Twenty years ago when I was the arts editor at Voice of America, I had the thrill of interviewing and making documentaries on many contemporary artists. Wolf Kahn, Paul Resika, and Rackstraw Downes were just a few I had the privilege of working with. I quickly found myself an avid collector of their work. Watching them painting and discussing the trials and tribulations of their artistic struggle was an education in the ups and downs of the creative process. And a fuller appreciation of their hard-won triumphs. You become a fan, a supporter, a cheerleader for the artists’ ongoing success—sometimes a patron and sponsor. Living with their art, something of their inner life touches on yours in the way of an abiding friendship.
Collecting emerging and contemporary artists (primary market, direct from the artist’s studio) is very much about the thrill of the new-new thing, discovering wonderful young talent with the ambrosial smell of fresh paint still lingering on the canvas. It is about creatively connecting with your life and times—feeling the buzz, the pulse of the here and now . . . something happening as it’s happening—the energy of the moment fledging before your very eyes.
For collectors of historical or secondary market works, the relationship with the artist has a different tenor, sometimes tinged with nostalgia or fascination with times past, but no less full of wonder: that an artwork can preserve something of the spirit of its maker long after they’re gone—that a distant moment of inspiration can still flicker to life under your enraptured gaze. Connecting through time with the life and work of great artists also sheds needed light on the preoccupations of the moment. A bracing, sometimes breathtaking perspective!
I shall never forget stumbling upon the work of a Tonalist artist, Charles Melville Dewey (1849-1937), in a small Chicago auction some years ago. Housed in a splendid gilded frame, the landscape was barely legible beneath the layers of yellowed varnish and brackish nicotine stains. No signature was visible. On the back of the frame were faded labels from once famous galleries and what looked like torn and missing exhibition labels. The auction house listed the work as in the style of Charles Melville Dewey based on the vague memory of the consigner. The resident expert suggested the painting was a wreck—not to go near it. There was no competition for its purchase. When I got the painting home and took the canvas out of the frame, the artist’s signature was instantly visible, hidden under the edge of the frame! My restorer went at it and found to her delight that under all the old varnish the original work was in perfect condition. Cleaned, Dewey’s, Return of the Hayboats, c. 1892 sang anew, as scintillating a canvas as the day it left the artist’s studio. And a little research—Google to the rescue—revealed it to be one of the most important and exhibited paintings in late-nineteenth-century American art: Chicago Worlds’ Fair of 1893 and the Munich International Exhibition of 1895. Such finds and such stories stir the hearts of secondary market collectors.
Today, cross-collecting, collecting both contemporary and historical works in the primary and secondary markets is becoming more common as collectors discover that living with works by living artists can be enhanced by hanging them in your home with those of their artistic forbearers . . . the living and the dead engaged in a glorious minuet across the ages!
(Sixth in a 21-part series of posts on the Art of Collecting. Originally published on Artsy.net. David Cleveland, an advisor to Artsy, is available to Collector Program members to discuss both the critical market details and strategic vision necessary to building a fine art collection.)
Leave a Reply