Going, Going...
After a locally owned Picasso portrait of the artist’s mistress Dora Maar was sold at auction for $95.2 million, the deal raised profound questions about the loss of the work and the future of the city’s museums.
(page 2 of 2)
| photography: courtesy of Sotheby's   |
Nearly $208 million worth of art was sold in just one night at Sotheby's May impressionist and modern art auction, the sale featuring Dora Maar au Chat. The amount was more than twice the $91.3 million in sales at the auction the year before. The auction house's contemporary art sale also fared extremely well this year, taking in $128.8 million, compared with $68 million last year. Combined auction sales of Christie's and Sotheby's soared to nearly $5.9 billion in 2005 from $3.2 billion ten years ago. It is now hard to believe that Sotheby's sales were just $16 million in 1958 (the equivalent of $112.7 million today). But much has changed in the art world.
Flash back to the 1980s-the manic decade when junk-bond dollars and Japa-nese yen flooded the art market, producing the biggest art boom in history and superinflated prices. Japanese speculators, in particular, were active in the 1980s, snatching up impressionist works at the auction houses for astronomical prices. Meanwhile, money-obsessed Wall Street types were also paying unimaginable sums for Warhols and Lichtensteins, as well as for works by lesser-knowns like Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, whose popularity soared in that decade.
The idea of collectors buying works of art for investments rather than for the genuine love of art did not originate in the 1980s, but it certainly proliferated in those years. Consequently, speculators drove up prices to the point of unraveling, and the market bottomed out by the early 1990s, only to rebound again by the end of the decade.
Today the art market remains buoyant, thanks to the surging stock market and real-estate boom, and the explosion of new foreign buyers enriched by the global economy. According to Artnet's Fine Art Auctions Database, more than 1,650 artists set new auction highs this past May alone-half as many as the entire year before, which saw 3,100 price records. And that is only counting sales at auctions, which are public. Many more sales are made privately and quietly, barely making a public ripple.
And as in the 1980s era, today's Young Turks, with nearly bottomless pocketbooks, continue to treat the art market as if it were Wall Street. "Some people are buying art like they're buying pork bellies," says Milton Esterow, the editor and publisher of ART- news. Richardson, Picasso's biographer, adds: "None of them have the foggiest idea of what they're buying. They'll buy a big, flashy apartment or an enormous house, but they don't know what to hang on the walls, except for the name Picasso."
Just how beholden the art business is to the new class of collectors is difficult to say, but experts note that even a handful of wealthy collectors can greatly influence the market. Consider Dora Maar au Chat. To many in the art world, the sale of that painting represents a market that is spiraling out of control. The $95.2-million sale price is a sharp increase from the $106,000 (or $704,930 in today's dollars) that the Gidwitzes originally paid for the painting in 1963-a 135-fold increase, or a total rate of return of about 89,270 percent, excluding Sotheby's commission. "It's grotesque," says Richardson, of Dora's near-nine-figure price tag. "I think it's absolutely absurd. In my view, it's by no means one of the best Dora Maars. It's just bigger than most of them and a bit flashier than most of them and therefore appeals to hedge-fund tastes." (Or, maybe, in this case, Russian oligarchy tastes.)
Auction houses have become the trading floors of choice for collectors' art portfolios, a fact that has attracted some criticism within the art world. Jerry Saltz, the art critic for The Village Voice, recently described art auctions as "bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and brothel," where "consumption becomes a sort of sacrament [and] art plays the role of sacrificial lamb." Saltz quotes Amy Cappellazzo, of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department, as saying, "Some people prefer to spend $500,000 at auction on something they could buy privately for $50,000." Paul Herring, a prominent New York art dealer who works with some of the world's biggest art buyers, including Ronald Lauder, thinks that auction prices often far exceed those in galleries because art auctions are, basically, "a macho thing, where rich guys . . . get up there and show themselves and others how rich they are." Of Dora Maar au Chat, he says, "There's not a dealer in the world who could find anybody who would pay $95 million for that Picasso." Even Sotheby's officials were shocked by Dora's final sales price. Norman says: "When you expect a picture to go for, maybe, $55 million, and it hasn't hammered down at $84 million, at some point, you've kind of lost it, like, ‘What's going on?'
" After the 1960s, money ruined everything," the great pop artist Robert Rauschenberg once remarked to the Trib- une's Alan Artner during an interview. Rauschenberg, says Artner, was referring to the commonly held feeling in the art world that the art market began to change in the sixties, when art came to be treated less like precious works and more like tradable commodities that come and go.
One aspect of the inevitable fallout from changes in the art business is that museums have largely become priced out of the art market-their annual acquisition budgets chicken feed compared with the sums superwealthy collectors can pay for art. And as the buying power of museums has diminished, they have had to become even more dependent on the largess of benefactors. "There's no question people find out, ‘Gosh, this picture is worth a zillion dollars-I don't want to leave that much to the Art Institute,' " says John Bryan, the institute's chairman.
"There are different priorities today," adds Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. "The art market is strong, and people may have different ideas about what they want to do with their works. It's something that all of us deal with as a reality of the art world today."
