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DePaul Art Museum

There’s a new museum in town. Yet I’m not sure how many Chicagoans know the good news. The DePaul Art Museum opened last September in a new, three-story structure adjoining the Fullerton CTA stop.

The museum is only new in a technical sense. Since 1998, it has been housed in two large rooms within Richardson Library, unknown to outside passersby. Louise Lincoln, its highly capable director since 1997, has mounted numerous noteworthy exhibitions under serious limitations.

Though art has been present on campus from 1985, it was hidden in the literal sense. What the striking red brick building achieves is a freestanding space for the museum’s art collection (2,000 objects with extensive holdings of Chicago art) with the size (15,000 sq. ft.) and facilities (a new collection study room) befitting a true museum. It also signifies the university’s growing commitment to the arts.

A tip of the hat is warranted for the contextually-rich design by Antunovich Associates, their first museum project.

My earlier post focused on Chicago’s formerly feisty publication, The New Art Examiner, and its dedicated focus on Chicago and the greater Midwest art community. Lincoln and assistant director, Laura Fatemi, opted for an equally strong local focus and provocative theme for their opening show

Re: Chicago opens with a wall text that states, “Chicago rivals—and surpasses—other cities in music, architecture and theater; yet in the visual arts, it has too frequently been seen as a ‘second city’.”  Though many prominent artists, past and present, sport Chicago connections, many left and made their reputations elsewhere.

The exhibit seeks to reframe Chicago as a true artistic center vis-a-vis other centers such as Paris, New York and even Los Angeles. Alongside the Chicago theme, Lincoln chose a novel way to showcase the chosen works: a group-curated show. She polled 43 curators, collectors, critics and scholars to name a favorite Chicago artist. The result is an alternate canon of the famous, the no longer famous and the ought to be famous.

Ivan Albright

The show is both a delight to walk through and an entertaining guessing game. New discoveries loom at each hang while one wonders what did James Elkins, Neil Harris, Lew Manilow and James Rondeau choose? For every known artist like Ivan Albright, Karl Wirsum, Dawoud Bey and Richard Hunt, there was the thrill of discovering Manierre Dawson, Art Shay, Macena Barton, Irving Petlin and many more. Most surprising was Franz Schulze’s backward reach into the mid-19^th Century for now-forgotten portraitist, George Healy, along with the absence of Ed Paschke, Roger Brown or Jim Nutt.

Manierre Dawson

You’ll want to take home the show’s colorful, attractively-designed catalog to reread not only each curator’s supporting statement but for the scholarly essays buttressing Chicago’s claim for its rightful place in the art world.

Wendy Greenhouse skillfully argues that Chicago’s art tradition has run counter to the prevailing canon throughout history. Its artists have long favored representational or surreal (“cartoonish”) work over an East Coast canon dominated by abstract, expressionistic art.

Karl Wirsum

Lynne Warren champions Chicago’s “extraordinary photographic legacy” and bemoans the near-criminal neglect of such masters as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind and other renowned figures.

If you are an art lover, you owe it to yourself to get to the DePaul Art Museum by March 4 to catch this appealing yet ultimately serious show. The museum’s next exhibition will feature African photographer, Malick Sidibe. It opens March 29.

DePaul Art Museum is located at 935 West Fullerton Avenue. For information on public events and hours, call 773/325-7506 or visit www.depaul.edu/museum.

Editor’s Note: The blogs posted this month will feature lesser-known personal discoveries that can provide enjoyable holiday outings.

Driehaus Museum

If you passed the imposing three-story brownstone at 40 East Erie in recent years, you would have found the building dark and open only by appointment. One would never know that, beyond the front door, lies one of nation’s grandest mansions of the Gilded Age. However, with the arrival of Lise Dube-Scherr last April as director, the Richard H. Driehaus Museum has come alive.

The museum is now open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Sundays 12-5 p.m and closed Monday). Banners identifying the museum hang above the front door and the public is warmly welcomed inside for personal tours of this architectural and decorative arts showpiece. Ms. Dube-Scherr has worked hard in the last nine months to establish a membership program, themed visits and evening soirees as might have been held in the home by its original owners.

Noted investment adviser, Richard Driehaus, is passionate about architectural preservation and decorative arts. He purchased the mansion in 2003 and then spent several million dollars over five years restoring it to its former glory. He has also lent the house period furnishings, works from his art collection, pieces from his extensive collection of Tiffany-designed lamps and antique chandeliers; all to give the galleries a true feeling of late 19^th Century splendor.

