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The Value of Henry Moore

Moore Working

Henry Moore is one of the most iconographic artists of the 20th century. His works in sculpture, bronze, Rosenthal Porcelain, and on paper are well known for the fluidity of line work that is abstract and detailed. His works effortlessly draw out the viewer’s feelings of compassion, interest, and wonder and thus it is not difficult to see why his works have increased in value.

The 20th Century British and Irish Art sale at Bonham’s in November broke the world auction record for a work on paper by Henry Moore. A 1941 drawing of a seated mother and child sold for $989,286. In addition, a 1939 bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, Stringed Reclining Figure, was also sold at this auction for $441,544.

Stringed Reclining Figure, 1939

As discerned from Art Price, the turnover value for works by Henry Moore in public auctions was over $33 million in 2010, with a 24% increase in value since 1998. The popularity of his mediums, such as bronze sculpture, Rosenthal Porcelain, and drawings vary depending on the iconography and price. However as the artist evaluation and recent auction listings indicate, the investment of owning a work by Henry Moore appears to be a wise decision.

The dangers of giving (or not) an opinion

In a thriving art market where works have been selling at high prices at auction (note the $199.8 total for a Modern and Contemporary Sale held last month at Sotheby’s), where blockbuster shows witness ticket hawking and long lines (the London National Gallery’s “Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” comes to mind), the finest art means very fine value to its owners. With such high sums at stake, those seeking a stamp of authenticity from foundations and academics are less than inclined to accept “attributed to X” for an answer.

In “The law vs scholarship,” Georgina Adam and Riah Pryor cite, “a growing fear among experts that they might be sued for giving their opinion” (The Art Newspaper, December 2011). Using the recent examples of a contested group of Degas plasters and a large group of drawings thought by some to be done by Francis Bacon, they voice concern that art collectors’ willingness – even eagerness, they suggest – to sue experts over undesired answers discourages scholarship.

Group of recently discovered Degas plasters

Even after disbanding in the 1990’s upon completion of the catalogue raisonné, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation has been sued over a number of works; recently, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Board was sued by the owner of Fuego Flores (1983), and given the choice of reaching a decision as to the work’s authenticity or paying up to $5m in damages. And who can forget that the Andy Warhol committee just called it quits, after being the subject of so many lawsuits.

This inclination to sue is dangerous. Aside from racking up high legal fees for scholars pursuing important, widely beneficial research, it turns the world of art scholarship and buying into a carnival sideshow. Although no one can be naïve enough to disassociate art from its value these days, we should try to uphold some shred of dignity for our art, our experts, and ourselves. Lawsuits should not be seen as a valid avenue to the authentication of an artwork, no matter its cost or potential value. Catalogue raisonné authors or artist board members should not suffer nightmares featuring a collector advancing, art in one hand and a legal threat in the other.

What Will Happen to Warhol?

The Andy Warhol Foundation has developed a rather convoluted reputation in their quest to catalog and certify the vast collection of over 100,000 (across all media) works that Warhol created. The Foundation Board has made several controversial decisions regarding the authentication of specific prints and screen prints that have landed them with millions of dollars’ worth of legal bills and a negative reputation as the monopolizing entity of the Warhol market. However a collector may feel about their role in the art market, they play an important one. In an interesting turn of events this past month, the Andy Warhol Foundation announced that it will dissolve its authentication board at the beginning of 2012.

Wahol- Blackglama

What does this mean for the collector? Will panic spread through the art market as Warhol’s go unregulated? That does not seem to be the case as the Art Newspaper brilliantly discusses in The problem with authenticating Warhol.  In the article they note the facts” that none of the top five Warhol works sold at auction have been stamped by the board…”. With only 16 out of 49 works for sale this past month having been authenticated by the board, there is no reason for collectors to fear.