When Chicago started making its way as a major city just over a century ago, many collectors and other civic lights held that art collected in the city should stay in the city. Charles L. Hutchinson, one of Chicago's leading bankers and a central force behind the establishment of the Art Institute in 1879, led early efforts to transform a prairie city into a place more like the other great cultural capitals of the world where, he said, "art treasures of many generations have been gathered together to delight, instruct, and inspire." Hutchinson's father, Benjamin, a powerful grain speculator, once mocked his son's purchase of a French painting of a sheep meadow by exclaiming, "Think about him-a son of mine! He paid $500 a piece for five painted sheep and he could get the real article for $2 a head!"
But over the years, many other Chicago business leaders followed the younger Hutchinson's example of cultural goodwill-the Ryersons, Palmers, McCormicks, Swifts, Armours, and Fields, to name just a few. In previous generations, says Artner, "people felt they owed something artistically to the city." Chicago's early benefactors, he says, wanted to be more than just captains of industry: "They didn't want to be remembered as simply the people who made their money being hog butchers. They wanted to be remembered as families that built libraries and museums, and treated them as if they were some counterparts to cathedrals."
As in the 1980s, today's Young Turks, with nearly bottomless pocketbooks, continue to treat the art market as if it were Wall Street.
Today some art insiders argue that civic and cultural patronage may have declined. The basic question for art collectors, ac- cording to Artner, is: "Do you have a re-sponsibility to the city in which you made your fortune, or not?" The short answer, he concludes, is: "It's a matter of conscience." He adds, "If you don't feel the guilt in going to Sotheby's and watching the gavel slam down when you're making 25, 50, 100 percent on your investment, if you don't feel it, there's nothing anybody can do to instill it."
But should collectors or their heirs feel guilty about doing whatever they want with their privately owned art? "Why should they?" asks Richard Gray, the art dealer. "Other people who have got all kinds of money and all kinds of valuable assets are not being called upon to give them away to a public institution when they die. It's just art."
But imagine if Frederic Clay Bartlett had not donated to the Art Institute his sizable collection, which included Georges Seurat's pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, now one of the in-
stitute's marquee attractions. Or what if Joseph Shapiro, Edwin Bergman, and the handful of other local collectors had not launched the Museum of Contemporary Art in an old Streeterville bakery building-providing money and artwork from their private collections for the upstart institution?
"I think you have to understand that it's a whole different ballgame, completely, than it was when museums like the Art Institute or the Met, or these major museums, formed their collections," says Hubert Neumann, a prominent New York art collector whose late father, the mail-order magnate Morton G. Neumann, amassed one of the most coveted art collections in Chicago. "Basically, there was real patrimony on the part of patronal families."
When the elder Neumann died in 1985, he left his collection to his family, not to the Art Institute or the Museum of Contemporary Art, both of which had courted him for many years. Likewise, Hubert Neumann has no intentions of giving away anything in the 500-plus collection, either. He has loaned works to museums over the years, but he says there are few incentives now for collectors to donate art works. For example, Neumann says that in 1998 his family offered to donate 65 works of art to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in lieu of millions of dollars of estate taxes that the family owed. Neumann appealed to Congress, which, by law, has to approve such special tax breaks. He recalls that the negotiations on Capitol Hill quickly broke down; certain members of Congress, he says, refused to cut tax deals for one family. "Politicians in Washington today aren't interested in the patrimony of our country," Neumann says. At one of
the meetings, he recalls an official telling him that he collected Beanie Babies, to which Neumann replied, "Sir, we're talking about Picassos."
Neumann points out that for years U.S. tax laws have discouraged even the most philanthropic givers from donating works to museums. In 1986, Congress changed the method for figuring tax deductions for works of art donated to museums, allowing donors to deduct only the price they had paid for the work instead of the market value at the time of the donation. So, if a collector paid $100 for a painting in the 1940s, he could deduct only $100 from his taxes, even if the work had appreciated substantially. Not surprisingly, donations to museums plummeted, and even though the laws have since become more advantageous, collectors still cannot take full tax deductions. Collectors can almost always come out better selling art works than giving them away. In August, new changes to federal tax rules were enacted that make it harder for collectors to make so-called partial gifts, wherein collectors give away fractional ownership of artwork to museums, and over time, the institution comes to own the artwork entirely.
Even museums themselves are cashing in on the overheated market. As art prices have shot up, a growing number of museums have turned to pruning their permanent collections, a practice called deaccessioning, though the money is usually used to buy other works. Potential benefactors may think twice about giving their beloved artwork if they think that some future museum administration could wind up selling it. "I hate the idea of deacquisition," says the socialite and author Sugar Rautbord, whose late aunt Ruth Kaplan, a longtime Art Institute benefactor, donated a Monet gem, Water Lily Pond, to the museum at the time of her death earlier this year. "I love knowing that when you go into the Art Institute, you're going to see Aunt Ruthie's Monet," Rautbord says. "That's part of the familiarity and the experience, and frankly, I'd be horrified if I saw her Monet hung up on some big Russian oilman's wall."