Samuel Nickerson, the founder of the First National Bank of Chicago, was the original owner. He and his family lived there from 1887 to 1900. It cost a staggering $450,000 to build the 25,000 square foot mansion, the largest private residence in Chicago when it was completed (the cost in 2011 dollars would exceed $100 million). That part of town, at the time, was known as McCormickville since several members of the McCormick family lived in the area.

Nickerson sold the house to Lucius Fisher, a paper-bag manufacturer and big-game hunting enthusiast, who resided there until his death in 1916. Fearing that it might be demolished, one hundred prominent Chicagoans, including William Wrigley, Cyrus McCormick and Julius Rosenwald, bought the home and donated it to the American College of Surgeons, for use as its headquarters.

Driehaus Main Hall

Inside the front door on Erie (though early visitors arrived by horse-drawn coach at a porte cochere on the side), you enter a two-story Main Hall and your jaw drops.

Straight ahead you see a grand staircase that leads to the family’s living quarters on the second floor and ballroom. Off the main hall on both sides are the Front Parlor, Reception Room, Drawing Room, Dining Room, Smoking Room, Library and the stunning Sculpture Gallery.

At your feet, the floor is covered in 17 kinds of inlaid marble. The house quickly became known as The Marble Palace. Equally impressive are the wood moldings used for the rooms’ rich wainscotting and the dropped ceilings’ paneling. The majestic Sculpture Gallery holds three masterpieces, making it hard to choose a favorite: the 19^th-Century  sculpture of “Cupid and Psyche”, a 7-foot-high fireplace with a gorgeous fireplace surround of mosaic tile and an oversize Tiffany-inspired dome overhead.

"Cupid and Psyche"

Other special touches in rooms throughout the house include inlaid marquetry wood in the Library, rare blue-green wall tiles, fabrics by Scalamandre and some original sconses and small flickering gas lights. Such detail and craftsmanship is unavailable today, even in the infamous McMansions erected by modern-day financial wizards.

I cannot readily recall being as overwhelmed by the beauty of a private residence as I was touring Driehaus’ recreation of the Nickerson mansion. Dube-Scherr points out that “we’re not trying to perfectly recreate how the house appeared in Nickerson’s time but to give people a sense of what life was like in the Gilded Age.”

To that end, she scheduled strolling carolers, an evening cabaret performance and a magic show for family visitors during the holiday season. Twilight tours, on the first and third Tuesday of each month, let visitors glimpse how the Nickersons socialized in the evening.

Looking for a different holiday treat? A visit to the museum strikes me as a perfect outing. Its “Deck the Marble Halls” observance is on daily (except Mondays) through January 8^th. You can take a self-guided audio tour or a guided tour daily at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. (1:30 and 3 p.m. on Sunday).

Admission is $20, $12.50 for seniors and $10 for students, children under 18.

The Museum is also available for rental for intimate dinners, private receptions, board meetings. Dube-Scherr says she is awaiting its first wedding booking. For full details, visit the museum at

www.DriehausMuseum.org. Phone is 312/932-8665.

Cezanne's Studio

It’s been almost 50 years since I took an Art History 101 course at Fordham University. I didn’t know it at the time but that experience would shape my lifelong interest in Art ever since.

I still remember the charismatic teacher for that course, Sabine Gova, who would keep me enthralled for nearly 3 hours each Tuesday afternoon while she projected countless slides of art and architectural masterworks and brought them to life. In addition to her knowledge of the paintings and artists that she shared, she also imparted another gift. She taught me how to look.

Every week, with countless images, she would challenge us with a variety of questions: “What do you see?, What is happening in this scene?, “Are the figures properly proportioned?”, “What makes this work a masterpiece?”. Precisely the type of questions I ask myself when I tour museum exhibits today.

Madame Gova, who was French, exposed me to artists such as Giotto,  Leonardo, Albert Durer, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, Monet and Matisse to cite only ten who remain personal favorites.

Cote D'Azur

I have traveled to museums at home and in Europe and admired the works of those ten and many more. However, this summer I am exploring the very region–Provence and the Cote d’Azur in southern France–where many late 19th and 20th Century artists lived and captured the special quality of light and landscape one finds there.