All of the top record-breakers are, however, detailed in the artist’s catalogue raisonné that the Warhol Foundation has compiled. There are three completed volumes of the catalogue that document Warhol’s paintings, prints, screen prints, and sculpture until 1974. The foundation’s mission is to make a complete catalogue of all of Warhol’s works and will continue to review works submitted for inclusion in future editions, but in its own time (unlike the authentication board, which took requests).

The Foundation stepping away from the market to focus on scholarship will undoubtedly led to good things. A more complete catalog of Warhol’s work will aid the art market in regards to authenticity as the new scholarship will include his drawings and photographs, which currently do not exist in a cohesive form. When looking at the Warhol works the Authentication Board has been exposed to, there is no cause for concern as only 6,000 of Warhol’s more than 100,000 works have gone through the authentication process. Thus the only advice to offer a collector is to practice due diligence in regards to researching the provenance of a piece and feel 100% comfortable and confident in their purchase.

Conservation in the 21st Century

Trolling the web for the latest art news, I stumbled upon a fascinating article on Wired. According to Mike Olson, an unlikely partnership with an even stranger toolbox has emerged to restore the frescoes at the Church of Santos Juanes in the Spanish city of Valencia, otherwise known as the birthplace of paella. Between the two of them, the Centre for Advanced Food Microbiology and the Polytechnic University at the Institute of Heritage Restoration identified the ideal restoration tool: a salt- and glue-eating bacteria. Let those who believe food and art to be separate take note.

Frescoes inside the Church of Santos Juanes in Valencia, Spain

Pseudomonas stutzeri was developed by a team of biologists, their efforts driven in part by Pilar Bosch, who learned her tricks from the group that cleaned the Campo Santo di Pisa in Italy. Growing the bacteria in a culture containing the elements that need to be removed from the frescoes, the scientists develop a strain that eats away, literally, at the gluey remnants of past botched restoration attempts and at the salt blooms left by pigeon nests.

The bacteria are spread on an area of the frescoes and covered with a gel; when heated by a lamp, this gel generates humid conditions under which the Pseudomonas thrive, and get to work.  Just 90 minutes later, the targeted area of the fresco is washed clean with water and dried, killing the bacteria and leaving behind a shiny clean section to admire.

In this way, about one third of the frescoes decorating the walls of the baroque and gothic Church, whose original structure dates back to the 13th century, have been restored to date.

What strikes me, and what might occur to fresco aficionados, is how this restoration-by-bacteria creates a neat symmetry, revealing what was created through similar means. The artist paints one pre-determined portion of fresco per day. Before work begins, wet plaster is laid down. The fragment must be completed before the plaster begins to dry. Any mistakes must be manually removed, and sometimes the entire section – called a giornata in Italian due to its daily time limit – has to be taken out.

Bosch and her team of people and Pseudomonas might think of their own work as broken down into miniaturegiornata, 90-minute cycles of apply and unveil. As for this joint venture of bacteria, biologists and baroque art, I knew the world needed to know.

Art Market Update

Sotheby’s and Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sales this past week provided for an interesting revitalization of the Impressionist and Modern art market. Christie’s tallied $149,773,500, while Sotheby’s tallied $199,804,500 in sales which are remarkable when compared to previous Impressionist and Modern sales. Both sales offered a variety of different works, but as an Artinfo article pointed out, the provenance and rarity of the items in the Sotheby’s sales were not to be passed up.

There were several insights that were revealed in these sales as to the direction of the art market. The first of which is that Surrealism is gaining popularity once more. Max Ernst’s incredible masterpiece, “The Stolen Mirror,” sold for a record $16,322,500. While two classic works by René Magritte also found homes with “La fin du mond,” making $7,026,500, and the painting “Les vacances de hegel,” making $10,162,500. Surrealism is an interesting theme as it attempts to express the workings of the subconscious through fantastic imagery and strange juxtapositions of subject matter, which not everyone appreciates but the works do have quite the solidarity in the art market.

