Never Too Late, Buying A Museum Piece

1950s, I was a slow-poke in accumulating abstract expressionist art works. NYC was rocking as the center of this new movement, not Paris or London. I missed the reflowering of Renaissance work, too.  Rembrandt, Renoir, Matisse et al. But I own Matisse watercolors rather than the huge florals that you see in the Paris museums. 

The art world thrives with or without you. You can catch up with work a hundred years old.  I did purchase a Rouault aquatint of Christ, “Veronica’s Veil” in Woodstock, New York.   Later on, I discovered that it was Rouault’s workshop student work. The artist would sign such pieces in the stone if he approved of them. That’s what gave them value. 

Always, a lesson to be learned here. Be as early as you can be in art markets. Rouault was just approving student work-shop pieces by signing his name in the stone form. At first, the Spanish frame encasing my piece was worth more than the lithograph itself. 

My job is to go through life encountering originals and giving them a home. Art dealers taught me much about collecting! The price of a piece and its valuation in the marketplace over a business cycle carries surprises. 

I’ve encountered dealers who mark up offerings by an additional 100%. When I asked why such a thing, their response was, “Well, we’re ready to negotiate down by 20% anything in inventory. File away, such nonsense that goes on.

I won’t deal with anyone who marks up his inventory outrageously,  looking to take innocent collectors for an expensive ride. 

Betty Parsons once begged me to buy several Mark Rothko pieces selling at $1,500 each that later on turned into collectors’ dreams, selling in the millions. I was basically being offered work near cost in the dealer's inventory. 

Sam Kootz, who handled Pierre Soulages, told me to find Soulages to buy as Soulages was moving into great demand. At that time a $35,000 work now sells into 8 figures. There’s the scarcity factor, too. 

The classic story on Soulages is that in his mid-nineties he concluded black was the most expressive color to work in. He painted hundreds of black pieces, later purchased with reverence by collectors like me. 

The Soulages’ exhibit of black and white work shown at the Pompidou in Paris drew thousands of collectors to the museum. There was an awesome hush in the galleries as hundreds of us looked on and bought our fill. 

Later on, we visited the Soulages Museum in France, filled with decades old canvases. Collectors should immerse themselves to discoveries of great work still ignored. 

David Hockney’s work shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton is a great example of an art venue embracing pieces of an established painter using its extensive space stretching for 

hundreds of yards. The museum adumbrated scope in Hockney’s work.  No huddles of kids clicking cameras at 3 by 4-foot Old Masters like Rembrandt in a nook on the museum's show floor. 

Hopefully, you’ve seen the best of the best and collected great pieces before they soared out of reach in dealer showrooms. My Rouault aquatint maybe isn’t worth much.  But, I saw there real quality, broadly displayed, that did soar into the heavens rather sooner than later.