a scintillating collecting opportunity: only five or six works of such magnitude and quality by Turner remain in private hands.
Souren Melikian, always incisive in his auction commentary for the New York Times, saw the sale as evidence of a declining market, saying that “Dealers fought tooth and nail over the very few paintings that deserved serious consideration” because it lacked works of quality and was padded out with drawings and the inclusion of 19th century British art.

It is true that the sale saw a few pieces soaring past their highest estimates, while a majority failed to perform above or even within expectations. We’d beg to differ, however, on Melikian’s overall evaluation of mediocrity on the block. Our previous reviews covered some of the bigger draws from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Aside from the Turner, Rubens’ “Portrait of a Commander” (see image #2 ) and Guercino’s “King David”, there were also some fantastic works by well knowns like Giovanni Bellini (see image #4), Claude Lorraine (see image #5),  and Theodore Gericault (see  image #6); the latter a possible link to the monumental “Raft of the Medusa”.

Furthermore, a slew of wonderful works by more minor artists went unsold. This included Samuel van Hoogstraten’s “Portrait of Count Ferdinand von Werdenberg” (see image #9), a Giuseppe Rocco still life (see image #7), and a surreal family portrait by the Dutch Golden Ager Pieter Codde (see image #8).

On the drawings side, the majority of our observations from  the week came by way of  Sotheby’s alone, where a featured work by Francisco Goya, “The Eagle Hunter,” (see image #10) sold within its estimate, for  £881,250 GBP, a Veronese study that we likened to an early rock-star demo shot past its high estimate at £67,250, a Pontormo lookalike by Domenico Puglio failed to entice any prospectors, and “Diana and Acteon”, a lively watercolour by Cavalieri D’Arpino reminiscent of Titian’s renowned version of late, sold for £151,250.

The dealer’s side of the spectrum was marked by the second annual Master Paintings week. The show continued the momentum of its inaugural undertaking, as an astute collaboration of renowned galleries showcasing their wares to the droves of collectors in town for the sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Within the relatively small area of St. James’ and Mayfair, a series of special displays in 28 galleries, including the big auction houses, showcased hundreds of works acquired in the capital. As it has for centuries, London looked like the centre of the Old Master market.

This was less an exercise in gallery hopping, and more a descension upon one treasure trove to the next. According to Colin Gleadell of the Telegraph, the highlight of Master Paintings Week amongst the dealer galleries was a rare outburst of painterly brilliance by art historic lightweight Frans Francken II. Known largely as a jack-of all trades during his time, whose studio produced a multitude of different types of pictures for patrons, Francken’s art reputation remains widely ignored- his best works sell in the six figure range today.

This particular canvas, however, has been touted as an exception, purchased by Old Master mogul Johnny Van Haeften for a record breaking price of   €7,022,300 EUR at Dorotheum auction this past Spring. The work is now being offered by the dealer for a princely £9.5 million GBP.

While that amount may have been excessive, it’s easy to see what spurned it, as the quality of the work truly constitutes what makes an Old Master so enchanting today.  It is a  fantastical depiction of a timeless aspect of the human condition: our choice between right and wrong. Centuries removed from today it is both beautiful, mysterious, and complex. The mythical allusions here may be somewhat indecipherable to the contemporary viewer. Yet in the age that we live in, where morality can seem relative, if not compromised; it’s refreshing to see our struggle between good and evil laid out in such stark and clarified terms.

We were also a fan of Philip Mould’s offerings, especially a magnificent full length portrait of Mary Sidney (wife of the Sixteenth century poet Philip Sidney). Dressed in black mourning dress with elaborate ornamentation, Mary was also a poet – one of the most important female writers of the period – and the painting is striking both in its handling, (attributed to Paul van Somer) and historical presence, which towers over us due to its enormous size.

The gallery describes the painting as “a wonderful depiction of passing time and beauty” adding yet another layer to a work that rewarded lengthy examination. Mould was also showing a significant Van Dyck self-portrait, and a beautiful “Study for the head of St Joseph” by the same artist.