La femme qui pleure, I

La femme qui pleure, I by Pablo Picasso

Meanwhile others insights emerged, and that was the continuing market power of Pablo Picasso prints.  His famed 1937 etching, “La femme qui pleure, I,” sold for $5,122,500 at Christie’s, a record for a single print at auction. Etchings are known to have a high resale value due to the artist’s involvement in their creation and the method employed to create them. Reproduced prints in particular have become steadily incorporated into artists’ original prints and are therefore not solely produced, as originally intended, for mass production therefore the value is still there as can be seen in the sale of this Picasso.

Several of our other artists that we feature had great sales as well. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Portrait en buste de jeune fille” went for $1,874,500, and Wassily Kandinsky’s color-charged 1908 Expressionist composition “Weisser Klang (White Sound)” sold for $8,930,500. These all seem to affirm, when taken in accordance to the auction results of the past few years, that art is a good place to put some of your wealth as it has proven to be a resilient market. The confidence in the art market can only continue to rise as additional Contemporary auctions occur this week.

The Ownerless Moore in Westminster

Though it could be worth up to £5 million, Henry Moore’s Knife Edge Two Piece isn’t being claimed by anyone. The three-ton sculpture, which was donated by the artist to his nation in 1967 and which he recorded as belonging to the City of London, actually resides in the City of Westminster; confusingly, it doesn’t seem to belong to either. The patina of the bronze has turned to inky black, that is, where the surface isn’t scratched over with graffiti dating back to the mid-1970s; rain water pools under the work on the platform Moore had specifically said he didn’t want. Despite its deteriorating condition, nothing can be done until an organization steps forward to claim ownership of the piece. Even its current site is less than ideal, given that concrete air vents from the parking garage underneath block the view of the sculpture from the sidewalk.

‘Two-Piece Knife Edge’ by Henry Moore

Martin Bailey reports in The Art Newspaper (October 2011), what is known: the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Greater London Authority, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Parliamentary Estate, and the Parliamentary Art Collection all deny ownership (and therefore responsibility) of one of the most important Moore sculptures in the United Kingdom. The Palace of Westminster’s Deputy Curator Melanie Unwin states the problem succinctly: “All of the organizations I have approached have said it is not them. It is even possible that the sculpture does not have a legal owner, but this is something on which we will have to seek legal advice.”

The closed circuit, “do not pass go” research behind what Bailey calls a “Kafkaesque trail” leaves just one thing certain. Until someone steps forward, the sculpture will continue to languish in its damaged state. If money were no issue, I know I wouldn’t mind having something to put in my backyard.

The Art of Hanging Art

Hanging art is a delicate balance between you, the strength of your wall, and the valuable object you are about to place several feet above the ground. We’ve all experienced the moment of dread when we hear the crash after the work has fallen from the mounting on the wall and think to ourselves, “Great, time to see the damage.” All of which can be avoided if the proper supplies are used, and your wall is sturdy of course.

Luckily, there are several things we all instinctively do when we hang works on the wall which are correct. These range from measuring the distance from the ground we want the work to hang on (universally around 5 feet, 2 inches as that is median eye level) to making sure our nails and/or brackets are horizontally even so the work doesn’t seem tilted to strategically placing the nails and/or screws on a stud. All of these are proper hanging techniques, but here a few more tips we use at the gallery.

The first set of tips revolve around the bolts/screws/nails/hooks themselves, with the most important being to always use two bolts/screws/nails/hooks for any work you hang no matter the size; and when more than ten pounds of weight is involved then a molly bolt is recommended. A molly bolt usually consists of a pointed end, which is used to help insert the bolt, the bolt or screw itself and the anchor.

Example of a Molly Bolt

The anchor is a sleeve that fits around the bolt and is threaded, so it expands as the bolt is tightened. It just provides some extra support for the weight of the work. Nails are fine to use, but screws and/or bolts should ideally be used as they are drilled into the wall which provides for little wiggle room that hammering a nail often creates in the drywall.