And many of the towns—Aix-en-Provence, Antibes, Biot, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Le Cannet, Nice, Vence–house museums dedicated solely to the work of the artist who lived and painted there. The museum in Aix features Cezanne’s studio, Antibes honors Picasso (who has museums in Villauris and Paris as well), Biot features Fernand Leger, Cagnes has the home where Renoir spent the final twelve years of his life, Le Cannet was home to Bonnard (an attractive museum housed in a former villa just opened in June), Nice has Matisse and Chagall museums.

It was a special treat to step into the very place—and the upstairs studio—that Renoir called home! Or to roam—and sometimes recognize—the same everyday places that Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Cezanne and Bonnard immortalized in paint. Compared to this living experience, a museum seems a much more sterile, impersonal storehouse.

Matisse Chapel

Two artists—Matisse and Jean-Michel Folon—even created two great works  of architecture. Each has designed beautiful chapels brightly illuminated by stain glass (Matisse) or glowing mosaic tiles (Folon). Matisse’s chapel is in Vence and was done to thank the order of nuns who cared for him during his last years. Folon, following Matisse’s example—designed La Chapelle des Penitents Blancs (White Penitent’s Chapel)—in St. Paul de Vence. He died in 2005 but his friends completed his vision. I had the pleasure of participating in Sunday Mass at the Matisse chapel and am told that Folon’s chapel is used for mass and marriage ceremonies.

Most of the museums are modest in scale except for the Leger and Matisse museums which are large structures. The museums’ holdings vary in quality.  Each has around 50-100 works on display, ranging from paintings to drawings, photographs and archival material. However, nearly all the real treasures produced by these artists are now housed in American and European collections like MoMA, the Art Institute, and the Musee d’Orsay.

Bonnard Museum

The inaugural exhibit at the new Bonnard Museum was drawn from international collections. The American collector who first collected Bonnard, an artist whose ranking has climbed steadily in the past 25 years, was Duncan Phillips (a gem of a house museum in Washington, D.C.). His acquisition is on display as is a beauty from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which mounted a stunning Bonnard exhibition a few years ago.

An absolute must-see on a journey to this region is France’s only privately-run museum, the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul de Vence. It could qualify as an artist museum since its founder, Aime Maeght, was originally a lithographer in Cannes who befriended many of the artists in that region beginning in the 1940s. Maeght went on to become a highly successful art dealer and publisher of art books in Paris.

When one of his sons, Bernard, died at an early age, a grieving Maeght was encouraged by George Braque to build a chapel in his honor on the St. Paul site and to share his personal collection as an artist foundation, an unknown concept in France at that time. Maeght hired noted Spanish architect, Jose-Luis Sert, to design the structure and many of his artist friends contributed works. The Fondation opened in 1964.

The Fondation’s collection consists of Aime and Marguerite original works, donations by their artist friends, many of whom are now internationally-known, ranks as the fifth-largest museum in France, though it receives no state funds and operates as a private foundation.

The building’s main exhibit hall is a knockout. It contains eight significant paintings and sculptures by a 20th Century artistic Who’s Who of Fernand Leger, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti and Wassily Kandinsky.

Miro Labyrnth Garden

Joan Miro’s mysterious, captivating giant sculptures and playful fountains in his Labyrinth Garden, combined with the lush outdoor setting, is a sight that will remain with me forever. Miro’s genius has never been better displayed.

Many vacationers visit the Cote d’Azur for its endless summer weather, to catch a glimpse of the celebrities and millionaires who live there or to gawk at the rich and famous’ conspicuous trinkets, such as Steven Spielberg’s giant yacht (available for rent at a mere $375,000 a week). For me, the richer payoff is basking in the everyday life of the artistic “backyard” that, a century later, still impacts our world’s cultural legacy.

Hyde Park Smart Museum

While the Art Institute and the MCA prepare new installations, the next month is a good time to venture off Michigan Avenue and head in new directions for one’s art fix. There are noteworthy exhibits at less prominent venues on the South Side and Evanston.

The Art Institute and MCA are the city’s marquee museums but, in past years, some of my most satisfying outings have been at art venues off-the-beaten path. I am thinking of the “1968” exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, “Heartland” at the Smart Museum or the Jim Dine and Gordon Parks shows at

Heartland

the Block Museum.

Those venues and others are listed in the Tribune, the Reader and TimeOut Chicago but so many people I meet have never strayed beyond the Magnificent Mile to those museums. Such timid behavior gives loyalty a bad name.

Chicagoans tend to be creatures of habit. They find a favorite restaurant, club, sports team or museum and stick with it for years. Loyalty is an admirable quality but not in Art. Art favors the new, the pushing past present boundaries.

The best place to view the new around town, in fact, is not museums but the galleries in River North or West Loop as well as the Hyde Park and Evanston Art Centers. Paying tribute to the valuable contributions made by Catherine Edelman, Carrie Secrist, Tom McCormick, John Corbett, Jim Dempsey and Kavi Gupta, however, is perhaps a future blog post.

Thus, here’s a selective run-down of what’s on view now at some places I visit regularly with apologies for other worthy sites I’ve left out.

Tragic Muse

Smart Museum of Art in Hyde Park has, in recent years, expanded its reach beyond the University of Chicago campus and added a more contemporary slant to its collection and programs. Opening February 10^th is “The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900” which explores the visual representation of tragedy over two centuries to answer how and why does art move us. Always a thought-provoking outing.
www.smartmuseum.uchicago.edu.

The Renaissance Society has been seeking out the new since 1915.  Over the past quarter-century, under the direction of Susanne Ghez, it has built an international reputation as a resource for, Ghez claims, “the finest vanguard art in the nation”. It has showcased artists at an early stage who have gone on to major careers. Its current exhibit features the work of video artist, Gerard Byrne. I must confess that I often leave Ren exhibitions bewildered but, most times, more knowledgeable about the issues and artistic practices of the moment.
www.renaissancesociety.org.

Before heading north to Evanston, let me bestow three hearty cheers on the Chicago Cultural Center, which is a museum by any other name and consistently features outstanding exhibits. Last year’s “Jazz Loft Project”, which I wrote about for the blog, was a highlight of my 2010 museum-going.

Currently on view are newly-discovered works of an unrecognized Chicago street photographer while she was alive, Vivian Maier. And don’t miss the stunning, second floor exhibit on architect Louis Sullivan, curated by city historian Tim Samuelson and graphic designer Chris Ware. You’ll learn new things about Sullivan’s designs and his tragic final years. It’s a beautiful, loving tribute to one of Chicago and America’s master builders. www.chicagoculturalcenter.org

Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art is on the Northwestern campus in Evanston. Like the Smart Museum, this venue began primarily as a teaching resource students. While both museums continue that mission, the Block too has expanded to museum status and mounted high quality shows of wider appeal over the past decade.

Thomas Rowlandson

The current exhibit, which just opened, examines a historical theme through the work of a Georgian-era artist. “Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England.” Rowlandson lived from 1757-1827. His masterful, detailed drawings depict the colorful and often bawdy aspects of everyday life of that era in and around London. Also, check its website for details about Block Cinema, an excellent series of classic and contemporary films. www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

DePaul University Museum is currently closed until September when it reopens in new, much larger, quarters. And Loyola Museum of Art (LUMA) across from Water Tower, features exhibits that explore spiritual themes. Its next exhibit, opening February 12^th will highlight works by typographer and iconographer, Eric Gill.
www.luc.edu/luma/

While the current historical shows at Smart and Block are ones I normally might skip, I’ll take them in since these venues have delighted me in the past with the care and scholarship of their presentations so that I always leave pleased that I made the effort. After all, the art of the 19^th and 20^th centuries that I favor were built on a foundation that one needs to explore more deeply.  Give some of these current shows a try. See if they don’t provide a worthwhile afternoon of viewing far from the standard Michigan Avenue fare.

I apologize to readers for the non-appearance of new weekly posts over the past two months.  However, as the blog’s founder and only contributor, I was drawn away on a lucrative assignment impossible to refuse. I hope you will now resume visiting the site regularly. With a backlog of ideas that piled up in my absence, I intend to post more than the usual single story each week for the rest of this month.  Thanks for staying the course! Let’s continue to enjoy culture together.

Wishing you all the very best in 2011!

Conductor Carlos Kalmar claims that the Mahler Second Symphony (“Resurrection), which he played with the Grant Park Orchestra in 1999, helped him land the job of Principal Conductor. Given that history, it seems fitting that he should reprise the score this weekend to mark the successful completion of his 10th Anniversary season.

Kalmar has a good deal to be proud of: molding a good orchestra into an even greater ensemble; the transformational move from an acoustically-challenged Petrillo Music Shell to the sonically-superior Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (attendance has skyrocketed from 120,000 in 2003 to 300,000 in 2009) conducting a wide variety of adventurous repertoire; showcasing the works of American composers; leading performances of the highest caliber in recent seasons, notably the incandescent Mahler 9^th and Beethoven 9^th to end the 2009 season.

