T

I often point out in my lectures that art is a fickle mistress, for whom mutual appeal and attraction can change on a dime. With so many artists in the world and so much art to choose from, how does one go about selecting the right piece for you? This question becomes much more complex when considering market trends, artist reputation, auction activity and, for that matter, global markets. My advice: shut all of that out and buy what you love.

Art endures. It carries us, like only family can, because it serves as a constant reminder of how precious and beautiful the world can be when we are in the presence of an object created merely for its own sake. Art has little or no utility, in the absolute sense. It exists to give us joy. Few things are valued and passed on after we go. The house and cars are sold, the furniture discarded, clothing given away, the jewelry and silver divided up.

But good art persists. It may be gifted to museums or collections for future generations to enjoy. It soon enjoys a place of honor in the home of the next generation. Its message gets stronger with the passage of time; its colors and composition never get tired or commonplace.

Love endures beyond our years here on earth in the memories of our loved ones. Art can deliver a timeless message that serves as a symbol or beacon of our good taste, our values and our commitment to surround ourselves with the very people and objects that truly matter. Art, like love, is eternal.

For Kathy, with Love

Illustration detail: Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1907-08); William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Cupidon (1756)

S

(Left) [IMAGE 1] Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl Eating Sweets (detail), 1680-85, oil/panel, 73 x 61″.  Collection Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts fine arts magazine 

Image 2: Collectors, Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo. photo: Walter Silver

Given their nationalities, it may seem obvious that they would collect Dutch and Flemish art, but it was carriages, sporting prints and a farmhouse that they owned in New Hampshire which launched their adventure as collectors. Only when Peter Sutton, then curator of European Painting at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, suggested they start collecting paintings representing the Netherlands’ Golden Age did they turn to Old Masters. 

In creating a collection composed of exemplary work of the most significant Dutch and Flemish artists of the seventeenth century, the van Otterloos have been guided by Dr. Simon H. Levie, former director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Dr. Frederik J. Duparc, former director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The works span the genres that characterize Golden Age painting: church interiors and townscapes, portraits, scenes of everyday life (“genre” painting), seascapes and landscapes, and still lifes. 

Today the van Otterloos’s collection totals 68 paintings, as well as a smaller number of additional pieces representing the decorative arts. Part of the collection has already been exhibited at the Mauritshuis. “In the Netherlands, people are familiar with Dutch painting as part of their heritage,” Mrs. van Otterloo noted, four days before the exhibition opened at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, earlier in 2011. “We’re really excited and eager to know what people will think.” When asked what she would like visitors to be aware of, she replied, “The beauty and quality of the works. It’s a wonderful survey of Dutch painting.” 

Martin Luther attaches his 95 Theses (1517). Image not part of PEM exhibition

The exhibition was organized by The Peabody Essex in conjunction with the Mauritshuis. Dr. Frederik J. Duparc is the guest curator, and Karina Corrigan, the H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at Peabody Essex, is the coordinating curator. 

In 1555, only 38 years after Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany (left), sparked the Protestant Revolution, the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries came under the control of Philip II of Spain. In 1579, the seven northern provinces, which were largely Protestant, united in the Union of Utrecht; two years later, they declared their independence from Spain. For the new United Provinces, the following century would be marked by enormous economic growth fuelled by trade, and by the unprecedented prosperity and cultural flowering known as the Dutch Golden Age. 

Image 3. Note: Reference all image detail below. Click here to enlarge

Wealthy merchants, bankers and other prosperous citizens replaced monarchs and the aristocracy as patrons and collectors of art. This led to the rise of an open art market. Paintings tended to be fairly small in size and scale, as they were purchased not for churches or palaces, but for private homes. Subject matter was secular, spanning a range of genres, including portraits, facial studies, townscapes, church interiors, scenes of daily life, home interiors, landscapes and seascapes, and still-lifes. Modesty was a virtue, though it did not preclude national pride. 

The highly detailed, lifelike rendering characteristic of Dutch painting of the era resulted in works that appeared highly realistic; but it was a deceptive realism, tempered with imagination and altered by the artist to achieve a particular end. 

Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection opens with an introduction to the Golden Age. A photograph of the van Otterloos greets visitors as they enter the first gallery. A large map shows the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Three landscapes – February by Jacob Grimmer, a miniature painted on copper by Brussels-born Jan Brueghel the Elder and entitled, Village Scene with a Canal, and Hendrick Avercamp’s larger Winter Landscape near a Village [IMAGE 3] provide visitors with views based on areas indicated on the map. 

Image 4

The low two-drawer oak and ebony ribbank cupboard, ornamented with geometric and figurative carving, is characteristic of the Southern Netherlands and is the only Flemish cupboard in the exhibition. In the seventeenth century, houses had few pieces of furniture, which took up valuable space and was expensive. Elaborately carved furniture was a status symbol. A four-drawer cupboard, or beeldenkast, of oak and ebony seen later in the exhibition, demonstrates a design associated with the Northern Netherlands, particularly Amsterdam [IMAGE 4 ]. 

Image 5

Jan van der Heyden’s View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam [IMAGE 5, and link to video clip at end of article] in the second gallery exemplifies the genre known as townscapes. In contrast to many of his other paintings, Van der Heyden’s rendering of the church, a well-known symbol of Amsterdam, is unusually faithful to the actual structure. The church was completed in 1631 and was the largest Protestant church in the world until the construction of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is still the largest Protestant church in the Netherlands and is the burial place of Rembrandt. Anne Frank mentioned the church’s set of bells (carillon) in her diary; she could not help hearing them, for the Westerkerk is located not far from the building in which she and her family hid during World War II. An interactive in the PEM exhibition gallery enables visitors to listen to the sound of those bells. 

Church interiors were also popular subjects. Such views were simultaneously scenes of everyday life in a religious setting. In the absence of crucifixes and other imagery that Dutch Protestants renounced—because they associated them with Roman Catholicism—the interior architecture of the church assumed a new importance. The Van Otterloo collection includes three examples, one by each of the three seventeenth-century masters of the genre: Gerard Houckgeest, Pieter Saenredam, and Emanuel de Witte. 

In The Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William of Orange, by Gerard Houckgeest, monumental sun-dappled columns frame the tomb of the great hero of the Dutch revolt against Spain. Darker tones prevail in Emanuel de Witte’s Interior of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam [IMAGE 6]. This latter work is one of the relatively few paintings in the exhibition executed on canvas, rather than on panel. 

Image 6

The introduction of private citizens as patrons and collectors of art contributed to the demand for portraits, a genre that ranked only below history painting in the traditional hierarchy of subject matter. Rembrandt van Rijn, the most famous portraitist of the Golden Age, arrived in Amsterdam at the age of 26 from his hometown of Leiden and in just a year was known as the finest portrait painter in the city. 

The Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh [IMAGE 7 ], which Rembrandt painted not long after his arrival in Amsterdam, was purchased by the van Otterloos in 2005. Rembrandt knew the sitter; he was living in her cousin’s house, and two years later, another one of her cousins would become his wife. 

Image 7

The other great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age, Frans Hals, is represented in the van Otterloo collection by his Portrait of a Preacher. Flemish by birth, Hals was just a child when he moved with his family to Haarlem. While he is particularly well known for his group portraits of civic guards of Haarlem, he also painted a smaller number of individual portraits as well as genre scenes. 

It is difficult to imagine the Dutch Golden Age without genre painting, or scenes of daily life. Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot by Isaack Koedijck [IMAGE 8] , shows a barber-surgeon, a legitimate medical practitioner in seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands, treating a patient. Koedijck and his wife spent most of the 1650s in Asia, where he was in the service of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). The VOC, which was founded in 1602, possessed a monopoly on Dutch trading activities in Asia and played a major role in the overseas trade of the Dutch Republic. 

The placement of the open window and hanging birdcage recall the composition of The Arnolfini Portrait (also referred to as The Arnolfini Wedding) by the early fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. The open book on the table in the background has only recently been identified, for Koedijck did not show the title page. An actual copy of the book may be seen in the exhibition in a display case next to the painting, while on a nearby wall, an interactive–one of three in the exhibition–invites visitors to further explore Koedijk’s painting. 

Image 8

Additional examples of genre scenes are exhibited in the fifth gallery. In Sleeping Man Having His Pockets Picked [IMAGE 9] by Nicolaes Maes, the pickpocket openly acknowledges the presence of the viewer, whom she invites to keep her secret as she puts a finger to her lips. Maes, who was a student of Rembrandt, painted genre scenes for not quite five years before beginning a long career as a successful portraitist; such scenes are therefore relatively rare. 

In the same gallery are examples of another genre of Golden Age painting associated specifically with the Dutch: the tronie, or facial study. Though related to portraiture, the tronie is not to be confused with it; a tronie is not intended to be a likeness of a specific person; the sitter, who may well be a model, is not expected to be identified. The van Otterloo collection includes three such works, exhibited side-by-side: Jacob Backer’s Young Woman Holding a Fan, Salomon de Bray’s Study of a Young Woman in Profile, and Jan Lievens’ Young Girl in Profile [IMAGE 10] . 

Image 9

While most of the art of the Dutch Golden Age drew its inspiration from contemporary life, classical antiquity also provided themes for artists, thanks in part to the availability of translations of classical writings and a high level of literacy. Twenty-year-old Aelbert Cuyp marries a classical subject to the landscape genre in Orpheus Charming the Animals [IMAGE 11 ]. Enticed by his music, an assembly of animals and surrounding trees listens to the Greek god Orpheus, whose mother, Calliope, was the muse of epic poetry. The presence of an elephant, an ostrich, two tigers and a camel – animals that would have been considered exotic – reminds us that the seventeenth century also saw the rise of cabinets de curiosités, or curiosity cabinets, which housed collections of objects ranging from natural history to antiquities, and which served as forerunners to museums. 

Contrasting with the classical setting of Orpheus Charming the Animals is Gabriël Metsu’s Old Woman Eating Porridge, a theme that was pioneered some twenty years earlier by another artist represented in the van Otterloo collection, Gerrit Dou. An elderly woman eats a bowl of porridge while her cat keeps her company at her feet. The simple interior speaks of virtue and modesty, while the fur of the cat is rendered with the same careful attention to texture that characterizes so much of Dutch Golden Age painting. 

Image 10

The small oak table, displayed near the painting, is also part of the van Otterloo collection, giving visitors to the exhibition an opportunity to see an actual table of the type depicted in Metsu’s painting. 

Landcapes and seascapes constitute a significant part of the van Otterloo collection, and are displayed in the seventh gallery. The foremost of all Dutch landscape painters, Haarlem-born Jacob van Ruisdael, is represented by three paintings: Wooded River Landscape, View of Haarlem [IMAGE 12] and Winter Landscape with Windmills. 

Seascapes reflect the importance of water in Dutch life, for water, which was ever a threat to the low-lying land, also led the nation to international power and wealth. Not surprisingly, the seventeenth century was a vital era for Dutch marine painting. Artists rendered details with the realism for which the period is renowned, even while incorporating imaginary and symbolic elements. Leiden-born Willem van de Velde the Younger is considered the most important seventeenth-century painter of the genre. His ability to convey atmospheric effects, as evidenced in works such as Fishing Boats by the Shore in a Calm, reminds us of the influence that the plein air seascapes of such later Dutch artists as Johan Barthold Jongkind exerted on the work of the young Claude Monet. 

Image 11

Also on display in this gallery is the painting that launched the van Otterloos’ Dutch and Flemish collection: Jan van Goyen’s River Landscape with Peasants in a Ferryboat. 

An exception to the smaller size and low horizons of most Dutch landscapes and seascapes is Jan Both’s Italianate Landscape with Travelers on a Path. This large fantasy landscape has never hung in the van Otterloos’ home, owing to its size; it shows the influence of Both’s visit to Italy, as well as his fondness for the light-infused work of French artist Claude Lorrain, a Both contemporary. 

Image 12

The last gallery of the exhibition is devoted to still-lifes. In contrast to the distant views and outdoor settings of landscapes and seascapes, the still-lifes present intimate, close-up views, most often of flower arrangements or food. Still Life with Flowers [IMAGE 13] by Rachel Ruysch—one of the very few women artists who achieved renown during the Golden Age—is one of several floral still-lifes in the collection. Like landscapes, still-lifes ranked lower in the hierarchy of subject matter than did portraiture and genre painting, but nevertheless enjoyed great popularity. Artists blurred the line between reality and fiction to produce aesthetically pleasing results, and thus did not hesitate to combine flowers of different seasons, no matter how realistically they might render them, in a single bouquet. 

A live, albeit sleeping, animal enters a still life in Gerrit Dou’s Sleeping Dog [IMAGE 14, below], showing a small dog curled up by an earthenware pot and a bundle of firewood. Dou, who studied under Rembrandt and achieved considerable success in his own lifetime, also painted animals and scenes of daily life. 

Image 13

Two pieces of blue-and-white kraak porcelain in Breakfast Still Life with a Ham and a Basket of Cheese by Flemish artist Pieter Claesz. remind us of the enormous importance of trade in the Dutch Golden Age. Kraak ware, produced in China for export between the late sixteenth and early decades of the seventeenth century, arrived in the Netherlands on the ships of the VOC (Dutch East India Company). Next to the painting, a small linen press made of oak, ebonized fruitwood and beech shows visitors how the Dutch expertly pressed the table-cloths and napkins that feature in Claesz.’s and a number of other Dutch works. 

The organization of the exhibition by specific genre such as portraits, still-lifes and seascapes, coupled with lively and informative wall texts, makes the exhibit accessible to visitors whatever their prior knowledge of Dutch art. The inclusion of furniture and other objects helps viewers better understand the lifestyle of the individuals and spaces portrayed in the paintings, while interactives turn them into active participants, providing opportunities to experience the collection by hearing and touch as well as by sight. The interactives also permit the inclusion of information, some of it in game format, which might otherwise have been omitted, and will help to draw in younger visitors. The overall accessibility of Golden mirrors the friendliness of the collectors themselves, both in their openness and enthusiasm in discussing their collection and their hopes for the exhibition with this writer and others, and in the remarkable generosity they have shown in their lending policy. This is an exhibition not to be missed! 