Richard Green brought out a collection that echoed the variety of the Sotheby’s day sale – including portraits by Cornelius Johnson featured in the window display. This could be seen as a mark of connoisseurship, for while they were featured by Green, similar works by Johnson did not sell at Sotheby’s. If one’s looking for an explanation behind this disparity, the devil has to be in the details.

Other pieces of note to us from Master Paintings week: Van Haeften’s “The Card Players,” (image #15) by Gerard Ter Borch, one of the most important pieces from the career of an important Dutch painter, and Colnaghi’s whimsical “Oyster Eater,” (image #16) by the little known Henri Stresor, a portrait virtuoso who in this work, may have been poking a little fun at his subject/patron: an ignoble youth besot with gastronomic excess.

Other galleries offered exhibitions organized around themes, including Deborah Gage’s “The Real and Idealised: A selection of European Religious Paintings from the 16^th to the 19^th Centuries,” Rafael Valls’ “The Trompe L’Oeil in European Art,” and at William Thuillier- “Classical Vistas and Noble Sitters: Landscapes and Portraits of the 17^th and 18^th Century.”  By the titles alone, one can imagine the sweeping breadth of material that was on display.

FURTHER:

Christie’s OM Highlights  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

Sotheby’s OM Highlights  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

In Old Masters Dealers Beat Auction House  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

For Old Master’s It’s Dealer’s Choice  [Souren Melikian, NY Times]

In Turner’s Record-Breaking Sale, Further Signs of a Shrinking Market [Souren Melikian, NY Times]

£120 million of Old Master paintings and drawings go under the hammer [Colin Gleadall, Telegraph UK]

New York’s April auctions paved the way for a partial recovery that continued on into the London June sales. In April Christie’s and Sotheby’s offered a reduced total of 125 paintings, drawings and sculpture(48% less than the same sales in 2009) and their selling percentage increased by 26% with 30% of lots failing to find buyers which is about average for the sector. Also 25% of lots that did sell sold above their estimate as to opposed to 18% in 2009.

The auction rooms are keeping the market afloat by being more selective in what they will put on the block and reducing estimates. For example the mid estimate average price over the June sales was $61,876 which is 45% less than in 2007. Perversely, with demand becoming masterpiece driven, and falling in line with the similar trend that has been apparent in Old Masters and Impressionists for some time, 18 paintings were expected to fetch over $500,000 over the June sales as opposed to 9 during the same week in 2009.

The Christie’s sale of 8^th June made £14,466,129 against a pre-sale estimate of £7-10m selling 76% by lot and 90% by value. Alexis de Tiesenhausen, Director of the Russian department at Christie’s: “The sale sent a strong signal to consignors that demand is high and that knowledgeable buyers from around the world are committed to acquiring works of art. Competitive bidding saw seven of the top ten lots sell above their pre-sale estimates and in total 26 surpassing their high pre-sale estimate. The European Royal Collection of Fabergé objects performed very well and realized a total of £746,025 / $1,083,228, highlighted by a bonbonnière in egg form.”

The highest price was paid for Vasya, by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin which sold for £1,833,250 / $2,661,879 / €2,221,899 against a pre-sale estimate of £250,000 to £350,000. The arresting portrait of a Russian boy not seen since its last public appearance in 1932 was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder. Several dealers quietly expressed their reservations as to the painting’s authenticity prior to the sale but the painting looked fine after a cursory examination and they may have been planning to buy it themselves and trying to put off potential buyers to depress the price.

The highest price in the works of art section was paid for lots 177 and 188, two exquisite Fabergé objects, one a little turkey and the other a lamp, each selling for £193,250 / $280,599. The Fabergé section of the sale was sold 95% by lot and 97% by value confirming a growing interest in Russia’s most famous Imperial jeweler and bodes well for the consortium who bought the Faberge name in 2008 and have started making contemporary Faberge(there is an essay entitled ‘They are aiming for the Tsars’ elsewhere on this website which examines this story).

Christie’s reported that buyers (by lot / by origin) for the entire sale were 70% Europe, 22% Americas, 3% Asia and 4% Middle East.
Other highpoints of the sale included: -

• “A Riverside Farm”, by Mikhail Klodt (1832-1902), an imposing and very detailed Ukrainian landscape, sold for £769,250 / $1,116,951 / €932,331 against an estimate of £700,000-900,000.