Millennium Park regulars know this musical figure primarily by his leonine mane and what critics have termed his “propulsive” and “athletically vigorous” performance style. Yet, beyond that, who is he?

Kalmar was born in 1958 of Austrian parents in Montevideo, Uruguay and went to study in Vienna at the age of 15. His conducting career took off when he won the Hans Swarowsky Conducting Competition in Vienna in 1984. He made his debut the following year with the NDR Symphony in Hamburg.

He gained valuable experience heading several German orchestras over the next 15 years. Kalmar made his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2000, the same year he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Grant Park Orchestra. In 2003, he was named Music Director of the Oregon Symphony, the oldest orchestra west of the Mississippi. Most recently, he added the music directorship of Madrid’s Orquestra Sinfonica which he assumes in the 2011-2012 season.

Kalmar says he is a musician whose main mission is simply “making music at the highest level with my musical family”. He spoke highly in an interview of his summer colleagues, drawn from such top orchestras as the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Kansas City and Seattle Symphony.

“These ten years in Chicago have been a blessing for me. When I arrived, it was a very good group of musicians. Now, it’s an excellent orchestra.” He speaks proudly of their familiarity with one another which enables them to know and learn repertoire quickly. Kalmar has also recorded six CD releases with the orchestra for Cedille Records.

He appears a man content in both his personal and musical life; not someone caught up in music world games. Asked if he found it difficult to be properly recognized in Chicago, a city with an abundance of world-class conductors in Riccardo Muti, James Conlon, Pierre Boulez and Andrew Davis, Kalmar laughed.  “If I started thinking of that (comparisons with Muti et.al.), I would leave music. I don’t lose any sleep over that.”

There is good reason not to worry. When James Palermo, head of the Grant Park Music Festival from 1995-2009, was looking to hire a music director ten years ago, he remembers several musicians approached him after a rehearsal of the Mahler Second and telling him, “This guy is terrific.” The next nine years validated that assessment. “He knows the music and the scores better than anyone else,” says Palermo. “He’s an incredible rehearsal technician.”

Kalmar substituted this season, on short notice, with the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras. At 52, he has a long career, with  higher achievements, ahead of him. Palermo, his working colleague for nine seasons and currently president and CEO of the Colorado Symphony, holds him in high regard. “He’s built a career for himself from the ground up. He’s done it the old-fashioned way, through hard work. It’s his time to shine and he deserves whatever comes his way.”

The Art Institute has devised an imaginative way to both honor your mother this Mother’s Day and support the museum at the same time. It’s a fund-raising gimmick called “Adopt a Dot”. It lets you adopt a dot from probably the signature masterwork of its collection, “La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat.

For each dot purchased at $10 (3 for $25 and 6 for $50), the honoree receives a button featuring a dot from the painting in one of 6 chosen colors: Red, Light Blue, Pink, Light Green, Orange or White.  As of last weekend, the museum had raised at least $70,000 as approximately 7,000 dots had been adopted.

The adoption sale is ongoing but button delivery by Mother’s Day next Sunday cannot be guaranteed. To buy a dot, go to the museum’s website at www.artic.edu. Perhaps the museum, come Summer, can declare some Sunday “Seurat Sunday” and have all button-buyers show their colors in a recreation of “La Grande Jatte” on the walkway leading to the roof of the new Modern Wing.

This clever marketing ploy should spur wider emulation by other Chicago arts organizations who might employ greater imagination in raising support than endless letters of appeal, usually offering nothing tangible in return. While sports teams have sold off seats, bricks or goal posts prior to demolishing old stadiums, I can imagine Lyric Opera selling a tiny swatch of gold thread from its curtain. Steppenwolf might sell off a page of August: Osage County, Ravinia could offer one of James Conlon’s discarded or autographed batons and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra might offer anything incoming Music Director (or is the proper title Messiah?) Riccardo Muti has touched. The list is limited only by local arts’ organizations imaginations. And isn’t imagination the art world’s leading brand?

So, I raise a glass to the originator of “Adopt a Dot” at the Art Institute and wish to see more of the same spirit of all around town. It’s time for arts leaders everywhere to wean themselves slightly off the unstable, unpredictable and begrudging state and federal dole as well as diminishing levels of corporate and foundation funding.

This year’s edition of the Armory Show, held earlier this month in New York, was what one attending art adviser called “American Idol for the visual arts.”  Visitors to the main show on Piers 92 and 94 also had 11 satellite fairs, including The Art Show at the original Armory, Volta, Pulse and The Independent, to explore. The Art Newspaper estimated that it would take more than 64 hours to spend 5 minutes at every presenter sampling the art.

An end-of-fair assessment pictured a successful show with record attendance, strong sales and, as importantly, a spirit of renewed optimism. A Danish dealer sold an Edvard Munch with an asking price of $6 million while, at The Art Show, a Joan Mitchell sold for $3.5 million minutes after the opening. The Art Newspaper reported that the Armory-Modern show on Pier 92, in its second year, had drawn a large number of museum curators from MoMA, Washington’s National Gallery, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie and the Philadelphia Museum to view much high quality art for sale.

For me, what I found most enlightening was less the art than a high-powered panel on Saturday, March 6^th, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and chaired by its president, the gallerist Lucy Mitchell-Innes. Its title was “A Committed Vision: Collecting in the New Economy”.

The panel consisted of Edward Dolman, CEO of Christie’s International,  Melva Bucksbaum, a long-time collector of contemporary art along with her husband, Robert Mnuchin, dealer at L + M Arts, Candace Worth of Worth Art Advisory and William Goetzmann, who studies the art market at Yale’s International Center for Finance.  They all agreed that the market was in a new phase, struggling to emerge from the bitter ashes of 2008’s economic meltdown and a euphoric period marked by record sales, sky-high auction prices and a mood of irrational exuberance.

Overall, the panel’s remarks reflected a more cautious current mood: more realistic expectations amid signs of recovery from a period of binge buying and a painful morning-after hangover.

Two closely-related questions seemed to be on the minds of the audience in the packed room: Has the market finally hit bottom and is it a good time to buy?

Goetzmann opened by saying that the notion of the art market as immune and separate from the art market had taken a hit. Major collectors, many of whom had come from the hedge-fund industry, sharply curtailed their buying with some even selling works to cover Wall Street losses.  The art market now appeared, he said, to be in a pause period prior to recovery.

(In support of the panel’s remarks, a report released this month by Dr. Clare McAndrew of the research firm, Arts Economics, showed that the United States’ share of the art market declined from 46% in 2006 to 30% in 2009 and that the United Kingdom’s 29% share had contracted almost 30% by 2009 as well. The player that gained share was the Chinese art trade which moved from a 9% market share in 2007 to 14% two years later.  The banking crisis had an immediate impact at the auction houses with buy-in rates (art that didn’t sell) by auction houses at 45% at the end of 2008, double the figure from 2007.)

Dolman noted that the current recession is very different from that of 1990-91.  Twenty years ago, he said, there was a “total lack of interest in contemporary art”. Now, there is real interest in that market, due in part to an influx of new Chinese and Russian buyers.

The realization that art can be a “real asset” was voiced by Mnuchin.  It plays a greater role in such newer markets as Middle and Far Eastern nations.  These players see art as a way to “shape a new culture and aesthetic”  wholly apart from the frenzied competition for a very limited inventory of Old Master works still in private hands.

Worth contributed that “urgency and volume is gone”.  She called last year’s period between April to June “the death knell time”.  Several panelists said they saw both younger and seasoned collectors returning to the fold.  The younger demographic is returning more slowly and is much more price-point conscious.  The long-time collectors are returning but showing a preference for Tier A art by Old and Modern Masters.

The market is in an “artist-driven” moment where brand names and those just below the top tier are holding value and selling while the market for mid-level artists remains soft.  Dolman mentioned that Ronald Lauder’s $135 million purchase of a Klimt painting and the recent, record-setting $104 million price for a Giacometti sculpture has “recalibrated the value of top-tier art”.

So, is now a good time to buy?  For some artists, the answer is “Yes”. Goetzmann sees now as lumpy times in the market. Yet, he cautioned against sitting on the sidelines. One “can miss an incredible opportunity” because great art only comes to market at certain, unpredictable times, usually via death, debt and divorce.  In order to strike when that rare opportunity comes along, he said, “You have to be invested full-time so you can enjoy those periods”

Little do millennial-old Roman, Greek, Chinese and Egyptian vases, pots, precious jade objects encased in museum vitrines know what trouble they have unleashed in modern times.  For at least the past 25 years, museums, dealers and collectors have found themselves under verbal and legal attack from archeologists and source countries, accused of encouraging looting and illegal trafficking in  ancient treasures. Read the rest of this entry »