By Susan E. Schopp, Contributing Writer 

On Display at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, now through February 12, 2012 

Visit the Peabody Essex Museum site; watch and hear Bach’s Tocata in D Minor on the Westerkerk carillon at: http://www.youtube.com/user/peabodyessexmuseum#g/c/A0433BEDF9C81A8A  

 An award-winning, full-color 404-page catalogue, “Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection” accompanies the exhibition and is available through the museum Web site at: www.mfah.org  [IMAGE 14, left]. 

* * * 

Susan E. Schopp is an independent scholar specializing in the shipping of the Canton trade, c. 1700-1842. She holds a Diplôme d’études supérieures in museum studies and a Diplôme de recherche in East Asian art history from the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Her current research focuses on chop boats. In her spare time she is a member of the volunteer crew of the full-size, fully operational reproduction East India ship, Friendship of Salem. 

____________________________________ 

Image References: 

² Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo in their home in Massachusetts. Photo: Walter Silver. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum. 

³ Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape near a Village, c. 1610-15. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

⁴ Cupboard (Beeldenkast), 1620-40. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Photo: Walter Silver. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum. 

⁵ Jan van der Heyden, View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam, c. 1667-70. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. 

⁶ Emanuel de Witte, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, c. 1660-65. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine  Arts, Boston. 

⁷ Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh, 1632. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

⁸ Isaack Koedijck, Barber-Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot, c. 1649-50. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum.  

⁹ Nicolaes Maes, Sleeping Man Having His Pockets Picked, c. 1655. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

¹⁰ Jan Lievens, Young Girl in Profile, c. 1631-32. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 

¹¹ Aelbert Cuyp, Orpheus Charming the Animals, c. 1640. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. 

 ¹² Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem, c. 1670-75. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. 

 ¹³ Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Flowers, 1709. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. 

 ¹⁴ Gerrit Dou, Sleeping Dog, 1650. The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Lehmann-Made Tut-Tut, No 490 (1913). Coll. of L. J. Buehler, 1999. Gifted to Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!” ~Charles Dickens

We may be shopping for the children in our lives, reminiscing about the holidays of our youth, or analyzing our portfolios, hoping that the decision to invest in Barbie instead of G.I. Joe this season turns out to have been the right one; whatever the case may be, whether or not they are a part of our daily lives, the December holiday season is upon us. This is the time of year when toys find themselves at center stage. artes fine arts magazine

Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA

Amid parties featuring our finest china and specially prepared meals, adults understand the inherent significance of a holiday, religious or otherwise, knowing that the music, dishes, and décor are not the reasons for the celebration in and of themselves, but the expression of an historical tradition based on an event like the miracle of the oil or the birth of Jesus Christ. However, while children can be told the significance of a date on the calendar, they often cannot grasp its full meaning without something tangible to bridge the gap between mature comprehension and youthful naivety. Often, that something is a new or special toy, which stamps the occasion with the kind of wonder and delight that children then continue to associate with holidays throughout much, if not all, of their lives. In short, toys have always made the holidays special for children, and that simple fact is being recognized this season by The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, Pennsylvania, as it warmly invites children and parents to come and enjoy a unique collection of antique toys which have been brought from their usual home in the Period House, Hoyt West, to the second floor of the Greek Revival style mansion known as Hoyt East, with plans to remain on display through the end of January.

Gifted by third generation furniture manufacturer, Louis J. Buehler, in 1999, just one year before he died, the Hoyt’s toy collection dates from the early 1900’s. Buehler’s grandfather, Gottlieb, had been born in Germany in 1857 where he trained as a carpenter. He emigrated to the US in 1881, bringing his woodworking skills with him, eventually settling in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he built a prosperous career making furniture. Louis succeeded him in the family business.

Left: Loius Buehler (c), with father (l) and grandfather, Gottlieb (r). c. 1920

While Louis never married or had any children of his own, he obviously cherished his possessions because, while he was still alive, he gifted a few important pieces to his nieces and nephews only to have them sell the items, which disappointed Buehler enough that he decided to give his estate to museums. Having been involved with museums throughout his life, he understood their continuous need for money, so along with his childhood treasures, furniture and art, he included The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in a trust providing annual support for display of the collections.

Steiff bears, early 20th c.

Some of the most noteworthy items include at least 1000 small lead figures. Some of the figures are animals and many are people, some British, German, Japanese, and American. There is a variety of turn of the century wind ups, most of which are still in working order, and a collection of at least a dozen board games that are among the few items which are not often shown.

Regularly on display in the Period House is a collection of Little Folks magazines, an educational board, a homemade doll house, built by his father, and a model of Buehler’s own house, which he built himself as a child. There is a tin tea set, a viewfinder with several slides, loads of Matchbox cars, many still in the original boxes, and a number of Steiff pieces. The Steiff bears are protected by a glass case, and the smaller of the two is most unique, with a removable head that reveals a glass vile within the cavity of the bear’s body, meant to hold candy.

Lehmann Halloh Motorcycle (1908). A 'Gyro Action' tin toy.

The toys themselves speak volumes about the material culture of childhood, a trending theme in today’s fine art galleries. They also remind us of what was happening in the areas of art, industry, science, and social progress during a previous age. Significant changes were occurring in the world of art and design during Buehler’s childhood, including a reconsideration of who sets artistic standards, and how art should be shared with the public. He would have witnessed the industrialization of America, which provided much of the subject matter for the realist movement. It was a new era, one of mass production, and popular culture grew to be a profitable national product. Tickets for a twelve-day cruise could be purchased for roughly $60, and the Ziegfeld girls earned $75 per week (Whitley 2008).

It seems fitting for Buehler’s collection, which includes such a charming group of tin toys, to have made its home in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which was known as the tin plate capital of the world in the early 1900’s, boasting the largest tin plate mill in America at that time.

Production of tin toys began in the mid 1800’s as an inexpensive alternative to wooden toys. Initially they were hand painted, until a process known as “offset lithography” began being used to print designs on flat tinplate, which was then shaped using dies and assembled with tabs. Leading tin toy manufacturer Ernst Paul Lehmann, of Germany, produced original, high quality designs, but eventually their proliferation tapered off in the U.S., when American manufacturers like Louis Marx and Company, amid post-World War I anti-German sentiment, tapped into a newly discovered supply of tin ore in Illinois.

'My Friend' celluloid & metal swimming figure, Japan, 1930s.

Again, war had an impact on tin toys, when the need for raw materials during World War II, halted production altogether; afterwards, under the Marshall Plan, Japan took over “all of the low profit, high labor manufacturing and the U.S. companies could sell the imported tin toy product. It worked better than expected, and Japan became a tin toy manufacturing force until the end of the 1950’s…In the 1960’s, cheaper plastic and new government safety regulations ended the reign of tin toys” (Konter 2010).

Perhaps the most remarkable piece on display at the Hoyt is a 1908 Lehmann Halloh Motorcycle, a ‘Gyro-Action’ mechanical tin toy, featuring rubber-coated wheels and a young male rider, clad with tall red socks, white skull cap, and blue jacket. The piece is in excellent condition, valued at roughly $2,900.00, with working gears and minimal wear. Another notable tin toy, a 1913 Lehmann Tut Tut No. 490, wind-up automobile in very good condition, features a red German eagle on the side and a driver blowing a horn (see above). This piece would likely sell for about $700 at auction. Comparatively, a red Louis Marx & Co. No. 7 Coo Coo Car tin wind up in somewhat better condition is worth slightly less.

Jolly Jocko and Hiking Bear (c. 1930).

While some certainly do it for the money, according to toy expert Robert Skingle, of Skingle Antiques, many collectors enjoy antique toys for a combination of two other reasons–the nostalgic sentiment that they convey, and the artistic quality of the toys’ design, all the way down to the graphics on the original packaging. From Japan in the 1930’s, a blond-haired, blue-eyed My Friend clockwork celluloid-and-metal girl swimmer wears a red bathing suit, and rotates her arms in a freestyle swim stroke. Its original box, decorated with red seagulls flying above the ocean upon which a sailboat can be seen in the distance, and a swimmer who appears to be soaring with them, features the Kuramochi trademark, CK. The Hoyt takes great pride in having this rare childhood plaything, complete with the original box, among those on display.

Wind-up tin alligator with skirted rider, 1930s.

Among the most charismatic toys in the Hoyt’s collection is a 1930’s wind up tin toy tribal figure riding atop an alligator, complete with original string reins, putting its value at approximately $250. A variety of wind ups are covered with soft fur, including an endearing monkey called Jolly Jacko who gazes into a pink hand mirror while combing his hair. He is joined by Stinky the Skunk, who hops when wound, wearing around his neck the original red ribbon with comical tag that reads ‘Caution,’ and Hiking Bear, who carries a red walking stick and, naturally, hikes.

Home-made motor yacht, made by Buehler father & son, 1930s.

Three large and lovely painted wooden boats, despite being safely perched on wooden stands, appear as if they are ready to set sail down a small and winding creek in a young child’s back yard. A popular pastime, Buehler and his grandfather built their own working sailboats, some of which were motorized. The open deck of one boat in particular features exquisite detail, including eight portholes, a life buoy, three fabric flags, a red and white striped canopy with a blue party light suspended beneath it, movable search light and throttle, spinning metal propeller, and an anchor whose tiny chain slinks gracefully in and out of a hole in the bow. The boat is wired so that, at one time, the spot light and a light inside the cabin would illuminate.

Of all the toys in the collection, the board games suggest, most clearly, the daily thoughts, actions, and expectations of young children during the first half of the twentieth century.  Perhaps this is because they implicitly require the participation of more than one child, and therefore one can imagine the interaction–including bits of conversation and mannerisms–that certainly played out among the living, breathing members of an older generation when it was young. It could be that the games inspire an adult viewer’s imagination more so than the individual toys, which primarily elicit nostalgic sensations; this, presumably, would not be the case for young visitors of the Hoyt, who would, hypothetically, reach for the wind ups or boats first.

Gilbert Co., Electric Eye (1935), 'an electric marvel'

The selection of games includes The Standard Radio Game, King Kong Oriental Checkers by Sam Gabriel & Sons Co., NY, and All Star Comics Playing Card Game by King Features Syndicate, 1934. Two exceptionally interesting games in the collection are the 1935 Gilbert Electric Eye, and the Playbox. Best known, perhaps, for its Erector Sets, The Gilbert Company produced a variety of scientific toys that tell of the technology of the day. Called ‘an electric marvel,’ this photoelectric device was surely a thing of wonder for the few affluent young boys whose families could afford such a cutting-edge plaything. The detailed instruction manual accompanying the Electric Eye proclaims its ability to turn on lights and radios, operate a burglar alarm, start and stop electric trains, and ring the door bell—all from a distance.

Parents Assoc., Pleasant Hill, OH, The Playbox, early 1900s, taught manners and skills

The set requires batteries, including a 22 volt dry cell, and two ‘C’ cells in the Power Pack to operate the low voltage relay. The switch linking the low voltage (sensitive) relay and the operating (power) relay is a primitive form of amplification. The Electric Eye is just one of the Gilbert company’s many products that targeted, through focused advertising campaigns, young boys who dreamed of adult achievement (“My Experience…”). To today’s children, this game would still appear to be scientifically challenging, but to an adult, it is the equivalent of, perhaps, a rotary telephone.

The Playbox, an educational toy from the early 1900’s produced by the Parents Association in Pleasant Hill, Ohio, claims to teach and drill children on a long list of skills, both academic and social, including Arithmetic, Astronomy, Botany, Geography, Ambition, Good Manners, Self-Control, and Tidiness. The sturdy metal box houses nearly 80 individual game pieces, including dominoes, checkers, ten-pins, marbles, a jointed ruler, and four brightly colored metal Versatilla Men, above which is written, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ The most endearing feature of the Playbox is the black-and-white photo on the inside of the lid wherein several children, wearing tall white socks and Mary Janes, play a game together with pieces set atop a chair on the rug in front of a fireplace.

That photo, while not related to the Buehler household, appears as if it could have been taken just down the hall from where these items are displayed; The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts boasts a unique setting in which the period opulence and grandeur subtly blend with a sense of intimacy and comfort. This atmosphere somehow transcends the years which have passed since the mansion was occupied as a residence. So while the vintage toy collection displayed there may be received in different ways by children and adults, the glimpse into the past, through the lens of childhood trifles, is sure to engender pleasant feelings for all.

Above: The Buehler homestead (l) and a model of the house, built by Louis Buehler as a child (r), in the collection of the museum.

Certainly, those with an interest in vintage toys should plan to visit the Hoyt, where an impressive permanent art collection and variety of seasonal exhibits, as well as the beauty of the facility itself, make for a satisfying museum experience.

By Autumn Miller, Contributing Writer

Visit the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts collection at www.hoytartcenter.org

___________________________________________

Works Cited:

Konter, Stanley. Tin Toy History. Retrieved Nov. 13, 2011 from VirtualBargains.com.

My Experience with Gilbert Science Sets. Lindy Week Review. Retrieved Nov. 13, 2011 from Jitterbuzz.com

Skingle, Robert. Telephone interview. 15 Nov. 2011.

Whitley, Peggy. ‘1910-1919.’ American Cultural History. Lone Star College-Kingwood Library, 1999. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.

Above: Louis Marx & Co. No.7 Coo Coo Car (c. 1920) 

Urs Fischer, Statue of Rudolf Stingel (2011). Part of 3-sculpture, 'Untitled' series

The tone of the 2011 Venice Biennale seems different from Biennales past. The political bludgeoning of the viewer is milder this year, and the curatorial mystification less extreme. A lot of thinking out loud is in evidence instead, as if the Biennale were puzzling over the proposition of a world exposition of contemporary art in the year 2011 and forcing visitors to ponder their role in attending one.