Aunt Ruthie's Monet currently hangs in gallery 206-joining a fine portfolio of other works recently donated to the museum by other Chicago benefactors. Indeed, despite the exile of many notable pieces of art, Chicago's hometown museums continue to receive sizable gifts from local collectors. For example, in 1998, under the direction of John Bryan, the Sara Lee Corporation gave away 40 works of art, then valued at about $100 million, to 20 U.S. museums, including 12 major pieces by
the likes of Gauguin and Matisse to the Art Institute.
And in 1992, Lindy Bergman lent the Art Institute 77 surrealist works that she and her late husband, Edwin, a former president of the Museum of Contemporary Art, had collected. About ten years earlier, the Bergmans had donated 37 boxes and collages by Joseph Cornell to the institute, making the museum one of the greatest repositories of Cornell's work. "Chicago is our home, and we felt very loyal to Chicago," says Lindy Bergman. "We just decided that was where we wanted them to be."
In fact, the institute had a near record 1,095 acquisitions last year. "Obviously the Art Institute is pretty well stocked," says John Bryan, the museum's chairman. "We've got a lot more in storage than we've got out of storage." He continues: "The Art Institute doesn't just say to the world, ‘Bring us your art.' It has to be something that the curators want, because we have to store it, we have to conserve it, tend to it, and all. We don't take just anything that comes along."
Still, the Art Institute-and to a lesser extent, the MCA-cannot simply rest on its laurels; the fate of several major Chicago art collections is still in question. Most of the city's prominent collecting pioneers are now gone-their collections have been sold off, passed down to heirs, or given away. And many of the city's most avid collectors are graying, and in some cases, no longer collecting art as actively. Only three local couples-Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis, Anne Dias and Kenneth Griffin, and Elizabeth and Harvey Plotnick-were listed in ARTnews magazine's annual estimate of the world's top 200 art collectors. By comparison, ten collectors made the list in 1991, the first year of its publication.
| A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY 1941 1946 1947 1963 2006 |
Museum officials and local dealers insist that there are more collectors in the city than ever before; they're just not as visible as in older generations. Naturally, curators at the MCA and the Art Institute are fiercely wooing these collectors-cajoling them, visiting their art-laden homes, wining and dining them, or flat-out begging. Rautbord recalls how her aunt, Ruth Kaplan, used to love all the attention that the museums seeking her Monet lavished on her. "She knew what she had, so when she was younger, instead of swaying her hips, she was showing off her Monet," Rautbord says. "I think she was very coquettish about it; knowing that so many great museums wanted it gave her a sense that she was never wanting for suitors because of this beautiful picture." Sometimes museum officials just come right out and ask for gifts. "If the museum curator really wants it, it's no more complicated than saying, ‘Gosh, I hope you'll leave me a couple of these,' " says Bryan. "It's kind of a compliment that their taste was approved by a museum."
But probably the most effective persuasion tactic used by museum directors and curators is to appeal to people's sense of loyalty-making the case that great art works should stay in the city. "People in Chicago have a civic pride in their institutions," says Elizabeth Smith, of the MCA. "It's usually quite a powerful argument to make to people that works should be shared with the public or seen by the public, and the best repository for a major work of art is in a public institution."
The fate of the real Dora Maar was far more complicated than that of the collectors who have owned the painting-and profited from it. The story of Picasso and Dora Maar ends around the mid-1940s, when the couple's stormy love af-fair could no longer endure the strains of the war or the clash of their own volatile personalities.
After Picasso ended their relationship in 1944 and began a new affair with Françoise Gilot, Maar suffered frequent bouts of depression. The critic James Lord writes, "Her friends thought she might go mad, commit suicide." After several frightening incidents and public outbursts, Maar was taken to a psychiatric hospital and put in the care of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who supposedly once said of Maar that he would have to put her either in a straitjacket or into the arms of the church. "It was the arms
of the church that won out," says the his-torian Mary Ann Caws. Maar became devoutly religious. She would send Picasso religious books; in return, he would send Maar painted toilet seats. Yet, over the years, Caw says, Maar never completely broke free from Picasso, forever enamored of his greatness. She is famously quoted as having said, "After Picasso, only God." Explains Caws: "After somebody this intense, and this all-englobing, and all-mastering, who in the world else could there be?"
Anyone looking for examples of civic patrimony in Chicago need only go to any of the city's art museums or other cultural institutions and look at the countless wall markers listing the names of our great and many benefactors, dead and alive. Or they can look no further than Pablo Picasso. In 1963, Picasso was commissioned by the City of Chicago to create a maquette for a grand sculpture that would be the centerpiece of the plaza outside what is now the Richard J. Daley Center. The 50-foot-tall sculpture he designed was installed in 1967; it was the first monumental modern sculpture to be publicly displayed downtown, and, as all Chicagoans know, it has become a city icon. What they might not know is that the sculpture was, in fact, a gift. In a gesture of civic generosity, Picasso refused to be paid his contracted sum of $100,000, instead donating the work to the city-and the people-of Chicago.
Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »
