Breakfast At Sotheby's: An A-z Of The Art World - Softcover

Hook, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0718192451 ISBN 13: 9780718192457

Publisher: Particular Books, 2014

Synopsis

Breakfast at Sotheby's is a wry, intimate, truly revealing exploration of how art acquires its financial value, from Philip Hook, a senior director at Sotheby's 'Reading it is like participating in a hugely enjoyable personal tutorial given by a cultured, witty, clear-eyed, world teacher with a fully functioning sense of humour. A real delight' - Spectator 'Hook's view of the art world is that of the professional auctioneer. In an A-Z format, it is an entire art education contained in under 350 pages. Wry, dry and completely beguiling' - William Boyd, Guardian, Books of the Year 'How to nail the mad, bad, crazy contemporary art world in print? Sotheby's senior director Hook draws on 35 years' experience in this informal memoir. He unravels, with humour, piquancy and erudition, what drives the economics of taste' - Financial Times, Books of the Year 'It's very hard to write an amusing book about art that has some serious things to say. But Philip Hook has done it' - Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'An auctioneer's alphabet of quirky reflections and off-beat lists such as 'middle-brow artists' and 'fictional artists': an ideal volume for the art-lover's bedside' - Martin Gayford, Spectator, Books of the Year 'His delightful Breakfast at Sotheby's is a house sale of a book, a chance for him to clear out 35 years of memories as an art dealer and auctioneer, first at Christie's and then Sotheby's, a rival auction house' - Economist Philip Hook is a director and senior paintings specialist at Sotheby's. He has worked in the art world for thirty-five years during which time he has also been a director of Christie's and an international art dealer. He is the author of five novels and two works of art history, including The Ultimate Trophy, a history of the Impressionist Painting. Hook has appeared regularly on television, from 1978-2003 on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Hook is a director and senior paintings specialist at Sotheby's. He has worked in the art world for thirty-five years, during which time he has also been a director of Christie's and an international art dealer. He is the author of five novels and two works of art history, including The Ultimate Trophy, a history of the Impressionist Painting. Hook has appeared regularly on television, from 1978-2003 on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow.

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Copyright

Introduction

When you stand in front of a work of art in a museum or exhibition, the first two questions you ask yourself are normally 1. Do I like it? and 2. Who’s it by? When you stand in front of a work of art in an auction room or dealer’s gallery, you also ask yourself the same two questions first; but they are followed by others, rather less noble-minded, such as: how much is it worth? How much will it be worth in five or ten years’ time? And, what will people think of me if they see it hanging on my wall?

This dictionary is a guide to how people reach answers to those questions, and how in the process art is given a financial value. I have spent more than thirty-five years working in the art market, first at Christie’s, then as a dealer, and latterly at Sotheby’s. That is my excuse for writing a book about the art world that investigates in prurient detail the guilty but ever-fascinating relationship between art and money. It is divided into five parts, each one of which analyses a different factor in what determines the amount a buyer ends up paying for a work of art. In the process I have undertaken a highly subjective and shamelessly self-indulgent tour of those aspects of art and the art world that have struck me over the years as comic, revealing, piquant, splendid or absurd.

The first part examines the artist and his hinterland. Who’s it by? The identity of the artist and his perceived importance in the scheme of art history is a factor that has an understandable influence on buyers and the price they pay for a painting; but there is also a back story to artists’ lives that affects our appreciation of them and the works they produce, a romance made up of the glamour and myth of artistic creation. Quite apart from the art historical importance of – say – Van Gogh and his significance as the originator of Expressionism, there is a tragic romance to his life that enhances his value to the collector both emotionally and financially.

The second section looks at what subjects and styles are in demand. The answer to the question ‘Do I like it?’ is influenced by one’s own personal predilections, but also by a broader artistic taste that is constantly evolving. At different times in history people want different things from art, so that what artists paint and how they paint it can to succeeding generations vary in desirability and financial value. But within that evolution, certain subjects and styles emerge as selling better than others with a reasonable consistency. This part of the dictionary attempts to analyse the factors in play, and to look at artistic taste as manifested now, in the early years of the twenty-first century. A warning in advance: the determinants of what sells and what doesn’t are occasionally subtle ones, but more often alarmingly simplistic.

The third part, ‘Wall-Power’, looks in more detail at what makes us like a painting. What gives it the impact that makes us want to own it (and attracts a crowd of other admirers too so that it sells for appreciably more than we can afford)? Of course, surpassing artistic quality is the element always reflected positively in the price a work of art realizes. And, at the very top of the quality tree, the price differential between something that is very good and something that is superlative is astonishinglylarge. That gap is something I find oddly vindicating about the market: in this respect it has its values right. It recognizes the very best and sets it very emphatically apart.