The three sculptures in Urs Fischer’s Untitled (2011) are not reassuring on this score. Soaring dozens of meters into the air is a full-size wax replica of Giambologna’s, Rape of the Sabine Women (1583), (below). A male waxwork in sport jacket and glasses regards the statue from across the gallery, and to the side is an empty office chair—also in wax—in which the man (or perhaps Fischer) might work when he is not visiting art fairs. The artwork, viewer, and chair are not just uncannily convincing replicas; they are candles. Each has a wick that was lit during the opening of the Biennale, and ever since, the three have been dripping, oozing, sagging, and dropping appendages. By and by, artwork, viewer, and “workaday world” will end up ignominious puddles on the Arsenale floor, consumed by time, necessity, and the perversity of Biennales. fine arts magazine

Urs Fischer,detail, Rape of the Sabine Women (2011). Part of 3-sculpture, 'Untitled' series

Though it might be some comfort to think of us all in this together, artworks and audience alike, the Biennale is not about reassurance. Confusion and questioning are its imperatives and the maze is its unannounced symbol. As ever, the official sites of the Giardini and Arsenale are exhausting warrens of art, with off-site shows hidden away all over Venice. On San Giorgio Island, a full-blown labyrinth has opened in honor of Jorge Luis Borges, and adjacent is the exhibition, Penelope’s Labour: Weaving Words and Images, a truly memorable exploration of the mathematical intricacies of weaving. In Dorsoduro, the idea of the tapestry labyrinth becomes political in Flying Carpets, by the Tunisian artist, Nadia Kaabi-Linke. Its suspended wires and crossbeams evoke both a loom and the carpets woven on it, but suggest as well a web and the jointed legs of a spider, and ultimately, the bars of a jail cell. The hanging metal casts a maze of shadows over the viewer, making the flying carpets of art and the steel trap of state oppression impossible to distinguish.

Penelope Grayson: Weaving Words and Images

Viewers may seek relief from the incessant tangles and conundrums in a roomful of soft couches in the Arsenale, where they can sprawl out and watch a film. But do not be fooled: there is no such thing as a Biennale couch potato. It takes twenty-four hours to watch this movie, Christian Marclay’s video The Clock, and the viewer does so in a state of Trivial Pursuits alertness. The Clock, shown earlier this year in New York, is composed of thousands of clips from the history of film, each with a timepiece registering a successive minute of the day, sometimes several clips for a single minute. Since directors typically cut in clocks at times of high tension, each clip is a Lessing-esque “pregnant moment,” like Keats’s “still unravish’d bride of quietness”: an arrested instant which, for those in the know, brings the rest of the movie flooding back. Or it would do if the next clip were not already demanding attention, and then the next, and the next.

Marclay strings together twenty-four hours of these ticking time bombs, denying viewers rest or resolution, though providing a lot of movie-buff delight. The guessing and marveling never let up. Who knew there were so many clock shots in the movies, and where is that one from—and that one? The final wonderment is that the readings on the clocks are precisely the same as the ones on our watches. In this respect, The Clock is a model of neo-classical decorum: the time of the spectacle and the audience’s time are one. We are back at Fischer’s candles, our fate merged with that of the art we gaze on.

Nadia Kaabi Linke, Flying Carpet

Time and the viewer: it is a challenging relationship. All over the Biennale, dark screening rooms beckon. The video art this year is virtuosic: works on the order of Bill Viola’s or Pipilotti Rist’s are no longer exceptions. Indeed, one begins to wonder whether the days of painting, photography, and sculpture are numbered. I stick my head in at Anton Ginzburg’s At the Back of the North Wind in the Palazzo Bollani and emerge reluctantly forty-five minutes later. I would happily have gone on staring at these time-kissed panoramas of Russia indefinitely, except that the Biennale contains thousands of other works. It is a quandary: you can either slight the videos and see the Biennale, or slight the Biennale and see the videos. Unless you take up residence in Venice till November when the Biennale ends, you cannot do both, and so the matter of comprehensiveness joins the others on the docket: does a world exhibition of contemporary art on this scale make sense in an age of video?

Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010 (video)

Nick Relph’s Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field is a case in point. Ostensibly, it is a bio-pic about the abstractionist Ellsworth Kelly, but this bewildering three-channel video, watched long enough, transforms art commentary into an art form. Exploring the “sources and analogues” of Kelly’s painting, Relph superimposes Kelly’s color planes over footage of tartan weaving mills, Comme des Garçons catwalks, avant-garde choreography, ethnographic spinning, and historical events of all sorts. He also cuts in interviews about Kelly with prominent curators, such as Rob Storr, Ann Tempkin, and the late Anne d’Harnoncourt. The color filters overlap the video material in ever-changing permutations, evoking more complex associations for Kelly’s work than discursive criticism could ever achieve. Taking it in requires a lot of viewing time.

Anton Ginzburg, At the Back of the North Wind

But equally perplexing are the questions about nationalism running through every aspect of the Biennale. This year’s title, ILLUMInation, projects a dim view of the subject in its slighting lower case. Here the Biennale interrogates its own past, for like other world fairs, it has always been organized according to countries. Since 1907, pavilions began dotting the grounds of the Giardini, permanent structures that are built, owned, and curated by foreign governments as proof of their nations’ cultural status on the world stage. Countries that do not own pavilions compete for space in the sprawling Arsenale or in palazzos, churches, galleries, and warehouses all over Venice. According to the 2011 Biennale curator, Bice Curiger, more countries than ever are entering exhibits and plans for new permanent pavilions are rising. She notes the Chinese people’s pride in their new pavilion (and hopes for “happy news” concerning Ai Weiwei); she regrets the absence of an Egyptian exhibit (and hails the developments that stood in the way). The cheering-on of nations is still official Biennale policy.

Nevertheless, ILLUMInation relegates nationalism to the shadows. Of the fifty-four Biennales to date, the last seven have included an autonomously curated international exhibition, and for Ms. Curiger, this is the future. She conceives of artists and viewers alike as “cultural tourists,” pursuing values exceeding political borders or national ideologies. To offset the official pavilions, she has commissioned “para-pavilions”: nonce structures designed by one artist to exhibit work by an artist from a different country. She has also encouraged collective shows that ignore citizenship, such as the Arab world’s The Future of a Promise (which includes Kaabi-Linke’s Flying Carpets). Norway has forgone a national exhibition altogether to sponsor an off-site lecture series with a slate of international theorists. And fittingly, 2011 is the first year the Roma are in the Biennale, their video installation documenting the injustices they have suffered at the hands of national governments.

Nick Relph, Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (video)

But the Polish pavilion delivers up the final coup de grace. The Poles are represented for the first time by a non-Polish artist: the Israeli, Yael Bartana. Her video trilogy, “…and Europe will be stunned,” documents the rise of the fictitious Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). Its goal is to settle three million Jews in Poland in order to make Polish identity whole again. Visitors to the Polish pavilion receive JRMiP membership cards and tote bags, and place their names on invitation lists for an international congress to be held in the coming year. Then they sit down to watch Bartana’s hour of videos documenting the history of the JRMiP.

The first video presents the messianic founder of the movement, a non-Jewish Pole who stands in a ruined Nazi stadium before a handful of youth-brigade followers. Without the Jews, he thunders into a megaphone among the weeds and rubble, Poland has no identity. Poland must regain its Jews if it is ever to be healed. The rosy-cheeked pioneers cheer and wave, their red neckerchiefs quivering in the breeze, their knees dimpling under their khaki shorts.

Venice Giardini, site of many national Biennale pavilions

By the second video, the movement has made great strides. Heroic Jewish settlers are planting crops and taking their well-earned rest in sun-splashed Polish fields. Straining on stout cables, the muscular youths and eager maidens of the JRMiP raise roof beams that echo the Star of David that frames the Polish eagle on the JRMiP flag.

But tragedy strikes in the final video. The charismatic leader of the movement, suddenly deceased, is lying in state in a mausoleum. Outside, a memorial rally is in progress, with distinguished speakers addressing the multitudes. Jews being Jews, however, there are as many viewpoints as there are speakers, and each is more eloquent than the last. The leader’s widow reiterates her husband’s dream of a Jewish Renaissance in Poland, and youthful followers decry the nationalist chauvinism that led to Poland’s loss of a Jewish Other. A Holocaust survivor living in Israel supports the restitution of her family’s Polish property, but bristles at the thought of living on it. A Jewish art historian sporting an Islamic scarf discourses on Enlightenment internationalism, and an old-style Zionist insists that the only safe dwelling place for Jews is the nation state of Israel. The vast crowd cheers and waves regardless.

Yael Bartena,'...and Europe will be stunned.' Trilogy (video)

The rhetoric of the speakers is so moving and the crowd so responsive that it takes a while to register the differences in what is being said, and at times one can hardly believe one’s ears. Hearing Holocaust anti-Semitism passionately denounced, or universal human rights championed in this absurdist context, is almost unbearable. The parody is so dense and directed so even-handedly that we are left with nowhere to stand, all ideological ideals combusting. The coinage “Zirony” comes to mind; it is no accident that an Israeli artist has made these videos. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Poland—or at least the Polish pavilion—has indeed repatriated its absent Jew in the person of Bartana (who lives, however, in Berlin).

Above, left: Though JRMiP does not exist, Bartana has designed its manifesto and logo: a blood-red Polish Eagle combined with a Magen David. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction further, membership cards and tote bags are available.

Yael Bartena,'...and Europe will be stunned.' Trilogy (video)

As one staggers out of the Polish pavilion, the International exhibition offers a perplexity that may be the undoing of the entire enterprise. Venice Biennales are programmatically devoted to contemporary art, but this year the headline artist is the sixteenth-century Tintoretto. Three of his immense canvases have been lifted from the church of San Giorgio and installed in the entrance gallery of the International Pavilion. Bice Curiger wanted them there, she says, because she was tired of Biennales that seem like spaceships landed in the middle of nowhere. Contemporary art springs from earlier art, she insists, and Tintoretto is an experimental, anti-classicist artist who speaks directly to the present.

Perhaps he does, but we must strain to hear him over the army of security guards blocking the view and shrieking threats when visitors so much as finger their cameras. Photography is not prohibited elsewhere in the Biennale, but then Tintorettos are not there either. Evidently the guards have not been informed of the conversation in progress between the past and present, or more likely, they see how lopsided an exchange it is. It takes only three Tintorettos to turn the whole Biennale into “everything else.” It is not that contemporary art cannot measure up to that of the Renaissance. (Even if you thought so, would Tintoretto be the standard to apply?) Rather, the Tintorettos remind us of the staggering context that surrounds the Biennale. Venice is tough competition for a contemporary art show.

The Grand Canal, Venice

If the Biennale is a contemplation of history, spectatorship and cosmopolitan complexity, Venice forces us to experience these imponderables head-on. Visitors divide their time between marveling and getting lost; after a while, the two seem much the same. This is life as bewildered, bemused, and thoroughly beguiled connoisseurship. Have I mentioned the color of the water in the lagoon—the purest aquamarine; or the holes in the cloud formations, clearly left there so baroque angels can peer down; or the sheer ecstasy of fig marscapone gelato? At the end of the day, who would not trade the wax puddles on the floor of the Arsenale for the delicious perplexities of Venice?

By Wendy Steiner, Contributing Writer

O

Left: Andy Warhol, Portrait of Doug Cramer (1985), acrylic and silksceen ink on linen. Collection Cincinnati Art Museum fine arts magazine

Cincinnati native, Douglas Cramer, standing in front of Warhol multiples, 1985. Photo: Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum

A television producer whose credits include The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible, The Love Boat, and a productive partnership with Aaron Spelling, this Cincinnati native is one of the nation’s foremost collectors of contemporary art. Cramer is routinely ranked by ARTnews as one of the top 200 collectors worldwide and his generosity has earned him the 2011 Cincinnati Art Award. Commemorating this moment, the current exhibition includes 32 pieces by Warhol, all portraits of Cramer made between 1984 and 1985.

Of the 32, eight of these portraits are Polaroid photographs of Cramer taken by Warhol to be used as the foundation for his trademark silkscreened works. As one might expect with an instant photo, these pictures are by no means subtle. Lacking delicacy, these high contrast images create a type of readymade, a model for Warhol to project and trace on to sheets of paper, because as he said “tracing is the best kind of drawing”.

The eight drawings of Cramer on view–descendants of the original photos- are for the most part, flat and lifeless. Though the didactic panel indicates that the works are a combination of traced projection and hand embellishment, the lack of variation and line sensitivity suggests otherwise. And two groups of three drawings are simply repetitions of the same two images. The hub of the exhibition, two sets of silkscreen and acrylic portraits fare only slightly better.

Andy Warhol with one of his many cameras (c.1980)

The first set features a black high contrast image of Cramer printed on four canvases, two with silver acrylic backgrounds and two with gold. Upon receipt of these Cramer was unsatisfied with the results and asked Warhol for something more colorful. Always eager to satisfy a customer, Warhol acquiesced. The results of Cramer’s request were four significantly more colorful, but marginally better paintings. Like all of the pieces in the show, these reworked paintings have nothing peculiar about them. Though the intense, saturated color –which immediately reads as being in vogue in the 1980’s- are the highlight of the show, these paintings present a rote repetition of the same image and are indistinguishable from Warhol’s other celebrity portraits of the era.

Much is made of Warhol’s allegedly ground breaking use of multiples, a comment that, in 1962, may have carried some weight. But by the time of these works -1985- the repetition comes off as soulless, as mechanical and cheap as anything made in China. Initially, Warhol discerned something unseemly about American life; a sinister undercurrent just below the surface of postwar prosperity. This keen observations gave his early works an edge and a vitality that all but disappeared by the late 1960s. By 1985 Warhol became what his seminal works exposed: an empty commodity seeking new markets.

By Alan Pocaro, Contributing Writer

Visit the Cincinnati Art Museum on line at: www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

Gorham silver coffee pot (c. 1932)

How can you explain the allure of silver? Like its rich cousin, gold, silver is one of those rare earth elements that has served the imagination and creative hand of artisans over the ages- often with breathtakingly beautiful results. Silver in its purest form is soft and pliable, reflective and lustrous when polished to a high shine and filled with beautiful light-effects when cut, shaped, hammered or cast.

Over the ages, silversmiths have taken their inspiration largely from nature to create works of art with both utility and beauty. Most familiar are the elaborate coffee services, candelabras and jewelry fashioned in the style of 19th Century Romanticism. These pieces showcased the craftsman’s skill with elaborate floral scenes and design elements inspired by the classical Revivalist style of the Romans and Greeks. In America, the austere, but elegant creations of the colonial silver-making tradition, popularized by our most famous silversmith, Paul Revere, can be found in many well-to-do homes.fine arts magazine

Chrysler Building, NYC, 1930. An Art Deco masterpiece

But few are aware that silver design flourished well into the 20th Century, reflecting the new sensibility of an industrial age, where streamlined utilitarianism became the guiding principle of the newly-defined modern lifestyle. In the first quarter of the 1900s, many were ready to throw off the mantle of Victorian sensibilities and embrace the spirit of “The New”. Advances in science, manufacturing and inventions such as the airplane, the automobile and wireless communication were shrinking the world. Speed and radical reform became the watchwords of a new and outspoken group of intellectuals called, The Futurists.