• “Roses and Apples”, by Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939) – a stunning still-life which was executed during one of the most important periods of his career – sold for £937,250 / $1,360,887 / €1,135,947 against a pre-sale estimate of £100,000-150,000. This represents the third highest price for a work by the artist sold at auction.

• Princess Maria Tenisheva’s two bronze and enamel boxes and covers, one in the form of a fish, selling for £217,250 / $315,447 and the other in form of a pigeon, selling for £157,250 / $228,327 demonstrate the continued demand for rare and exceptional works of art. The Russian works of art section included five works of art selling in excess of £100,000.

• The European Royal Collection of 45 Fabergé works of art realized a total of £746,025 / $1,083,228 / €904,182 and was highlighted by a jeweled and enameled gold-mounted nephrite egg-form bonbonnière, selling alone for £115,250 / $167,343 / €139,683.

Sotheby’s small sale on June 7^th of Important Russian Art sold 17 of its 26 Lots with the highest price offred for a rare and well provenanced African period work by Alexander Yakovlev entitled Titi and Naranghe which sold for £2,505,250 against an estimate of £700,000-900,000. Yakovlev is a mainstay of the Russian art market along with Ivan Aivasovsky, Nicholas Roerich and Konstantin Korovin. In 2009, for example, he was the 4^th highest selling artist at auction with a turnover of $29,066,620 and the highest number of lots at 220. He holds the third highest price ever achieved for a Russian artwork with $5,561,040 after Konstantin Somov ($7,327,952) and Natalia Goncharova ($6,229,793). And yet despite this success between 2005 and 2009 his buy in rate was a high 38%. Perhaps this is explained by the bizarre discrepancy between the interest in his African works and the lack of it in his European works. For example in this round of sales at MacDougall’s there was a fine Capri period work by Yacovlev of an attractive subject entitled the Fruit girl of Capri which barely floated off on its reserve of £36,000…..so there are still bargains to be had in this uneven and young market.

Another fine lot at Sotheby’s was Yuri Annenkov’s portrait of Zinovii Grzhebin which sold for £1,777,250 against an estimate of £800,000-1,200,000. This was a solid but not spectacular result as another similar sized and dated portrait of another important Russian literary figure Aleksandr Nikolaevich Tikhonov had sold for £2,260,500 on November 28^th 2007 at the height of the market.

MacDougall’s auction of Thursday10th June rounded off the week with a total of £7,563,942. One of their top lots was the perennially popular Nicholas Roerich whose The Black Gobi sold for £790,118. Roerich sold 133 lots in 2009 for a total of $37,272,711 and averaged a buy in rate of fewer than 10% between 2005 and 2009, a percentage only beaten by Ivan Pokhitomov. MacDougall’s also did well with Niko Pirosmani’s Arsenal at Night which sold for £1,075,368 and Aleksandr Volkov’s Wedding which sold for £541,168. Their buy in rate was probably higher than Christie’s and Sotheby’s primarily because they are bravely including more Soviet period paintings in their sales, a period which the Russian collectors are still treating with suspicion but which will become sought after in time. MacDougall’s also achieved £1,592,202 for their inaugural sale of Russian works on paper, an area that is surely undervalued at present. On Monday 7^th June, in their Russian sale, Bonham’s had some successes with their top lots such as Vladimir Weisberg’s Portrait of Guinsberg which sold for £186,000 against an estimate of £50,000-70,000 and Erik Bulatov’s Portrait of Olga Andreeva which sold for £150,000 against an estimate of £80,000-120,000.

To conclude the Russian market is nowhere near the level it achieved in 2007 but it has stabilized and the better paintings are selling if at only 2/3rds of their 2007 levels. The demand is skittish, with many items failing to attract any interest whatsoever, and the only the major pieces with impeccable and watertight provenance that almost guarantees the attribution selling well. The taste of the realistic 19^th century artist such as Aivazovsky and Shishkin would also appear to be fading whilst demand for 20^th century works is in the ascendency.

In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: It is essential to discern the different shades of feeling. Nothing must escape an instantaneous perception. Here again intellectual and artistic taste resembles sensual taste: Just as the gourmet immediately perceives and recognizes a mixture of two liqueurs, so the man of taste, the connoisseur, will discern in a rapid glance any mixture of styles. He will perceive a flaw next to an embellishment. — Voltaire, 1757

Connoisseurship is a dead language and a dead art. Or so art theorists with disdain for aesthetic judgments would have us believe for some 40 years now. Indeed, connoisseurship has long languished — unfashionable and unpracticed — in academic circles and beyond. But still it matters for many people, and there are signs of a renaissance, even in the most unlikely realms of the art world. The time is ripe for reconceiving connoisseurship as relevant to furthering culture and seeing with maximum powers of observation that which humankind creates.

Connoisseurship is deeply rooted in the past. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin cognoscere (to know), and conceptually, it dates back to ancient Greece, where people began valuing art for its aesthetic merits, rather than for its imagined superpowers to placate deities. By the time a market for classical Greek sculpture was flourishing in Augustan Rome, acknowledged experts were opining on originals and copies and on matters of taste generally. With terms like judicium subtile videndis artibus (subtle judgment in seeing art), the nascent language of connoisseurship invoked the intellect and the senses. Connoisseurship has retained its classical associations ever since.

After waning in the Middle Ages, it regained currency in the Renaissance with a market that included paintings and drawings. The 18^th century was a Golden Age, as connoisseurship entered the English lexicon (in 1719 via painter -collector Jonathan Richardson as “connoissance”) and developed into an intellectual discipline with philosophers like Voltaire penning elegant discourses. More than a century of fine-tuning ensued, with methodologies echoing forms of literary criticism: e.g., “legislative” (judgment based on a priori canons), “scientific” (judgment based on objective criteria), “expository” (explanation without judgment), and “impressionistic” (personal responses with or without judgment). Approaches ranged broadly from striving for scientific objectivity (Giovanni Morrelli’s morphological analysis) to those engaging in subjective appreciation (Anatole France’s “adventures of a soul among masterpieces”).

Though widely regarded far into the 20^th century as essential for collecting, curating, and critiquing, connoisseurship suffered attacks early on. Enlightenment commentators worried that it was easily corrupted by market forces and unduly focused on establishing financial value, rather than on loftier artistic aspects (still true today). Such tendencies spurred protracted debate, but connoisseurship never withered until the 1960s, when champions of Marxism, Feminism, Relativism, Postmodernism, and Multiculturalism began to discredit it as elitist, sexist, unscientific, and irrelevant to socio-political-economic studies of art, among other harsh pejoratives. Today, connoisseurship is largely relegated to identifying valuable works (mostly by long-dead artists) in service of commodification, rather than art appreciation.

The Features of Connoisseurship

To ascertain why it has been so marginalized, one must examine common conceptions and methods of connoisseurship. Certain salient rational and sensual capacities characterize the ideal connoisseur. First, a capacity for prolonged, practiced looking: patient, in-person, close-up examination of countless works of art, comparing and contrasting them to discern their most subtle distinguishing characteristics. Connoisseurs consider the totality of art, practicing what theorist Max Friedländer preached: “He who knows but one master knows him insufficiently.” One thus cultivates a “good eye” through unconscious mastery of the art of perception. This must be accompanied by a keen visual memory. The best connoisseurs, as collectors of visual experiences, have a remarkable Proustian capacity for instantaneous memories of the most fugitive “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time.” They also possess the power of “intuition,” or what Voltaire calls “feeling,” registering the smallest perceptions of a work’s ineffable “essence.” (Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.) Finally, the connoisseur must paradoxically master communicating nonverbal perceptions through verbal opinions and judgments, delivered with sufficient objectivity and authority to carry weight with others.

These attributes may seem beyond reproach, but the fact that it requires considerable effort to become a connoisseur is objectionable to those who criticize anything not equally “accessible” to everyone. Moreover, reliance on inarticulable intuition in establishing authorship and authenticity (in the absence of empirical evidence or logical reasoning) likewise incites mistrust among those already suspicious of the fact that the designation of connoisseur requires no licensing, certification, or regulation (the old fear of “snake oil salesmen”).