After the correct supplies are chosen, which depends on your preference and weight of the work, the process begins. This is where the importance of measurements cannot be stressed enough. No one likes the feeling of screwing in a bolt and realizing when the work falls or won’t fit in the desired spot that the distance they measured on the wall was wrong. Therefore to avoid the frustration, always measure the hangers on the back of your work and then transfer the measurements to your wall, leaving a mark with a pencil or tape.

Tape, especially masking tape, is handy for after the hanging if you want to tape around the nail/bolt/screw and hanger to provide extra assurance and support. As the work often gets mismanaged in the hanging process, do make sure to always support the bottom when hanging so the work does not drop. The last bit of advice would be to rotate works on display so they do not get damaged by elements such as light.  When everything is done right there will be no accidents or crashes, and you and the artwork can rest easily knowing everything is secure. Happy hanging!

 

 

Introduction to Paper Conservation

Paper conservation is the preservation of a wide range of rare and valuable objects that are paper-based. The paper objects, due to their vulnerability, must be cared for properly to ensure their appreciation and value for decades to come. Such vulnerability comes from the chemical change that occurs through cellulose deterioration that is caused by light, humidity and air pollutants, as well as contact with harmful materials such as some pressure sensitive tapes. Deterioration can also occur through the improper handling of the objects and biologically via exposure to active mold spores.

In determining how to conserve the paper that has been damaged, conservationists have three main categories that the damage can fit under. They consist of Fixable, Fixable to a Degree, and Not Fixable. All of which are dependent on the complexity of the restoration, which in turn corresponds to cost as well results.

The first category explained will be Fixable which includes wet mounting, dry mounting, and tape/hinge removal, all of which when done wrong, or simply through age leaves residue that effects the chemical change of the paper. All of which is explained in the article What is “museum archival framing”?. However, as a brief recap, wet mounting is artwork that is glued to another surface. Dry mounting is liquefied dry mount tissue that causes the work of art to bond with another sheet of paper. Lastly, tape or hinge removal is due to the excessive use of hinges/tape that attach the art to its current mount.

The second category of paper conservation is Fixable to a Degree. This classification consists of treatments that may or may not result in a “good as new” appearance, which is caused by discoloration. There are six types of discoloration which include foxing, tideline, mat burning, toning, light staining, and tape/hinge staining, Foxing is brought on by metal salts resident in paper, which could be due to fungus/or mold.  Tideline is caused by water polling on the surface of an artwork. Mat burning is evident of thin, dark lines, nearest the cut edge of an acidic mat board. Toning is discoloration due to fumes emanating from acidic material. Light Staining is caused by the penetration of UV light on unprotected paper. Lastly, tape or hinge staining is darkened areas left by tape, hinges, or glues as discussed in the paragraph above. Tears, holes, or abrasions to the papers surface are also classified as fixable to a degree depending on the size and complexity.

The last category of paper conservation is Not Fixable , which means it is unwise to fix the surface of the paper. This includes faded pigments and abrasions to screen-print inks which if fixed leave a permanent residue on the work is discernable through UV illumination and could possible alter the value of the work if done poorly.

The conservationist we trust with our art is Diane Jeffrey of Studio Conservation Inc.. Masterworks Fine Art has been using Diane for years to inspect and guide our decisions concerning the potential problems of a piece. She has been an instrumental aid in our success as a business and offers over 25 services designed to preserve and conserve not just original works of art, but paper, posters, and other collectibles as well. Please feel free to view her website at http://www.atstudioc.com to see what she can do for your conservation needs as she is the only one we trust for ours, or you may contact her directly at (800) 583-8379 for any inquiries.

Another great resource is the American Institute of Conservation, which offers articles, and a directory. This particular resource is more informative than this article for those of you looking to possibly have work conserved or wonder what kinds of misfortune can fall upon your art investments if you do not properly care for them.

The Creation of Calder Mobiles

Some could say Alexander Calder was born to design. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, and Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder is best-known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia’s City Hall tower. Therefore, being surrounded by such creativity from a young age, it was no wonder that Alexander Calder would be most famous for designing a new art medium through three-dimensional creations.

Throughout his childhood, Calder was always constructing toys. He was fascinated with using objects to create multiple dimensions, and upon receiving his degree in mechanical engineering in 1919, Calder decided to apply his passion and formal training to a career as a professional artist. He attended art classes in New York, and in 1926 moved to Paris, where he received acclaim for putting on small-scale circus performances known as Cirque Calder. These spontaneous performances were fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other objects that Calder found and assembled.

Through the creation of the Cirque Calder, Calder’s interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art began. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures. Calder’s further experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture came from his visit to Mondrian’s gallery where Calder was inspired to make art multidimensional. This lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys. By suspending the works in mid-air, Calder discovered that he could add life to the otherwise static sculpture.

Example of Calder Mobile

By the end of 1931, Calder moved on to more delicate sculptures, which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder’s “mobiles” were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed “stabiles” to differentiate them from mobiles.

Calder is noted as saying, “Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middling—indicated by variations of size or color—directional line—vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc. . . .—these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many.” From this, we can only glimpse at the magical vision he had of the world that surrounded him. The mobiles and stabiles he created to encapsulate that vision continues to inspire us to see the intertwining relationship of all the elements in the universe.

Watermarks and Rembrandts

When Masterworks Fine Art acquires an artwork, we undertake a program of research and identification. Old Masters prints, such as those by Rembrandt, require special attention because documentation can be limited, works often exist in multiple states, and posthumous prints made from plates still in existence are on the market.

When researching a Rembrandt impression, we consider the image and sheet size, the type of paper on which the work is printed, and the watermark (if there is one). We consult Nowell-Eusticke, the authoritative catalogue raisonné for the artist, compare our results against the volumes by Hind and White & Boon, and turn to the recently-published Watermarks in Rembrandt’s Prints by Ash & Fletcher. These books describe, in one way or another, differences large and small between each printing of a single plate.

Rembrandt experimented with the effects of printing on different kinds of paper, and is known to have used vellum, calfskin parchment, creamy handmade European papers, coarse “oatmeal” papers made from the dregs of the papermaking vat, and the thicker, softer “Japan” paper (Ash & Fletcher, 11).  Not all of these papers were made with watermarks or wire marks, as they are also known, but those that were can provide insight into the time frame in which a print was pulled.

As methodical studies of watermarks found in the graphic work of specific artists appear, the identification of these marks becomes increasingly valuable. It is a rare day when we uncover a full watermark on a newly acquired print. Finding even the tip of a crown or a partial cluster of grapes enables us to match that fragment to a documented watermark. If we can nail down what paper the work is on, we can at least be certain that the impression was not pulled before a certain date.

How does this relate to Rembrandt?

Say we determine that a certain watermark was produced in the early 18th century. A Rembrandt etching on that particular paper couldn’t possibly be a lifetime impression, given the artist’s death in 1669. Ash and Fletcher note: “Our research often revealed the use of the same paper in the same print or in prints produced within a few years of each other” (15). That being said, they continue, “Rembrandt may have purchased certain papers in quantity, saved them, and used them intermittently over the years” (Ibid). This passage underscores the difficulty Rembrandt scholars face in assigning prints an exact date. Though helpful, a paper’s dates of creation do not necessarily dictate the time frame for the printing of a specific state. A plate may have been etched one year and printed the next. It may also have been reprinted a decade later.

Information obtained through a watermark about a paper’s country of origin, dates of manufacture, and import history can narrow the time frame for an impression and authenticate the work. However, sometimes our search for a wire mark leaves us empty-handed, and we turn to determining the state of the print.