The public fervor surrounding this new industrial age inspired many artisans to redefine traditional approaches to their craft. They increasingly sought inspiration in the changing world around them, rather than in the lessons of generations past. Notably, Cubism had emerged from the artists’ studios of Paris and the International Style of architecture (Bauhaus) was employing the fundamental lines of the square and the minimalist effects of glass in their building designs.

Silver makers, too, began to figure the clean lines of geometric shapes into their designs. Some of the most beautiful examples of this radical new objets d’art were being created in French studios. A handful of progressive designers, many coming from families with a long heritage of working in precious metals and jewels, set the stage for this revolution in form.

Covered serving piece by Jean Puiforcat (1930s). Note industrial chain incorporated into design

To learn more, I traveled to the lower west side of New York City to meet an expert on the topic of 20th century silver. Audrey Friedman has spent a lifetime collecting and learning about modern silver, glass and artifacts and her Primavera Gallery contains some of the most beautiful examples from that period.

She explained that the Paris exhibit of 1925, Exposition des Arts Decoratifs introduced the public to a new design movement, Art Moderne, later deriving the name Art Deco from this show. Here, artisans like Jean Puiforcat, Tétard Fréres and Maison Desny would exhibit their sterling and silver plate creations to the acclaim of some and the disdain of others. But there was no mistaking the reality that modern sensibilities were taking hold in a field that had been dominated by traditionalist views.

Gorham silver brooch (c. 1934)

The event was originally scheduled to be held some years earlier, but was delayed because of World War I. “If the show had come off earlier, the silver of the time would have had a very different look,” according to Audrey. “The Deco ‘look’ was heavily influenced by the sleek and aerodynamic appearance of the machinery of the time and the technological advances made possible by industrial expansion. Ironically, the complexity and beauty of these early modernist designs meant that they could only have been turned out, one at a time, by the hand of the craftsman, himself.”

In the handful of years that followed, before the Great Depression of 1929 changed the face of the American economy, retailers attempted to promote the Art Deco style for use in the American home, but with little success. Audrey points out that resistance here was due to, “the American view that silver was something to be passed on by previous generations, hinting at inherited wealth; or at the very least, that classic silver could be purchased to become an ‘instant heirloom’.”

Georg Jensen, ‘Pyramid’ Sterling Silver Tea Service, Waste Bowl and Waiter Tray (1927)

Nevertheless, a number of well-known European silver designers were rushed to New England factory studios and, by the following year, 1926, several American companies, including Gorham, International Silver, Reed and Barton and, to a lesser extent, Tiffany & Co. were embracing the cause of modernist design; although some would argue that their offerings were more heavily inspired by architecture than by a desire to capture pure form. In spite of these constraints, many of these New England manufacturers made timeless designs in the modern style right up until the eve of World War II.

To see some period pieces from the American school of Art Deco silver, I called on my friend and colleague, Bernard de Maillard, of Westport’s Léonce Antiques. As if by sleight-of-hand, he made several beautiful examples of mid-20th century silver magically appear from the back row of one of his many display cases.

Georg Jensen, 'Lily of the Valley' flatware pattern (c. 1925-1935)

He explained that the Art Deco movement allowed room for design influences from an earlier, more stylized period. Here, European moderne geometrics are supplanted by softer, more graceful lines inspired by nature. Taking their cue from the turn-of-the-century Swedish designer, Jorge Jensen, these silver pieces are designed to appeal to the eye using the same modernist’s techniques of form, balance and surface effects, but with a very different result. “Many of these companies are now history,” Bernard says, “leaving us with examples of the period that will never be replicated.”

With such a broad range of unique designs to choose from, consider including several examples of modern silver in your collection. But, I have to confess that, for pure geometric symmetry, quality of craftsmanship, luxury of detail and balance in the hand, these functional works of art beg to be used and enjoyed!

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

____________________________________________

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Understanding 20th Century design means differentiating between several design movements that may sound alike, but have different influences and objectives. There is some overlap as certain styles emerged from others:

Romanticism (1780-1880)- An artistic and intellectual movement in Western culture that rejected established values in favor of individualism and reason. The life and times of the ancient Greeks and Romans were idealized and impacted all phases of artistic design. Nature was extolled and its themes were idealized in painting, literature, functional art (silver, ceramics, furniture, architecture, etc.). It was in response to overblown sentimentality and flourishes of Romanticism and Victorianism that many of the late 19th century artists, writers and craftsmen rebelled.

Art Nouveau (1880-1914)- An international style of design, begun in Paris, using highly stylized, flowing and curvilinear designs incorporating floral and plant-like motifs to create repeating abstract and geometric patterns.

Arts and Craft – A British (1880- 1910) and American (1910-1925) aesthetic movement, founded in response to the increased use of industrialized methods, emphasizing the importance of hand crafting and natural inspiration; sometimes called the Craftsmen Style.

Modern (1880-1945)- A period or fervent social, cultural and political changes, defined by a shift in power and influence from Europe to the U.S. and reflected in a rejection of Victorian values for a more open social value system, artistic experimentation, innovations in manufacturing and scientific research and the realignment of the world political map by two global wars.

Art Deco (1920-1939)- A functional art movement that incorporated several influences [Cubism, Symbolism, Bauhaus Internationalism, industrial design and Modernism] into the design of everyday objects

Art Moderne (1920-1925)- The early name for geometric functional art design until the Paris show of 1925, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, lent its shorthand title to the movement, Art Deco.

A brisk mid-winter walk through the streets of lower Manhattan eventually led me under the iconic Romanesque arch that stands at the center of Washington Square. To my left, a uniformly-pristine row of Federalist-era, brick-and-columned town houses, standing like monuments to another, more gentile time. Over the years, NYU’s bustling urban academic community has emerged nearby. I first met Professor Moses in a small office, stacked high with art auction catalogues, at the University’s Stern School of Business, close to the epicenter of campus.    

 Opening Image (left):  All works pictured subject to Mei-Moses ® index analysis: J.M.W. Turner, Giudecca la Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio (1830-41). Category: Old Masters/19^th Century; Sales History (1897) $35,000; (2006) $35.8M. Annual Return on Investment (ROI) for 109 yrs, +6%.    

Overview    

My journey began with an invitation to travel to the city to learn more about the Mei-Moses® index, a cumulative, 13-year data set that has emerged as a reliable predictor for art portfolio development and investment planning strategies. Their objective in this project is to help prospective art buyers to move out of the purely emotional realm of ‘buy what you love’ into more objective criteria. Moses explains to me that, “the emotions that guide a purchase should not be discounted or dismissed, but to be aware that there is additional data available, before making a purchase at auction, that the potential buyer may want to factor in.” He point out that his Index is aimed at the following: fine arts magazine   

–Comparing art to other asset classes (stocks, bonds, real estate, other collectable);    

–Providing insights on financial performance of the art market, updated annually, while acquiring art for a portfolio;    

–Offering a tool to evaluate the role of art in overall wealth management and asset allocation;    

–Providing instant “mark to market” art valuations, with interim quarterly updates;    

–Evaluating market adjusted rates-of-return for individual, established artists.    

Titian, A Sacred Conversation-The Madonna and Child with St. Luke & Catherine of Alexandria. Category: Old Masters/19th Century; Sales History (1954) $1,632; Resale (2011) $16.9M. Annual ROI for 57 yrs, +17.6%.

 Since 1999, Moses and his colleague at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Jianping Mei, now Professor of Finance at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, in Beijing, have been compiling data that allows them to track the long-term performance of fine art. Their goal: to correctly analyze financial returns available on the art market. “It is important to remember,” says Professor Moses, “that art prices are ‘wealth bound’—the viability of a deal hinges on the size of the offer. Our model tracks those offers over time for ‘repeat pairs’; that is, the same item coming to market again, even years or decades later.”    

The Mei-Moses® indexes focus on mature artists whose works command prices from tens-of-thousands to millions of dollars at auction. They take the original purchase price at auction any place in the world and then the most recent sales price at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York and calculate an annual return for a single painting. This ‘repeat-pair’ method is key to their approach; i.e.- how an identifiable art work performs when it is brought to auction twice, with a minimum of one year lapse between sales. So, for example, a J.M.W. Turner view of Venice sold at auction at Christie’s in London on May 29, 1897, for $35,000 and then sold at Christies in New York in 2006 for $35.8 million—which yields about a 6 percent annual return for 109 years—an impressive return, in addition to the joy of ownership, for the generations who may have owned it during that period.    

Jacob Toorenvliet, Rabbinical Discussion. Category: Old Masters/19th Century; Sales History (1996) $18,400; Resale (2011) $104,500. Annual ROI for 15 yrs, +12.3%.

 To date, Mei-Moses® (with recent help from the ‘European Fine Art Database’) has compiled 26,000 such repeat-sale pairs, adding approximately 2000 incremental pairs annually, from recent auction transaction, for their ever-expanding indexes. Professor Moses explains that their data is based exclusively on Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction results, given that they represent established, recognized artists. They have broken out the historical periods of art being bought and sold into five over-arching collecting categories: beginning with Old Masters/19th century; Impressionist/Modern, American before 1950. They later added Post-War/Contemporary and Latin American works, the result of more adequate data in these last two categories becoming available for the period, 1988-2009.    

Where the rubber meets the road for the Mei-Moses Indexes is putting them to work in the competitive field of investment advisory and planning, exploring ways in which their indexes can influence buy-hold decisions, maximizing rate-of-return, while limiting down-side risk. Moses tells me that the auction market is the best setting to consider the investment potential for art, because of its ‘transparency’. “In an auction environment, buyer demand sets the value of a piece. The house or the seller may set a reserve, but, if it doesn’t sell, then it’s considered a non-revenue event, or marketplace failure. We only count successful transactions and, unlike a gallery, collection owner, or artist, setting a retail price that they believe the market will bear (‘non-transparency’), a successful auction sale is a true measure of value—a market-tested exercise in supply and demand. There are strong parallels to the stock market, here. If a stock is placed on the block for sale, with a limit order price, and it doesn’t sell, then it’s a non-event. Only when that stock sells at a price that reflects demand, does it become a financial event we can evaluate. For this reason (and others), the correlation between stocks, bonds and commodities becomes a powerful comparative tool for modeling the auction art market,” Moses says.    

But, unlike stocks and bonds, works of art are one-of-a-kind and need to be looked at on that basis. The closest existing model that accounts for the heterogeneity, or unique features of a sale item, is real estate. Moses explains that, “a new apartment building may offer a hundred units for sale, but some are higher up, some low, some face the city skyline, others the parking lot, and so forth. In other words—not all units in the building are comparable. The other factor to consider is supply and demand; that is, how many buyers and sellers are in the market at any one time. We all know that markets, and therefore pricing, are influenced by ‘bust and boom’ periods. These features affect asking price and ultimately, sale and resale price. We believe that the only relevant way to track the viability of money spent in a situation like that is to develop an Index that accounts for the individuality of unique objects, like residential real estate and art. The commonality between the two is due to the infrequency of trading and differences in the characteristics of the objects that come to market, from period-to-period.”    

Right: Clara Peeters, Still Life with Fish […] and Cat on Ledge. Category: Old Masters/19^th Century; Sales History (2008) $162,205; Resale (2011) $68,500. Annual ROI for 3 yrs, -25%.   

Thus for art and real estate, an index based on average prices over a period of time may be more dependent on the mix of objects that come to market rather than changes in the underlying market itself. A database of repeat sales of the same object resolves this issue. Thus, the statistical methodology used to create the Mei-Moses® indexes is similar to that developed by Professors Case and Shiller for their residential real estate index, published by Standard and Poor’s.    

As noted, to insure transparency (free-market pricing) for the Mei-Moses® indexes, only data from public auction results are collected. “We have looked at the New York art market, from Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, starting our analysis with data from 1925, since that is the start date for the S&P 500 total return index, which we use for comparison purposes. For the five major art-collecting categories: Old Masters/19th century; Impressionist/Modern; American before 1950; Post-War/Contemporary and Latin American, we search the current sale catalogues for items that have sold. For those items which also have a listed prior-auction sale, we use our best research efforts to obtain the consummated prior sale price at any auction house, any place in the world and at any date. If the object has been held for at least a year and we have successfully found both the sale and purchase prices, including the relevant buyer’s premium, we include it in our database. Thus, we introduce no subjective sample selection bias.” Moses explains. “We start our current annual All Art index with data available from 1925. This index explains approximately 70% of the variability of a measure of the underlying returns of the objects on which it is based.”    

Pablo Picasso, Nature morte a la guitar, bouteille, verre de vin et journal. Category: Impressionist/Modern; Sales History (2007) $816,172; Resale (2011) $387,500. Annual ROI for 4 yrs, -17%.

 The compiled information allows for the creation of annual indexes for each of these period-specific collecting categories, as well as the All Art index. The data also allows Mei-Moses to develop insights into the factors that drive returns for individual or groups of objects. They also use the indices to undertake asset allocation studies, including art, as well as making available a ‘mark to market’ art valuation service. In 2009 they introduced a new feature allowing for the comparison of returns across important and highly traded artists.    

Modeling for Success    

Joan Miro, Tete bleue et oiseau fleche. Category: Impressionist/Modern; Sales History (2004) $621,758; (2011) $2.76M. Annual ROI for 7 yrs, +23.8%.