Connoisseurship elicits further opprobrium when it seeks to rank works, since aesthetic judgments are subjective and aesthetic experience involves an element of schadenfreude. Detractors also deride it as an ethnocentric vocation of privileged white Anglo-Saxon males, rooted in the era when they practiced connoisseurship on their Grand Tours of Europe. During these long expeditions, young men collected expensive works as signifiers of social status — the kind of connoisseurs admiring paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence so spectacularly depicted here by Johann Zoffany. Ironically, democratized art consumption, no longer reserved for aristocrats and blue bloods, has eroded its social cachet.

Today’s Challenges

Add to this the contradictions between connoisseurship and contemporary art. Old-school connoisseurs, who favor “masterpieces” of the past over “mediocrities” of the present, are much to blame in alienating the contemporary art world. Traditional formalist stylistic analysis of visual elements likewise excludes contemporary art objects that have more to do with ideas than with how well something is rendered. When the artist’s hand is absent from ready-mades or commissioned objects, attribution and craft matter little, and conventional connoisseurs have trouble adapting their skills to other purposes. In cases of performance, “process-oriented,” and “instruction-based” art, for which no physical object even exists in a post-medium age, object-based connoisseurship is left out in the cold. (Marcel Proust was prophetic when he said that “Museums are dwellings that house only thoughts.”) Connoisseurship recedes, too, as contemporary notions of visual “culture” usurp “Art with a capital A.”

Other, more benign, factors are eroding connoisseurship. Scientific aids (e.g., x-radiography) are now widely preferred to the naked eye, though connoisseurs must interpret the data. Much of the world’s art can be seen, moreover, in lavishly illustrated books and high-resolution digital images on the Internet. In violation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s acquaintance principle, we increasingly forgo first-hand experience of the actual works on which connoisseurship depends. Yet no matter how fine, a reproduction can never exactly reproduce color, texture, scale, or volume. In art pilgrimages, cameras replace sketchbooks, minimizing mental and visual engagement before moving on to the next must-see work. Our time-pressed, short-cut oriented society stunts our eye. Probing physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of art are rare for all but the most purposeful art lovers.

Still further erosion of object-based connoisseurship stems from scarcity of great material in the market. What remains moves up the food chain, such that a still-abundant supply of late-period Picassos (once dismissed as incoherent scrawls of a past-his-prime master) now enjoys the same “masterpiece” status once reserved for Blue, Rose, Cubist, and Classical period Picassos. In some cases, rapprochement is merited, and decades of received opinion are rightly set aside, but in others, standards are lowered. Connoisseurs are only as good as what their eye consumes. Fewer great ones may inhabit the ranks of “the Trade” in years to come. Museum curators, enjoying prolonged communion with masterpieces out of unadulterated passion for their subject, may be the greatest hope for connoisseurship. (This is ironic, since museums did not exist when connoisseurship first developed, and were, in their infancy, exclusive playgrounds of wealthy would-be gentleman-connoisseurs before admitting the wide public that now populates them.)

There is hope, too, in the commercial arena now that the recession has purged spendthrift amateurs, recalibrated prices, and forced hidden treasures back into circulation, enabling connoisseur-collectors whose bank accounts remain intact to train their eye on what remains that is superlative. Perhaps now we can give credit to genuine connoisseurs, rather than to those whose sole accomplishment is to throw vast sums of money at art, only to be lauded as great collectors without ever taking the time to fathom their acquisitions. Theirs is legacy-building and status-seeking collecting, often relying entirely on another’s eye. Indeed, in the shadows behind many celebrated collectors is an unheralded connoisseur.

The Road Ahead

Connoisseurship aimed at establishing authorship and authenticity is not endangered (the market sustains those efforts in pursuit of profits). Rather, the threat is to that which aims to identify aesthetic quality in the belief that it can be ascertained and articulated and that greatness is rare and worth privileging. We produce more art than ever. In the words of philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” Connoisseurship helps, as Voltaire put it, “to perceive a flaw next to an embellishment” and thus disgorge.

In a recent interview, artist Jeff Koons captured the prevailing permissive attitude when he remarked, “Art requires you to bring nothing with it. Your own past history is perfect.” Yet we must surpass raw experiences of art (though legitimate) if we are to fully appreciate it (in the sense of understanding, versus enjoying) and heed Friedländer’s caveat that “a universal receptiveness carried to an extreme, leads to aesthetic Nihilism.” If we no longer receive classical educations or study iconography, we cannot grasp the rich symbolism, for example, of an Italian altarpiece, Dutch still life, or French conversation piece. We will think like a collector who recently quipped: “If there is a bunch of flowers on the wall, you walk by them and say, ‘That’s pretty,’ but that’s the end of it.” We will miss the profound aesthetic experience that Proust relished: “We have learned from [Jean-Baptiste] Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter had proclaimed the divine equality of all the things before the mind that contemplates them, before the light that beautifies them.” It’s true that no one must be a connoisseur to enjoy art, but the more one learns, the more one experiences new dimensions of appreciation.

To those seeking to banish connoisseurship from nontraditional idea-based art, or any art, let’s throw down the gauntlet. Connoisseurship is concerned with physical qualities, but equally concerned with ideas and Voltaire’s “different shades of feeling.” Form and content are conjoined. “We use colors,” Chardin said, “but we paint with our feelings.” These days, people are enamored with novelty, as if traditional techniques have run their course. With notable exceptions (e.g., John Currin, Will Cotton, Ellen Altfest, Eric Fischl), technical mastery of a medium like painting is irrelevant to critically acclaimed art-making. In literature, words must form intelligible sentences, or the message is incoherent. The best writers deviate from rules of usage for aesthetic effect, yet master them to break them impactfully. The same is true for virtuoso musicians and five-star chefs: Their discordant notes and idiosyncratic ingredients flow from fundamentals. But painters no longer need to know how to mix pigments, layer glazes, or achieve chiaroscuro, sfumato, sprezzatura, and the like to gain recognition. Nor do sculptors need to master modeling, carving, constructing, or casting. Fewer artists “strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting…to the perfect blending of form and substance” once extolled by novelist Joseph Conrad. Connoisseurship thus outlasts the very elements of style it was originally designed to promulgate and critique, since it continues to perform an evaluative function, whatever the object of its gaze. It can bring us full circle, however, to age-old art forms in assessing the relative merits of new modes of expression.

Though conventional stylistic connoisseurship may founder in the face of new art forms, we must still judge form and substance if we care to differentiate among all that inundates our senses in this age of art proliferation. Adapting French critic Ferdinand Brunetière’s commentary on criticism, if connoisseurship “forgets” that an object is an object, and refrains from judgment, it is no longer connoisseurship, but “history and psychology.” With her groundbreaking Extreme Connoisseurship exhibition of conceptual art at the Harvard Art Museum in 2002, curator Linda Norden reminded us that, if we expect new objects to look familiar, we cannot fully appreciate them.

Connoisseurship, which is open to all who invest the time, must evolve. Without sacrificing close scrutiny of objects, it must be reconceived to admit new criteria by which to judge new visual evidence and adapt to the works it seeks to judge. Still, it must strive to identify that which rises above legendary connoisseur-dealer Bernard Berenson’s dreaded “fads, stampedes and hysterias of the moment.” Although Friedländer reminds us that “the boundary line between genius and talent has never been done quite successfully,” we must nevertheless try. Connoisseurship teaches us that fame does not equal greatness; artists rise as much by luck as talent. Quality lies equally in anonymity; the greatest feat for a connoisseur is to identify quality that bears no name.

Just as writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe conceived of destructive and productive criticism, the same is true of connoisseurship (ultimately a form of criticism): Connoisseurs can make perfunctory pronouncements of “good, better, best” as gospel, or they can answer meaningful questions about what an artist intended and how well he or she succeeded. The answers (right or wrong) will inspire new artistic dialogue and creation — ultimate proof that the language and art of connoisseurship are alive and well, poised to awaken the senses.

Carol Strone is an attorney and founder of Carol Strone Art Advisory, 29 East 64^th Street, 4C, New York, NY 10065, 212.879.2748, cstrone@csartadvisory.com