But how does it do it? Artistic quality is notoriously difficult to pin down. Certain contributory factors are examined here: a work’s colouring, its composition, its finish, its emotional impact, its relationship to nature, and to other works of art. Conversely, on what grounds do we have reservations about a painting that will negatively affect its price? Is it unfinished, or too dark, or heavily restored, or depicting something unpleasant? Could it be, horror of horrors, a fake?

In the same way that an artist’s back story affects our perception of him and his work, so does the back story of the physical work of art: whose collection it has been in, where it’s been exhibited, which dealers have handled it. So the fourth part looks at provenance. If the work you are buying comes from a distinguished private collection, it will raise the price because previous ownership by a very eminent collector is an imprimatur of the work’s quality. A Cézanne from the Mellon Collection will be worth more than the same picture from an unnamed private collection. Similarly, to those in the know, certain names appearing in a picture’s provenance can trigger alarm signals. These are the dealers that research has identified as having trafficked in looted art during the Second World War, for instance. Unless it can be proved that the painting was not stolen from a Jewish collector, its value may be seriously reduced by its handling by one of these dealers. It may not be saleable at all. And the name of Field Marshal Göring in the list of previous owners of your picture – even if he came by it legally – isn’t necessarily a bonus.

What’s it worth? Art is assessed and changes hands in a constantly evolving market environment. That environment is the product of a vast range of elements: economic, political, cultural, emotional and psychological. It is influenced by the marketing of dealers and auction houses, by the whims of collectors and the caprice of critics, by what people see in museums and on television, by their own individual aspirations. The final section of the dictionary, ‘Market Weather’, examines some of the varied factors that contribute to the storms and sunshine of the art-world climate.

Attaching financial value to works of art is not an entirely uncontroversial activity. But on the whole I think the art trade performs a necessary function and does it no worse than a number of other respectable commercial institutions. It has certainly provided me with an interesting life. I have had close encounters with a large number of great works of art (and a large number of less good ones, too, which is also salutary). I have met some extraordinary (and extraordinarily rich) people. This dictionary is an anthology of what I have learned from them. And, having spent two happy decades working for Sotheby’s, I should of course point out that the conclusions I draw are my own and not necessarily the views of my long-suffering employers.

The Artist and His Hinterland

Bohemianism

Branding

Brueghel

Creative Block

Degas

Diarists (Artists as)

Female Artists

Fictional Artists

Géricault

Images (Famous)

-Isms

Jail (Artists in)

Madness

Middlebrow Artists

Models and Muses

Quarters and Colonies

Spoofs

Suicides

Bohemianism

Iris Barry, having given birth to the child of the Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis, returned from hospital to his studio with the new baby but had to wait outside until he had finished having sex with Nancy Cunard. When Vlaminck sold a painting unexpectedly, he took the cash and went on a three-day drinking bout with Modigliani; what money they didn’t drink they folded into paper aeroplanes and sent gliding into the trees along Boulevard Raspail. To paint The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault shaved his head, cut himself off from his friends, put a bed in his studio and worked there unremittingly for ten months. After the completion of the picture he suffered a total nervous collapse.

Artists live differently from ordinary people. This was recognized early on: in one of Franco Sacchetti’s novelle, written in Italy in the late fourteenth century, a painter’s wife exclaims: ‘You painters are all whimsical and of ever-changing mood; you are constantly drunk and not even ashamed of yourselves!’ Five hundred years later Edvard Munch’s father, in classic bourgeois horror at his son’s choice of profession, said that to be an artist was like living in a brothel. The alienation of artists is grimly described by the British painter Keith Vaughan in 1943: ‘We see them at odds with themselves and others, perpetually lonely and ailing, carved out with wretchedness, their manhood falling to pieces about them and only the bright jewel of their creative rage burning in the centre of the wreckage.’

Bohemianism is an expression of the artist’s otherness. In its modern form, it flowered in the nineteenth century as a growth of the Romantic Movement. The artist was cast as tortured hero, a bohemian in the sense of being a gypsy, one who led a vagabond or irregular and unconventional life; not necessarily by choice, but because he had to, being driven by an irresistible creative impulse. Heavy drinking, sexual promiscuity, drug-taking, flirtations with madness, and eccentricities of appearance and dress were deemed the symptoms of creativity; there were even those who believed that indulgence in such things was creativity’s precondition, and steeled themselves to drink more or to grow their hair long (or cut it short if they were girls) in order to become great artists.

Henry Murger, who wrote La Vie de Bohème in 1843, is generally credited with having invented bohemia. He fixed it as immutably centred in the Latin Quarter, declaring that ‘it only exists and is only possible in Paris’. Arriving there from Germany in 1900, Paula Modersohn-Becker observed that the painters all wore ‘long hair, brown velvet suits, or strange togas on the street, with enormous fluttering bow ties – altogether a rather remarkable bunch’. By then the uniform of the antiuniform was established.