 The average investor maintains a diversified portfolio of equities (stocks), bonds of various types, commodities such as gold and cash in ratios that reflect desired return in exchange for exposure to risk. These investment instruments are considered ‘liquid’, because they can readily be converted into currency. Real estate, art and other collectables are ‘illiquid’ because the conversion cycle to currency is slower and product performance (average price) tends to be dependent on the mix of objects (supply) that come to market at any given time, as well as demand at the time (examples: the downward pressure on existing housing prices, given the number of foreclosures on the market today; the upward pressure on selected artists’ auction prices during periods when their work is in demand). “We were curious to see what would happen if we included relatively illiquid assets in a comprehensive portfolio management strategy. Our modeling assumed that, along with stocks, etc., most sophisticated investors would also own real estate as part of a long-term asset acquisition program. With the inclusion of the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. Residential Real Estate Index and the Mei-Moses® art indexes, we could now foresee a means to incorporate art, along with other asset classes into a typical portfolio. We regularly evaluate rate-of- return, risk and correlation among other assets, over many time periods and holding periods. This detailed analysis allows investment advisors to have the analytical tools to guide their clients with a reasoned strategy for buying art or expanding an existing collection,” Moses says.    

The beauty and uniqueness of art as an asset class is that it offers the individual three distinct ways to reap the pleasure and excitement from ownership. The incomparable beauty and emotional appeal of art ownership is the first and most obvious one, especially when those works become part of one’s home or office setting. The second factor is the enjoyment most individuals derive from the process of seeking out and acquiring art. This includes, but is not limited to, knowledge acquisition, socialization with like-minded collectors and experts, the excitement of the chase, meeting artists and visiting studios, etc.    

The third beauty of art is its longevity and financial performance. For more than three millennia art has always been an important part of our cultural heritage. The passage of time is a key component to the analysis performed by the Mei-Moses® index. For each index, art’s relative performance is based on the historical time period under consideration. For example over the last fifty years the Mei Moses® All Art Index (a summary of the five categories under examination) and the S&P 500 Total Return Stock Index have had approximately-equal compound annual returns. The art index has underperformed the equity index for the last 25 years. Over the last five and ten year periods, art has significantly outperformed equities. “However,” Professor Moses explains, “for almost all these time periods, art has higher volatility and lower liquidity than most other financial assets. Conversely, art has low correlation with other asset classes and thus may play a role in portfolio diversification.”    

Joan Miro, Westvaco. Category: Impressionism/Modern; Sales History (2001) $32,950; (2011) $194,700. Annual ROI for 10 yrs, +19.4%.

 The paintings in the index aren’t all blockbusters. Moses estimates that the median size of recent transactions charted is about $200,000 or $300,000. As their most recent update shows, over the last 50 years, stocks (as represented by the S&P 500) returned 10.9 percent annually, while the art index returned 10.5 percent per annum. And in the five-to-ten years, art outperformed stocks. But not all art performs equally. In recent years, Old Masters haven’t done so well, while Post-War/Contemporary art before 1950 has been soaring—up 25.2 percent in the last year alone. And across categories, masterpieces tend to underperform lower-priced paintings by a substantial margin. Why? Like blue-chip stocks, well-known paintings by blue-chip artists are known quantities and offer safety and stability and their importance was well-known when they were previously purchased at auction. As with stocks, the greatest opportunity for growth in art values comes when investors suddenly focus their attention on a hot new sector or name. But Moses points out that it is not necessary to seek out the latest ‘hot artists’ in order to do well; the broader Mei-Moses® art indexes have historically generated returns that make them of interest in asset allocation.    

As noted above, there are some obvious differences between Van Gogh canvases and Verizon shares, having to do with liquidity. Art is far less liquid than stocks: You can’t simply push a button and sell a Picasso tomorrow. And while you might assume that the fortunes of the art market are closely tied to the fortunes of the stock market, Moses found that fine art actually has a very low correlation with stocks and a negative correlation with bonds. “In some sense, it’s a good portfolio diversifier,” says Moses.    

Like stocks, art is susceptible to fits of irrational exuberance. In 1990, Japanese executive Ryoei Saito capped off the Impressionist art bubble by paying an impressive $82.5 million for Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Between 1985 and 1990, the Mei-Moses® art index returned about 30 percent/ year—the same unsustainable rate at which the Nikkei grew in that period and at which the S&P 500 grew in the second half of the 1990s. Despite today’s huge prices, Moses notes, the mood surrounding the art market is nowhere near as exuberant as it was when Western Europe’s economic largess was flooding into Japanese corporate board rooms in the late ’80s.    

Critical Issues: Professor Moses Responds    

The Mei-Moses index methodology is not without potential shortcomings. Observers in the ‘art-as-asset’ world are quick to point out that the Mei-Moses indexes:    

Heinz Mack, Lichtpyramide. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2005) $6596; (2011) $108,945. Annual ROI for 6 yrs, +59.6%.

1) Do not account for private treaty sales, a small, but important part of the secondary sales art market. Response: “True, but since there is no sale or purchase price transparency who is to judge whether the information being provided is factual and not subject to selection bias (stressing winners over losers) by the reporting firm.”    

2) Do not account for buyer and seller transaction costs in an auction house setting. Response: “True, but we started with the premise that we wanted to determine the return based on what willing buyers over time had paid for an object. Thus our return values are the upper estimate on net returns. In addition we should point out that we compare our results to those of the total return index for the S&P 500 where dividends are reinvested tax free and does not account for transaction cost which are diminemus now but were much more substantial years ago. Research has show that over long periods of time from 1/3 to ½ of the total return of the S&P 500 is provided by the reinvested dividends. However the round trip transaction cost of some 20-30% will substantially reduce short term holding period returns, making day trading all but impossible, but since the average holding period in our database is over twenty years our research shows that the average reduction caused by transaction cost reduces annual returns by less than one percent.”    

3) The indexes don’t consider art that comes to market, but doesn’t sell. Response. “True, but no one knows if this causes negative returns or positive returns that were just not sufficient to induce the owner to part with the work. We also fail to capture the returns of works the currently sell but had not sold the previous time it was offered. These would tend to offset some of the supposed negative bias of the works that did not sell. We also cannot study works of art that are not subject to public transparency.”    

Lucio Fontana, Untitled. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2007) $50,173; (2011) $99,225. Annual ROI for 4 yrs, +18.6%.

4) That the implied returns of art ownership don’t adequately account for costs related to art ownership: insurance, storage, transport, conservation, and the like. Response: “True, but these costs for most collectors are deminimus. Insurance is less than ¼ of a percent in most residential settings. Most collectors store what they own on the walls of their own dwellings. These costs are also small compared to the management fee charged in many equity accounts.”    

5) That the database doesn’t account for the pieces that fail to sell on the auction block and are quietly unloaded for a loss in private sales, similar to those works previously addressed in issue #3!  Response:  “Additionlly however, we also do not study works that were bought at auction many years ago and are then given to museums.  These would tend to have high returns and tend to mitigate any of the downside of works that are dumped in private sales.  Once again however we cannot study what is not knowable and where there is no price transparency and potential selection bias.”     

6) That art is purely aesthetic and has no underlying value (like a stock’s corporate earnings) to insure performance over time and that art is subject to the whim of society’s taste-makers and therefore, is difficult to reliably evaluate, using standard metrics. Response: “Art is like gold which has very little underlying value and pays no dividend. Most of gold’s price is based on its supposed hedge against inflation or based on speculation. Our database of over 26,000 pairs over 150 years incorporates changes in style and whims over time since we have pairs that were part of every changing environment. Also for the last 3000 years there has always been, somewhere in the world, rich individuals who were exhibiting their wealth through the size of the domiciles and the art and furnishings that adorned it.”    

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2006) $2.7M; (2011) $4.4 M. Annual ROI for 5 yrs, +10%.

In addition, Moses responds to all of these objections by pointing to his enormous data base. “26,000 repeat sale pairs cannot be considered an unrepresentative sample of what has gone on in the knowable part of the art market over the last 200 years. Not every stock that has a limit order on it, sells. In that case, my expectation as the seller is not satisfied. Why do we expect something different from the art market? We do not make the financial markets clear these limit orders at the end of the day; why should we force that on the art market? We eliminate selection bias by not just focusing on the high-priced ‘winners’ in the auction market, or the artistic superstars. By focusing on the ‘S & P’ of the art market, we capture performance data for 90% of the mature artists, whose work comes into the two major auction houses in the world and track their performance on a matched pair basis only. Not only are we comparing apples-to-apples, we are looking at the same apple, with a prior auction record, as it returns to the auction block after a minimum of one year in ownership hands. We eliminate quick turn-around, ‘day-traders’, where the owner is going for quick profit in an overheated market,” Moses emphasizes. “Our goal was to demonstrate that the broad auction market had sufficient financial performance as a whole, and did not require the collector’s ability to choose the outperformers to gain sufficient returns, to make art pay in a well-balanced, optimally-designed wealth portfolio.”    

As a result, Mei-Moses® can look at long-term performance for art as a legitimate part of a diversified portfolio that are realistic and achievable in the market. “Over the years, with the usual ups and downs, art performs at an average 9% rate-of-return. Some indexes claim 12, 15 or even 18% rates of return, but we have found those models to be flawed,” he tells me. “We believe that the only place to achieve this kind of return is in an auction environment, where the informed buyer observes one simple rule: the best returns, on average, are achieved when you never buy a work of art for more than the index-inflated price from the last sale—never buy a work of art for more than the index inflated price from the last sale. Knowing your facts, keeping emotions in check and flying by this rule will maximize (knowing there is no guarantee of future performance) your chances of doing well in a leveled playing field.”    

Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait. Category: Post war/Contemporary; Sales History (1992) $151,536; (2011) $5.26M. Annual ROI for 17 yrs, +20.5%.

Over the last ten years, the risk—or down-side exposure—associated with the Mei Moses® All Art index is less than that of the S&P 500 total return index, 14.4% vs. 20.4% respectively, and 17.6% vs. 18.3% respectively, over the last 25 years. We think this was caused by art’s methodical rise since the late 1990s, after a pronounced downturn in the early 1990s and then another pronounced drop and recovery over the last three years. Contrast this with stocks meteoric rise of the late 1990s and a slow recovery after the 2000-2002 down-turn, followed by substantial increases for a brief period, until the dramatic decline of 2008, returned it to 1997 levels, followed by last year’s recovery and a continuation of solid gains in 2011.    

However the downside risk for the equity index over the last 50 years, 17.2%, is slightly better than the art index, 17.8%. Over the past three years our results show that there has been a substantial reduction in the 50 year historic lower risk of equities over art (from a difference of 3-5% to the current 0.6%). The very low correlation factor between the art and stock/bond indexes for the last 50 and 25 years respectively indicated that art may play a positive role in investment portfolio diversification.    

“We are confident about the strength of our model after so many years and with so many repeat-sales pairs (26,000, to date with 2000 more added/year),” Moses explains. “Buying art for love is a perfectly understandable motivation, but the question has to be asked, ‘How much is love costing you?’ Approaching the purchase experience objectively doesn’t have to diminish the emotional charge that comes from acquiring art. Understand the metrics and variables that will increase the likelihood that your investment will hold its own over time. Know that masterpieces are exciting to consider, but are likely to underperform for the vast majority of buyers, over time. Focus on the mid-range, mature artistic community; buy at auction; which is the only truly democratic way to evaluate pricing dynamics; know the limit of value for each piece you bid—don’t bid beyond the index-adjusted purchase price from the last sale of that work of art; recognize that there is a painting for every purse and just because you didn’t pay too much for a painting doesn’t mean it won’t yield either joy or return-on-investment in the long run.”    

www.artasanasset.com -The Mei-Moses® Art Indexes© Web Site Summary    

Ross Bleckner, Untitled. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2008) $49,900; Resale (2011) $16,200. Annual ROI for 2 yrs, -36.2%.

The Home page allows access to a selection of articles and interviews involving the Mei Moses® indexes and research results of Beautiful Asset Advisors®. Several thousand articles have appeared, using Mei-Moses® data since it first became available in 2001. A complete list can be found (enter “mei moses” as the preferred search object).    

The Home page also allows access to reactions to Mei-Moses® index research and to the website from art, insurance and financial market participants. Also, frequently asked questions (FAQ’s), such as: Why only use auction information? Why use a repeat sale methodology? Dealing with works that do not sell at auction; developing the optimal collecting category; lists of representative artists from each collecting category are also provides, as well as contact information and bios for the principals.    

Once on the useful Home Page of Mei-Moses®, Beautiful Asset Advisory, LLC, the website is organized into five additional sections:    

The Market Insights section contains the annual updates of our analysis of the New York auction market covering returns, risk, and correlation performance for art, as compared to other assets. It will also contain tracking reports issued in early April, July and November of each year, describing the progress of the market within that current calendar year. Any special research reports that might be of interest to subscribers, such as the analysis of financial performance of Matisse and Picasso created some years ago, during their combined show in New York, or the current relationship among art, equities and real estate, can be found there.    

Francis Picabia, Tete de Chat. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (1998) $3,612; Resale (2011) $19,000. Annual ROI for 12.5 yrs, +14.2%.

The Index Data section contains graphs for the All Art Index since 1875. Graphs for the All Art Index, as well as most of the collecting category indexes for the last fifty years are also available (Old Masters/ 19th century; Impressionist/Modern; American before 1950; Post-War/ Contemporary and Latin American [most recently, data on the traditional Chinese art market has been added]). Graphs for indexes based on special studies will also be available such as the one we created based on our analysis of purchase price and performance.    

The Asset Allocation Studies section analyzes the benefits of a diversified portfolio, including art. The risk-return tradeoffs of including art in a varied portfolio of stocks, bonds, cash and gold are illustrated. The section also visually demonstrates the optimal allocation percentages to these asset classes, at various return levels. Also demonstrated are optimal portfolio results for individuals with a fixed pre-existing art collection. The user gets to choose which art assets to include and which historical time period to use for historical performance.    

The Art Valuation section allows the user to employ an applicable Mei Moses® art index and a user-designated prior-purchase price or appraisal value to create a personalized current “mark to market” valuation level, based on art market changes over the intervening time period. This methodology may be useful in creating art valuations for potential object sales or insurance valuations of existing works in a collection, or price estimates for proposed current purchases at auction or from a dealer. Individual subscribers will be entitled to an unlimited number of valuations, per year, for their own non-commercial, personal use. Daily restrictions may apply however based on total volume of traffic.    

Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2006) $1.46M; (2011) $1.41M. Annual ROI for 5 yrs, -0.7%.