Other bohemias sprang up later to rival Paris – Berlin before the First World War, perhaps, and New York in the 1960s. The British competed gamely, and produced a few fully fledged bohemians of their own such as Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. But in the ranks beneath them, there was a lack of commitment, and a sanitized, romanticized, peculiarly British bohemia came into being. George du Maurier’s Trilby, a successful late-nineteenth-century novel, features three impossibly hearty British art students in Paris, and portrays the Latin Quarter as a place where drink flowed, but no one got drunk, no one drank absinthe, and no man or woman ever had sex. Rather than Paris, British artists of the time were actually more likely to gravitate to summer colonies in places like St Ives and Newlyn in Cornwall to paint and live unconventionally [see Quarters and Colonies below]; but despite valiant attempts at bohemianism the British ended up playing rather a lot of golf and cricket. In 1942 Osbert Sitwell told George Orwell that in the event of a Nazi invasion the Home Guard had orders to shoot all artists. Orwell observed that in Cornwall that might be no bad thing.

Bohemians at play: artists misbehaving as dawn breaks over Paris (Jean Béraud, Le Petit Matin, après la fête à Montmartre, oil on canvas, 1907)

According to Murger, bohemia is ‘a stage in artistic life; it is the Preface to the Academy, the Hotel Dieu, or the Morgue’. Part of your duty as an artist was to shock the bourgeoisie, to position yourself remorselessly against convention. This was all very well up to a point, until you found that the bourgeoisie were actually also your buyers. Then you sold out and joined the Academy. Or you didn’t sell out, and either went mad or died. Another exit from bohemia was via the domesticity of marriage, or more specifically of parenthood. That was often a dispiriting cul-de-sac. Nothing, in Cyril Connolly’s words, is more inimical to artistic endeavour than ‘the pram in the hall’.

The ultimate bohemian, in his pursuit of a primitive life, uncontaminated by industrial and bourgeois values, was Gauguin, who escaped to the South Seas [see Part II, Exoticism]. Then there was Augustus John, who literally became a gypsy and learned the Romany language, wandering the country in an itinerant, rootless existence trailing mistresses and children, which was a good way of dealing with the pram-in-the-hall problem. Modigliani may have stayed mostly in Paris but set standards of excess that have remained a benchmark ever since. Munch, perhaps finally heeding his father’s strictures, in later life vowed to reform. He would confine himself, he said, to ‘tobacco-free cigars, alcohol-free drinks and poison-free women’.

Flaubert was an advocate of restraint: ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works,’ he advised. There is an interesting subsection of artists for whom the bohemian way of life has held no attraction, who have rebelled against the paradoxical uniformity of its eccentricity. These artists make no connection between the production of good work and unconventional behaviour, and deliberately adopt a conservative, bourgeois lifestyle. Pierre Bonnard, for instance, lived a private life of quiet domesticity apparently punctuated (to judge from his subject matter) only by the regularity with which his wife took baths. Magritte maintained a deeply conventional appearance and favoured a bowler hat. Sir Alfred Munnings – whose subjects were mostly horses – dressed and lived like an English country squire, and once memorably suggested that if he ever met Picasso he’d give him a good kicking.

Today there is a group of successful portraitists in London known as the Pinstripe School, because they are rarely seen wearing anything but suits. It is entirely possible that these men – who are talented if somewhat representational painters – take off their jackets to work, and perhaps even loosen their ties. But their supreme conventionality and the dapperness of their appearance are reassuring to a certain sort of public. They drink, no doubt, and may even chase women, but no more so than the merchant bankers, hedge-fund managers and high-earning barristers who constitute the majority of their clientele. On the other hand, the suits worn by Gilbert and George, at the cutting edge of contemporary art, are part of a different agenda. Their apparent conventionality of dress is actually the ultimate nonconformity, a post-bohemian bohemianism.

The artist as bohemian is an important part of the myth of art. Art is something magical, transcendent, and worth paying large amounts of money for precisely because it is priceless and unquantifiable. Artists, as the producers of this supremely desirable spiritual commodity, need to dress and behave differently in order to demarcate themselves from ordinary people. Their bohemianism is a badge of their anointed state, a reminder that art is special. And financially valuable.

Branding

The most overworked word today in the vocabularies of dealers, critics and auction-house experts is ‘iconic’ [see Part V, Glossary]. But to praise a work of art as ‘iconic’, besides acknow...

About this edition

• Publisher: Particular Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0718192451
• ISBN 13: 9780718192457
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192