The Artist Returns section, new in 2009, provides information on the returns achieved at auction for the works of each of the 150 artist with the largest number of repeat auction sales represented in ‘repeat sale’ database. This is in the process of becoming the most comprehensive analysis of individual artist returns available anywhere. For each artist graphed, the compound annual return (CAR) of each repeat-sale pair, as a function of the year the work was purchased, is presented. Also provided are summary statistics on the mean and standard deviation of the CAR for all repeat-sale pairs, for works by these artists.    

The CARs for individual artists are not comparable because the repeat sale pairs have different ownership dates and holding periods. To enable an appropriate comparison between and among artists, we normalize the returns for each artist’s works relative to the broader market. We calculate the excess return for each repeat sale pair as the difference between the CAR of that pair and the CAR for our all art index over the same holding period, and calculate the summary statistics (mean, standard deviation) of the excess returns for all the repeat sale pairs of each of the artists analyzed.    

Recommendations to Portfolio Managers and Investors    

Investment advisors, typically unacquainted with the complex forces at play in the art world tend to shy away from discussions with their clients on the topic of their present art holdings or the reality of factoring in art acquisition as an integral part of their portfolio and wealth-building strategy for the future. Approaching the topic of art as an integral part of a diversified portfolio means having the confidence to engage in a meaningful discussion of the financial ramifications of the art he/she currently holds or is thinking of buying, knowing that there are tools available to help guide the process.    

Most high net worth clients will have some form of art as part of their holdings, along with other illiquid categories like real estate and other collectables (watches, cars, fine wines, etc.). Assisting the client to consider art as an important diversification strategy, by accounting for works of art currently owned, along with a proposed strategy for acquiring more art, while mitigating risk and building a realistic ROI, is an important way to strengthen the manager-client relationship. Mei-Moses® indexes provide a reliable and practical means to that end.    

By Richard Friswell, Executive Editor    

Jianping Mei, Ph.D. is a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, China, and co-founder of Beautiful Asset Advisors®, LLC; previously he was an associate professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.    

Click on chart to enlarge

 Michael Moses, Ph.D. is a co-founder of Beautiful Asset Advisors®, LLC; previously he was an associate professor of management and operations management at Stern School of Business.    

Editor’s note: This recent update appears on the Mei-Moses® Web site. Go to their helpful site for additional timely information: www.artasanasset.com. Readers may also want to request a free re-print of an article recently published in The Journal of Investment Consulting, entitled, “Wealth Management for Collectors” (2010). Contact Mei-Moses at support@artasanasset.com.     

CONTINUED FOURTH QUARTER INCREASES FOR MOST COLLECTING CATEGORIES ALLOWS THE MEI MOSES® ALL ART INDEX TO ACHIEVE AN ANNUAL RETURN OF 16.6% REVERSING THE ART MARKET SWOON OF LAST YEAR AND SURPASSING THE 15.06% INCREASE IN S&P 500 TOTAL RETURN INDEX FOR 2010©    

The 2009 decrease in the return of the Mei Moses® All Art index of approximately 23.5 percent was the largest decline in the all art index since the 1991 decline of 38.7 percent. The latter decline occurred after the bursting of the art bubble of 1985-1990. The 23.5% was the second largest decline since the great depression. The declines of 2008 and 2009 occurred after five years of positive annual growth averaging almost 20 percent. The 2010 results, an increase of 16.6%, has stopped this slide and may be the start of a new base building period for the auction art market. These results have allowed the all art index to slightly outperform the results for the of the S&P 500 total return index (where dividends are reinvested tax free) of 15.06%. In addition the most recent ten and five year compound annual returns (CAR) for art, 4.86% and 3.59%, exceed the S&P returns of, 1.35% and 2.28% respectively. Stocks outperformed art over the last twenty five years with a CAR of 9.91 percent compared to 6.43 percent for art. However, for the last fifty years the returns were very close with art achieving a CAR of 9.23% compared to the 9.73% for equities.   

Click on chart to enlarge

___________________________________________    

Additional Reading Material:    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces. The American Economic Review, pgs 1656-1668, 2002.    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Vested Interest and Biased Price Estimates: Evidence from the Auction Market, The Journal of Finance, V. IX, No. 5, pgs 2409-2435, October 2006    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Wealth Management for Collectors. The Journal of Investment Consulting, pgs 50-59, 2010.    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. 2010 Year-End Market Insights Based on Mei-Moses Art Indexes. New York: ©Beautiful Asset Advisors, 2011.

AK Airways, Cuddlefish (2009), vinyl, lights

Jasper Johns said, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.” He encourages each artist to embrace the act of creating something that enthralls, the moment it is perceived. Enhance the work by pushing its boundaries to a new level, he seems to be saying. Expand awareness by defining where exactly that sphere lies. The art on display at Outsight Inn in Rupert Ravens Contemporary embraces Johns’ concept, flexing our preconceived assumptions. In this high-tech world, there are many ways we can rely on technology to take us to these stratospheric heights; but art, effectively executed, can achieve similar goals, enhancing our comprehension of the world around us. fine arts magazine

Jared Whitham, fore: 9/11 Keyboard Relic (2010), mixed media; back: Florida House w/ Garage Sale (2010), mixed media

Upon entering, the work of Jared Whitham and Stefanie Nagorka offers a reflection on Americana. Whitham has constructed a full-scale Florida home with pink shingles and white picket fence. Aptly titled Garage Sale, complete with carport, housing this on-going investigation he has carried on for years. The plethora of items available for sale sparks a conversation on modern society and the objects it produces. Nagorka’s My America, 49 porcelain representations of the American states, communicates eloquently. It is the visual reminder of our terrestrial permanence and our governments self imposed legal boundaries. The face of her work carries the four-color palette of mapmakers, yet the back is painted black, representing the underbelly or dark side of this country.

Stefanie Nagorka, My America (2010), porcelain, acrylic, hay

The work of Matt Stone comprises various sculptures of cardboard, wood, wax, burnt plastic, feathers and colored foam. Taking up residence in a corner of the second floor, Stone invites you into a world of his own making. He favors banal objects, but the transformation is a sight to behold, speeding past your retina, straight to your neocortex. You are no longer in a former furniture store in downtown Newark. You are surrounded instead by shapes, colors, textures and forms which take hold (birds, trees, prehistoric predators, etc). Look! Jutting drawers and tilted glass, tree rings, is that…? The artist provokes open-ended questions, swirling emotions—a new realization permeates—only to be undone. A momentary reprieve comes with a fresh perspective. Attention to detail is paramount to Johns’ “do something” idea, experimentation being an essential factor in the equation. Certain components are vital to the narrative for Stone—the protagonist, antagonist and supporting roles—all coalescing through the dynamic of his work.

Matthew Stone, Body Electric (2009), mixed media

Conversely, the iPad creations of Olu Oguibe do not espouse the same sentiment. These canvases do not engross the viewer as effectively. They appear not to disengage from the here-and-now. A diverse palette of pulsating brushstrokes conceived on an iPad, printed on canvas— digital-to-physical—offers an intriguing glimpse, more than a fully-realized, artistic vision. The artist takes several steps to achieve a distinctive perspective; these pieces are unique more for their printing ingenuity than their subject matter. In doing so, he appears to miss the mark with his exhibit. It is a familiar scene—the viewer stands and admires rather than becoming engaged. The more he attempts to move against the grain, the closer he comes to common elaboration.

Olu Oguibe, Untitled VI (2010), Apple Ipad, archival pigment on canvas, uv coating

What if you take a system of energetic brush strokes—constricting the palette—resulting in a neo-algorithm, a new language? To risk the creation of a cohesive narrative, relying on paint alone, where presentation and context are crucial to understanding, may not always yield an effective result. In a series of paintings, John Mendelsohn successfully achieves this result. Tact, when applying pigment—direction and arrangement—is of utmost importance; for if the effects don’t cohere, there is no moment of release, no flash of sublimity. Mendhelson’s work distinguishes itself by unifying these elements. The colors capture what the lines do not, and vice-versa. His work may be random movements of brush and body; they are certainly not arbitrary in relation to one another. The works functional well separately—and as a unified whole—the eye finding new reasons to return to the work, time and again, in pursuit of his procession of color.

Christopher Tanner, Pink Narcissus/Cake Walk (2007), mixed media

Having been inundated with detail to this point in the exhibit, Christopher Tanner’s work offers little reprieve. His decadent sculptures assault your senses. Gaudy? Perhaps. However, those quick to dismiss do so at their own peril. Tanner’s work is pure burlesque, pomp and circumstance shot from a cannon. Not lacking in innuendo, his work is a fitting alternative to bland nudity. It is an amalgam of elements that asks for your attention and indulgence. Of the work discussed thus far, his work delves deepest into Jasper Johns’ directive. Here, careful examination pays off, with each and every jewel, sequin, and fabric swatch, every minute element, vital to his Gestalt. Two pieces laid out on black fabric succeed in transporting the viewer to a different level of perception. Comprised of leather and jewel-bedecked, the work offers a surprising re-interpretation of the expected. They transmogrify into representations of elegant women, lying on their sides, hair flowing, curves seducing—temptresses with nary a human detail. Where others incorporate simplicity, Tanner engages in decadence and over-saturation, not limited by scale. If Tanner had lived in the 17th century and worked as court artiste for the Sun King, one could imagine that Versailles would have looked like this.

Rich Wislocky, Lord Evil Falcon & Tribal Perch (2010), mirrors & mixed media

AK Airways’, Cuddlefish, still laden with playa dust from the Nevada desert soars above, below and beyond your peripheral vision. Comprised of five gargantuan, inflatable, glowing, orange ‘worms’, it raises the stakes of the other works on display. Don’t paint the monster, MAKE IT. Don’t just sketch a flower, construct one. Markus Baenziger does so through Forever Never, a metal base festooned with dozens of delicate resin leaves. There is also Turn Around, faux-weeds affixed to a concrete moored fence, appearing to be ripped from the street and brought to the Outsight Inn gallery wall.

Markus Baenziger, Forever Never (2005), metal, resin, wood

Of the many artistic works on display at Outsight Inn, two artists are exemplars to understanding what Johns meant by saying “do something else to it.” Rich Wislocky and Ryan C. Doyle succeed by expanding beyond the limits of gravity-bound thinking, taking us to the otherworldliness of their fertile imaginations. Wislocky’s work occupies an entire corner of the gallery—but the space does not simply serve as a repository of ideas. It is a dream world. Turn a corner to discover an entirely surreal atmosphere of mirrors, lights, masks, found objects, totems and images. His is an invitation to another planet—it’s a journey far away, seen through the eyes of his masks, evoking Stravinsky’s early 20th century modern ballets, such as The Firebird. Do not fear! The only thing you are overdosing on is intimate panoply of resourceful and brilliant imagination. Ideas become reflected realities, as a maze of mirrors and spotlights scatter light in every direction. Repetitious imagery (Gandhi, Jesus, Manhattan, etc.) coexists with found-objects; all conceived and presented as demented orgies of plastic toys.

Ryan C. Doyle creates another distinct environment. On the gallery’s third floor, you are greeted by an illustrated skull, encircled by a heart with the words “Idle hand is the devils play tool.” His hands are surely not idle; Doyle’s ride-on installations are certainly devilish toys. Flames spit from the Regurgitator as its patron sits helplessly, waiting to be whipped into a mind-numbing vortex of mechanically-inspired vertigo. Inside, a collaborative mural between Doyle and Mikey 907, Detroit: Half-Dead and Dynamite, provides a backdrop to a dwelling of cracked floors, chipped paint, graffiti throw-ups, empty beer cans and another imposing ride-able sculpture, Hella-Copter.

Ryan Doyle, fore: Hella-Copter (2009); Mikey 907, back: Detroit, Half-Dead and Dynamite (2010), florescent spray paint

As previously stated, the success of adhering to Johns’ “do something” revelation is founded in a creators’ ability to wholly remove the viewer from reality. Stability is unwelcome, no foundation, no shelter—the exhibit demands that you must confront this work and digest it. Never boring, these artists work outside the bounds of the expected, while pushing the limits of creative expression. Whether successful or not, in this writer’s eyes, each artist disengages from the predictable to stride assertively, taking that compelling step into the arena of contemporary art…asking, What’s next?!

By Lawrence Ciarallo, Guest Contributor

Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark, NJ.

www.rupertravens.net

Jessica Lagunas. Para besarte mejor (The Better to Kiss You With), 2003. From video, stills by Roni Mocán

 It was only a few years ago—2007 to be exact—that ‘The Pinta People’, took a big gamble and surprised the art world, by mounting the world’s first international Latin American Modern & Contemporary Art Show at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. With 35 international galleries and countless Hispanic artists from the United States, Spain, Mexico, Central and South America, showing their works, the fair was an immediate hit. So much so, as a matter of fact, that Pinta felt secure enough to not only turn it into a yearly event, but also to eventually establish yet another annual Latin American art fair, during the month of June, in the city of London. fine arts magazine   

Opening Night at Pinta Latin American Art Show. Photo: Pablo Coradis

This past November, ‘the little fair that could’ took another gamble and moved its 4-day, New York City celebration of Latin American art from its Chelsea habitat to Pier 92 on the Hudson River, the same location made famous by The Armory Show. With daylight streaming in from the pier’s surrounding windows, the new and improved Pinta with larger and brighter aisles, more galleries and art installations, a bar and café for the public, and a private, upper level VIP section – with roughly four times more space than the old Pinta – generously gifted its visitors and exhibitors alike with more breathing and thinking room, as well as strolling, eating (and oh, my tired feet!), resting options.   

Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn Lowry. Photo: Edward Rubin

Again, the golden glow of success reared its lovely head and nearly 12,000 art-loving people visited the fair’s 57 participating galleries, the majority being from New York City and Sao Paulo, Brazil. More importantly, though, sales to private and institutional collectors, according to Pinta’s favorable wrap-up report, were “significant.” Among those institutions buying art was the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York’s El Museo del Barrio, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Harvard museums. Also seen looking for bargains at Pinta’s new space were several museum bigwigs—chief among them and wearing a snazzy pink scarf—MoMA’s director, Glen Lowry.   

Although the art of legendary artists Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam, Lygia Clark, and Ana Mendieta, as they did in the first three editions of Pinta, took their customary bows, for the most part, it was the work of the young contemporary Latin American artists whose fresh, unique ways of looking at life that supplied the majority of the fair’s visual excitement. Though many paintings, sculptures, and a few videos, were on view, it was the quietly inventive work of the photographers—digital and otherwise—that depicted life, in its myriad postures, most interestingly.   

Lluis Barba, Project of the Adequacy of the Great Gallery of Louvre (2010), after Hubert Robert (1796) Travelers in Time series 44x50” C-print, diasec Courtesy: Dean Project

 The work of Brazilian artist Rochelle Costi at the Celma Albuquerque Galeria De Arte (Rio de Janeiro) is about the scale and perception of space. In one photograph, two stacks of hand-cut paper, lined up side by side, inhabit a one-window, dollhouse-sized room. Another, titled Disproportionally, reveals the floor of a room, covered with a few dozen small metal containers, the type that holds rolls of film. Both objects, deliberately placed in miniaturized settings by the artist, add a disorienting effect to the photos. Our eyes dart back and forth, from the window to the ceiling to the floor, to the object and back, trying to make visual sense of what we are looking at. Are the objects large or small, and what size is the room? As Costi wrote, “The series was made using a model of a house where odd objects were introduced to stress the difficulty that we have in realizing the amount of space we really need to live. Have we grown up with too much,” Costi asks. Has the environment swallowed us? Is growing up not fitting anymore?”   

In his digitally-composed photographic series Travelers in Time at Dean Project (New York), Barcelona-based artist Lluis Barba, startles the brain by adding unexpected contemporary images, somewhat humorously, into the scenario of classical paintings. In Brueghel’s Peasant Wedding (1568) modern day tourists pose and party among Brueghel’s 16th century wedding guests. In Project of the Adequacy of the Great Gallery of the Louvre, Barba re-envisions Hurbert Robert’s 1796 painting of the Louvre, by re-hanging the museum’s walls with the work of twentieth century masters, like Picasso, Magritte, Rothko, then adding present-day museum goers into the mix. Even more topical—both images are slipped into the scenario—is a portrait of Michael Jackson and what seems to be the figure of designer Karl Lagerfeld, wearing his trademark sunglasses. The artist seems to be saying that art and fashion continually change while human behavior remains the same.   

Stills from video performance, Jessica Lagunas. Para acariciarte mejor (The Better to Caress You With), 2003. Image courtesy the artist and ROLLO Contemporary Art. Stills:Roni Mocán

None of videos on view were as visually exciting, lushly colored, or intellectually stimulating as those of Nicaragua-born, New York City-based artist Jessica Lagunas, at the Rollo Contemporary Art (London, England). In this series, the artist herself—in three separate wall-mounted screens—is seen applying lipstick, mascara and painting her nails, all in an overly exaggerated manner. Frantically transforming her lips, eyelashes and fingernails, until they become almost clown-like, Lagunas’s videos use the titles, Little Red Riding Hood, The Better To Caress You, The Better To See You With, and The Better To Kiss You With, to parody the various ‘must do’ female beauty routines that Madison Avenue and Hollywood have hawked for decades. In doing so, she attempts to undermine the authority of contemporary visual culture’s representation of the female body, by re-presenting it in terms of insecurity and obsession. A few months later, much to my surprise, these same Lagunas videos, apparently making the rounds, were entertaining crowds at the opening of curator Sasha Okshteyn’s exhibition, Basic Instinct, at the Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I have a sneaking suspicion that Okshteyn, known for having a keen eye and finger on the pulse, must have been doing some pre-exhibition shopping at Pinta.   

Luna Paiva, Untitled (2009), photograph of woman plucking a chicken 24.4x33.1”. Courtesy Galeria Teresa Anchorena, Argentina

The narrative work of Paris born, Argentina based photographer Luna Paiva, at the Galeria Teresa Anchorena (Buenos Aires, Argentina), is all about drama. Whether it’s her edgy series of scantily clothed show-girls, known as vedettes, posing inside their homes, or her telling portraits of everyday people at home and work, behind every photograph lurks a fascinating story. One eye-popping, surreal Paiva photograph of a woman manically plucking a chicken pulled me right into the gallery. With one arm in the air, and feathers magically flying everywhere, the lady stands behind a long fruit, fowl, and vegetable-laden table that would do any still life painting proud. As the story goes, Paiva, at the bequest of singer Candelaria Saenz Valiente, composed this sumptuous scenario – reminiscent of Peter Greenaway’s 1989 movie, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, at a friend’s antique shop, to illustrate the Argentine chanteuse’s song, Electrodomestics.   

Felipe Morozini A Noiva do Vento (Bride of The Wind) (2007) 16 photos mounted on Diasec. Above: Untitled, 2007, photograph of woman sunning herself, 40x60” courtesy: Zipper Gallery, San Paulo, Brazil

Equally strong, but opposite in their ability to excite, are the photographs of Brazilian, Felipe Morozini, at the Zipper Galeria (São Paulo, Brazil). Using a zoom lens, Morozini – exercising his voyeuristic rights – secretly documents the lives of his neighbors from the window of his apartment. In one photograph, a woman soaking up the sun in a two-piece bathing suit lies precariously on the ledge, just outside her apartment window. In another, a naked woman stands on her balcony examining herself in a mirror. As luck would have it—and luck plays a large part in Morozini’s work—the very instant he took a snapshot, the mirror was reflecting his neighbor’s nipple. In Bride of the Wind (2007), the artist turns his gaze on the temporal qualities of nature and depicts—in 16 sequenced frames—various effects of the wind on a set of curtains hanging out of an apartment window. Following the twisting and turning movements of each curtain, frame-by-frame, I found the windmill of my mind making its own little movie.   

Rafael Gómez Barros, Casa Tomada: Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino Altar de la Patria (2008) Courtesy of Galería Christopher Paschall S.XXI, Bogotá, Columbia

Galería Christopher Paschall S.XXI (Bogatå, Columbia), one of a handful of galleries that did so, dedicated their entire exhibition space to Casa Tomada (Seized Home), Columbian conceptual artist Rafael Gómez Barros’s traveling installation. Using nature’s small, but hard-working creatures, for political purposes—his intent to symbolize the people displaced by continuing armed conflict and its resulting forced migration in Columbia—Barros attaches hundreds, sometimes thousands of fiberglass ants, enlarged to the size of scary, to the facades of government buildings and revered historical monuments, such the National Congress of Columbia and Quinta de San Pedro San Pedro in Santa Marta, one the nation’s many shrines dedicated to Simón Bolívar. One gallery wall, covered with a trail of giant black ants, was literally stopping people in their tracks. Another wall featuring photographs of Barros’s ants invading various buildings, brought to mind the countless science fiction movies popular in the 50s and 60s, such as Them (1954), in which ants, greatly enlarged by atomic radiation, threaten to take over the world.   

Gerard Ellis, Birthday Pinata (2010) 78x118” Courtesy: Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Santo Domingo

Even before I entered the Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery (Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic), Brooklyn-based, Dominican-born, Gerald Ellis’s stunningly composed painting, Birthday Piñata (2010), with its knockout vibrant blue sky, took me prisoner. The artist’s beautifully drawn images of dinosaurs, and cartoon-like white clouds, under which a birthday boy with toy sword in his hand stands, capture all of the innocence of childhood. Autobiographical by nature, the painting channels negative feelings that Ellis experienced as a child when called upon to smash open the piñata. “I hated going to birthday parties and always tried to stay away from clowns and the piñatas,” Ellis wrote to me. “I think this funny looking object (the piñata) can detonate a very strong and violent behavior on the child, who is, after destroying the object, fighting his way through into getting as much as he can from what was inside it. I view this as an early example of what really moves us as humans, from a selfish point of view.”   

No fair is complete without a touch of eroticism and Brazilian artist Vincent Gill more than made up for it in his series Read the Book, Watch the Movie (2004) at Galeria Nara Roesler (São Paulo, Brazil). Each drawing, executed in India ink on pages taken from psychology books—like a modern day Kama Sutra—lustily depicts various sexual positions. Few of the book’s words—those not blotted out by the black ink which covers most of the page—serve to illuminate each image, while white, topsy-turvy line drawings illustrate the love-making figures. The words on one drawing of a penis penetrating a vagina read, Another was the one who introduced the concept for the first time. The text accompanying the image of a man and woman in head-to-toe position announces that, All kinds of things come together (right). A third and somewhat ambiguous drawing of a naked woman leaning over a bed—it is left up to the viewer’s imagination as to what is going to take place—reads anxiety by chastisement.   

At first glance, the simple paintings of Mexican artist Hugo Lugo, at the Ginocchio Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), executed on pages torn from a spiral notebook, the type we took with us to college, appear to be a simple mix of drawing and collage. On closer inspection – talking about trompe l’oeil – each work, down to the page’s torn holes and solitary men occupying each page, is a fully realized oil and acrylic painting on board. Equally deceiving is the subject matter. For here, the artist waxes existential in his presentation of solitary-thinking characters in simple situations, forcing us to consider our own existence. In one painting, the artist turns the page’s straight lines into a wavering whirlpool, placing a barefoot man, shoes in hand, head bent down at its very center. The painting, aptly titled Cuadernode de Reflexiones (Book of Reflections), seems to say that we are at the center of everything going on around us. Another less felicitous reading could be that it is only a matter of time before we are sucked into this circle of nothingness.   

Hugo Lugo, Cuaderno de reflexiones (Book of Reflections), 2010, oil, acrylic on canvas – 41x 31”, Courtesy: Ginoccho Gallery, Mexico

The most unusual installation at Pinta belonged to Venezuelan-born, Miami-based, fashion designer, Nicolás Felizola, who dedicated exhibition space in memory of Mexican actress, María Félix (1914-2002), Latin America’s revered movie goddess. Known as La Doña to her loving fans (myself included), Felíx was a huge star throughout Central and South America and Europe in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Cast in films by Renior, Buñuel, Emilio Fernández and Juan Antonio Bardem, with such greats as Rossano Brazzi, Vittorio Gassman, Jean Gabin, and Yves Montand, Felíx refused to work in Hollywood unless she made her grand entrance from the “big door” and not the small roles offered by Cecil B. de Mille. “I was not born to carry a basket,” Félix is reputed to have said.   

The back story here is that in 2007 Felizola, attending Maria Felíx’s posthumous auction at Christie’s, left the premises owning the most comprehensive collection of the movie star’s couture-designed wardrobe, some of which—Dior, Balenciaga, Hermes, Chanel, Halston, Cardin, and some of Felizola’s own Felíx-inspired creations—are displayed here on mannequins (see below) . Running alongside what is essentially a visual timeline of Felíx’s devotion to fashion and film, through her costumes, garments, hats, and accessories, is Carmen Castilla’s 2001 documentary film, Maria Felíx, The Making of a Myth. Structured around an exclusive interview, in which the still-radiant 87-year old, Maria Felix responds to an off-camera narrator, she recalls her films, men, clothes and jewels. Thus, little by little, the legend unfurls.   

Fully saturated, having spent a wonder-filled, half-day at Pinta, I make for the door.   

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer   

Edward Rubin is a critic who writes about art, culture and entertainment. Although based in New York City, he travels frequently to cover international events.

George Catlin, La-dóo-ke-a, Buffalo Bull, a Grand Pawnee Warrior (1832), Pawnee, Coll. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

 “‘Ashort distance below [the rocks above the city of Alton, Missouri], a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and sweeping and surging in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.’ This was the mouth of the Missouri, ‘that savage river’ which ‘descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.’” 

—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883), quoting the French explorers,”Joliet, the merchant and Marquette, the priest,” from their journal (1673). 

“The way, the only way to stop this evil [selling land to the white man] is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right to the land, as it was at first and should be now—for it was never divided, but belongs to all. No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. …Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” 

—Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnee, in an angry address to a joint meeting of whites and Native Americans (1810), transcribed at the scene. 

In the mid-eighteen hundreds, St. Louis, Missouri was America’s West Coast. Almost daily, long processions of slow-moving Conestoga wagons (nicknamed, prairie schooners) departed the town along deeply-rutted trails, plying ‘the amber waves of grain’, westward. With territorial expansion and settlement well underway, the levees and supply warehouses along the banks of the Mississippi River boomed. Population shift in search of ‘Manifest Destiny’ had converted this small 18th century trading outpost of a few hundred to a small, thriving city of more than 16,000 by 1840. The vast, once pristine river, flowing south to New Orleans, was a slow-moving liquid highway with an exit ramp just north of the town—the Missouri River—for those who would trace its winding and sometime tumultuous path onward to the Dakota territories, Montana and the vast newly-mapped mountainous regions of the Great Northwest. fine arts magazine 

St. Louis waterfront levees and steamers(c.1850)

Along the way, whether by established land routes or river passage, travelers would encounter pristine lands and Indian tribal communities, still largely untouched by Euro-American influences. These were the ancestral lands of the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Dakota, Omaha, Arrapahoe, Crow, Boise and Nez Perces, to name a few. Viewed by many as an obstacle to territorial ambitions, others believed that settler and Native Americans could co-exist in the same natural domain. What proved to be antithetical to this concept of cohabitation was the notion of ‘land ownership’, a concept introduced by the new arrivals. While initially at the mercy of harsh natural elements and the hostile (or peaceful) intentions of nearby tribes, ultimately, settlement rights were assured by sheer numbers of new arrivals, a system of forts offering refuge from attack and the fire-power of the U.S. military to control and eventually eradicate the Indian threat. 

"Our City", St Louis (c. 1850), lithograph

Two men from very different backgrounds, but with similar agendas, ventured to St Louis in the early 1830s, in the hopes of capturing the images and the stories of the Native American tribes that lay in the ‘vast unknown’ beyond the limits of civilization as they knew it. One was an American, George Catlin, with an itch for adventure and a limited budget; the other, a European painter, Karl Bodmer, in the employ of a wealthy German nobleman and traveling companion with a burning curiosity about the American West. Their approach to the task of capturing images of authentic America and its original inhabitants was very different, although they unknowingly shared the same long-range objective—that is, to record the new American landscape and its Indian culture as objective observers and then to report their findings to a curious, even disbelieving, world. 

To learn more about the two artists, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, I contacted Mary Williams, owner of Mary Williams Fine Arts, in Boulder, Colorado, and an important purveyor of prints by each artist. She explained to me that both artists were very likely to be traveling on the Missouri River, in the Western territories, at about the same time. “It is ironic that their paths may have unknowingly crossed in pursuit of the same goal—to capture the image of the American Indian in his native habitat. The Plains Indian tribes and their unaltered lifestyle, at that critical moment in the 1830s, was on the verge of being tainted and eventually destroyed by the massive influx of settlers to the region. Within a few years, what they saw there would no longer exist. It became an irreplaceable record of a culture lost to progress”. 

Willian Fisk, George Catlin (1849). Coll. Nat'l Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Williams points out that certain images by both Catlin and Bodmer are well-known and easily recognizable by those familiar with art of the period and the genre. “However they worked in very different ways. Catlin traveled and painted in the region for several years…he was a true field painter and some of his lesser-known paintings have a spontaneous, unfinished feel. They are true records of events that were happening at the time, or near the time of the completion of the image. Bodmer, on the other hand, was sketching and taking notes for studio work that he would do much later, in his studio, first in Germany, then France. He lived and gathered data for what he and his patron, Prince Max, knew would be a series of complex and very high quality, hand-colored prints. The aquatint engravings they created was the most involved printing processes of the day. They rivaled in quality the John J. Audubon opus, The Birds of America.” 

George Catlin (1796-1872) was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Following a brief career as a lawyer, he produced two major collections of paintings of American Indians and published a series of books chronicling his travels among the native peoples of North, Central and South America. Claiming his interest in America’s “vanishing race” was sparked by a visiting American Indian delegation in Philadelphia, he set out to record the appearance and customs of America’s native people, “…to save from oblivion their primitive looks and customs”. 

George Catlin, Mix-ke-móte-skin-na, Iron Horn, a Warrior (1832), Blackfoot/Siksika, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

Catlin began his journey in 1830 when he accompanied General William Clark on a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi River into Native American territory. St. Louis became Catlin’s base of operations for five trips he took between 1830 and 1836, eventually visiting fifty tribes. Two years later he ascended the Missouri River nearly 1800 miles to Ft Union, Montana, where he spent several weeks among indigenous people still relatively untouched by European civilization. He visited eighteen tribes, including the Pawnee, Omaha, and Ponca in the south and the Mandan, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet to the north. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career. Later trips along the Arkansas, Red and Mississippi rivers as well as visits to Florida and the Great Lakes resulted in over 500 paintings and a substantial collection of artifacts. 

When Catlin returned east in 1838, he assembled these paintings and numerous artifacts into his Indian Gallery and began delivering public lectures which drew on his personal recollections of life among the American Indians. Catlin traveled with his Indian Gallery to major cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New York. He hung his paintings “salon style”-side by side and one above another-to great effect. Visitors identified each painting by the number on the frame as listed in Catlin’s catalogue. Soon afterwards he began a lifelong effort to sell his collection to the U.S. government. The touring Indian Gallery did not attract the paying public Catlin needed to stay financially sound, and Congress rejected his initial petition to purchase the works, so in 1839 Catlin took his collection across the Atlantic for a much-publicized tour of European capitals. Anticipating the Wild West shows of a later date, Catlin’s exhibit featured lectures and demonstrations of American Indian hunting, war, and weaponry, displays of artifacts collected during his travels in the West, and live performances by ‘Native Dancers from the Wilds of America.’ 

George Catlin, The Buffalo Hunt, Chase (1834)

Catlin, always the showman and entrepreneur, initially attracted crowds to his Indian Gallery in London, Brussels, and Paris in 1845. The French critic Charles Baudelaire remarked on Catlin’s paintings, “M. Catlin has captured the proud, free character and noble expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way.” But, the revolution of 1848 forced him to return to London, where he opened yet another exhibit. While touring abroad, Catlin’s wife and son both died, leaving him three daughters, whom he entrusted to the care of a brother-in-law in New York. 

Catlin’s dream was to sell his Indian Gallery to the U.S. government so that his life’s work would be preserved intact. His continued attempts to persuade various officials in Washington, D.C. failed. He was forced to sell the original Indian Gallery, now 607 paintings, due to personal debts in 1852. Industrialist Joseph Harrison took possession of the paintings and artifacts, which he stored in a factory in Philadelphia, as security. Catlin spent the last 20 years of his life trying to re-create his collection. This second collection of paintings is known as the “Cartoon Collection” since the works are based on the outlines he drew of the works from the 1830s. 

George Catlin, Chin-cha-pee, Fire Bug that Creeps, Wife of The Light (1832), Assiniboine/Nakoda. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

Despite his hardships, Catlin had managed to publish, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, in two volumes, in 1841 with about 300 engravings. Three years later he published 25 plates, entitled Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio, and, in 1848, Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe. From 1852 to 1857 he traveled through South and Central America and later returned for further exploration in the Far West. The record of these later years is contained in Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1868) and My Life among the Indians (ed. by N. G. Humphreys, 1909). In 1872, Catlin traveled to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian. Until his death later that year in Jersey City, New Jersey, Catlin worked in a studio in the Smithsonian “Castle.” Harrison’s widow donated the original Indian Gallery-more than 500 works-to the Smithsonian in 1879. 

The nearly complete surviving set of Catlin’s first Indian Gallery painted in the 1830s is now part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. Some 700 sketches are in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. 

Artist, Karl Bodmer (c 1860)

Karl Bodmer (1809 –1893) was a Swiss painter of the American West. He accompanied German explorer, Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied from 1832 through 1834 on his Missouri River expedition. He was hired as an artist by Maximilian with the specific intent of traveling through the American West and recording images of the different tribes they saw along the way. 

Karl Bodmer was born in 1809 in Zürich, Switzerland. When he was thirteen years old, his mother’s brother, Johann Jakob Meier, became Bodmer’s teacher. Meier was an artist, having studied under the well-known artists Heinrich Füssli and Gabriel Lory. Young Bodmer and his older brother, Rudolf, joined their uncle on artistic travels throughout their home country. 

A major turning point in Bodmer’s life was his being contracted to the Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied. Known popularly to naturalists then, and even now, as Prince Max, this German aristocrat, having successfully led a scientific expedition to Brazil in 1815–1817, decided to embark on another such venture, this time to North America. 

By 1828, Bodmer had left his native Switzerland for the German city of Koblenz. It was there that he came to Prince Max’s attention. After delays, Bodmer, in the company of Prince Max and a huntsman and taxidermist, David Dreidoppel, set out for America in May, 1832. In a letter bearing that date, Prince Max wrote to his brother that Bodmer “is a lively, very good man and companion, seems well educated, and is very pleasant and very suitable for me; I am glad I picked him. He makes no demands, and in diligence he is never lacking.” 

Karl Bodmer, The Hidatsa chief, Pehriska-Ruhpa (Two Ravens), etching from Travels in the Interior of America (1839-41)

Arriving in Boston on July 4th, the three encountered hardships and delays caused largely by a cholera epidemic in the eastern states that swept across the north to Michigan. Bodmer and his entourage traveled through several Eastern cities to and from their way west, stopping to record the attractions along the way, including scenes like Niagara Falls and a prison in Pittsburgh. It was not until October, 1832, that the three began their journey down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, arriving in Mt. Vernon, Indiana about midnight, ten days later. The next morning, the party made their way to New Harmony, Indiana. 

In his famous book chronicling the expedition, Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, the Prince wrote, “I had been indisposed, as well as my huntsman, since I left Louisville, and was not in a mood properly to appreciate the fine, lofty forests of Indiana, the road through which was very bad and rough.” 

Prince Max had planned to spend only a few days in New Harmony, Indiana. But his stay “was prolonged by serious indisposition, nearly resembling cholera, to a four months’ winter residence.” The Prince devotes a whole chapter of his book to New Harmony, its environs, and to the work and personalities of two leading American naturalists who lived there, Thomas Say and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur. Lesueur was also a prolific artist. 

Karl Bodmer, Bison-Dance of the Mandan Indians, (Plate 18), from Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the interior of North America. London: Ackermann, 1843.

Unlike the Prince and the huntsman, Bodmer was not ill-disposed. Alone, he left Indiana at the end of December, and in January 1833, caught a steamboat at Mt. Vernon to New Orleans and spent a week with Joseph Barrabino, an Italian-American naturalist and friend of Say and Lesueur. Along the way, he visually recorded the details of river life and the people there. A fine pencil portrait of host, Barrabino, drawn by Lesueur, is preserved at the New Harmony Workingmen’s Institute, for example. Eventually, he reached St. Louis and was joined by the prince and others, where they readied for their image and specimen-gathering expedition into the wilds. 

When the 18-month expedition through the upper reaches of the Missouri River basin was complete, he returned to Germany with Prince Maximilian, then traveled to France. In Paris, he had over 400 drawings and paintings to select from and settled on eighty-one scenes from the expedition to be reproduced as aquatints, many being composites of several individual field studies. The Prince had these images incorporated into his book, which was published in London in 1839. Bodmer eventually settled in Barbizon, France, where he became a French citizen. At that point he changed his name to ‘Charles Bodmer.’ Today the majority of his original watercolors are located in three collections in the United States, with the majority of them located at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. They are recognized as among the most painstakingly accurate images ever made of Native Americans, their culture and artifacts, and of the scenery of the pristine ‘Old West’. 

Karl Bodmer, Dog Dance (c. 1833). A Mandan (Missouri River) plains warrior. From, ‘Travels in…’(1843)

“So,” Williams explains, “Catlin was responsible for creating a more far-reaching visual record, given that he spent more time—more than five years in the field—and painted more spontaneously; but more often than not, his work lacks the detail or skill-level of Karl Bodmer. Nevertheless, Catlin’s held a deep conviction that the communities of Indians he visited and lived with were truly endangered. This compassion is communicated in the body of work he left behind. Bodmer, on the other hand, was a European painter with an ethnographer’s interest in his subject. He and his sponsor both knew there would be a strong market for the scale of an atlas of fine quality (including images, diaries and a map of their experiences in America), that he would later create. His collection of aquatint engravings represents one of the finest and most detailed records of Native American dress and habits that exist today.” 

Williams goes on to explain, “Both artists’ work is critically important to the pre-photographic recordings of Native American life on the Plains. Sadly, their romantic and dramatic method of preserving visual history became obsolete with the invention of the camera, and the persona of the roving artist/adventurer would soon disappear. In looking back through the various records that these two men left behind, each offers us a legacy of information that is unparalleled, today. Within ten years of Bodmer and Catlin’s departure, smallpox would have wiped out much of the tribal communities in the region and their legacy would disappear forever.” 

By Richard Friswell, Executive Editor 

Visit the collection of original and high-quality print reproductions of George Catlin and Karl Bodmer at mary Williams Fine Arts, www.marywilliamsfinearts.com 

See the entire collection of paintings and prints by George Catlin at: www.georgecatlin.org 

Visit the Smithsonian Collection of George Catlin images at: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlinclassroom/catlin_browsepagetribe.cfm?StartRow=1 

Bodmer is known today almost exclusively for his watercolor portraits of the American Indians they met and his views of the extraordinary Missouri Valley landscape through which they passed. But his position as Maximilian’s expedition artist meant that he was also engaged in the more mundane task of documenting the American fauna that was an equal part of the prince’s studies. Over the course of the three years, Bodmer produced finely executed and wonderfully detailed studies of the variety of animals the expedition countered. Sometimes drawn from the wild, but as often rendered from creatures shot as specimens, these works are given the same attention and care as Bodmer’s other paintings. Not as well known as the portraits and landscapes, these works were nevertheless a valuable record of the journey. A selection of animal studies from Omaha, Nebraska’s Joslyn Art Museum, extensive Maximilian-Bodmer Collection, was on view in 2007-8 and can be seen at: http://joslyn.org/exhibitions/Exhibition-Detail.aspx?e=f0d33187-88fe-4028-a77b-051705525743&i=11 

_______________________________________________ 

Excerpt from, George Catlin, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (1848)

“On an occasion when I had interrogated a Sioux chief, on the Upper Missouri, about their Government – their punishments and tortures of prisoners, for which I had freely condemned them for the cruelty of the practice, he took occasion when I had got through, to ask me some questions relative to modes in the civilized world, which, with his comments upon them, were nearly as follow; and struck me, as I think they must every one, with great force.”

George Catlin, Beautiful Prairie Bluffs above the Poncas, 1050 Miles Above St. Louis (1832), Ponca. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

‘Among white people, nobody ever take your wife – take your children – take your mother, cut off nose – cut eyes out – burn to death?” No! “Then you no cut off nose – you no cut out eyes – you no burn to death – very good.’ 

“He also told me he had often heard that white people hung their criminals by the neck and choked them to death like dogs, and those their own people; to which I answered, “yes.” He then told me he had learned that they shut each other up in prisons, where they keep them a great part of their lives because they can’t pay money! I replied in the affirmative to this, which occasioned great surprise and excessive laughter, even amongst the women. He told me that he had been to our Fort, at Council Bluffs, where we had a great many warriors and braves, and he saw three of them taken out on the prairie and tied to a post and whipped almost to death, and he had been told that they submit to all this to get a little money, “yes.” He said he had been told, that when all the white people were born, their white medicine-men had to stand by and look on – that in the Indian country the women would not allow that – they would be ashamed – that he had been along the Frontier, and a good deal amongst the white people, and he had seen them whip their little children – a thing that is very cruel – he had heard also, from several white medicine-men, that the Great Spirit of the white people was the child of a white woman, and that he was at last put to death by the white people! This seemed to be a thing that he had not been able to comprehend, and he concluded by saying, “the Indians’ Great Spirit got no mother – the Indians no kill him, he never die.” He put me a chapter of other questions, as to the trespass of the white people on their lands their continual corruption of the morals of their women – and digging open the Indians’ graves to get their bones, etc. To all of which I was compelled to reply in the affirmative, and quite glad to close my notebook, and quietly to escape from the throng that had collected around me, and saying (though to myself and silently), that these and an hundred other vices belong to the civilized world, and are practiced upon (but certainly, in no instance, reciprocated by) the “cruel and relentless savage.” left, above: George Catlin, Du-cor-re-a, Chief of the Tribe and his family  (c. 1830), Winnebago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.