Sleeping Giants

By: Roberta S. Maneker

February 2007

The art market is not just about Klimt and Picasso. While some collecting categories are thriving, others are sleeping—or at least sleepy. Fine works are out there, not yet swollen by hedge fund money or celebrity endorsements. But tread carefully—The marketplace is complex, imperfect and quirky, neither completely rational nor susceptible to normal cause and effect. In this follow-up to “Sleeping Giants, Part I” (June 2005), Art & Antiques surveyed top market watchers to disclose select categories that currently may be underappreciated and therefore perhaps undervalued.

JAPANESE PRINTS
Specialists in the arts of Asia say that despite blazing prices for ceramics, bargains can be found in Japanese prints, those early works that helped put the “modern” in “modern Western art” (think Japonism). Katsura Yamaguchi, head of Christie’s Japanese Art department in New York, cites ukiyo-e prints (translated roughly as “pictures of the floating world”) as a category worth watching. These polychrome woodblock prints date from the Edo period (1603–1867), when the shoguns ruled and Japan was both isolated and at peace. The prints were mass-produced and immensely popular. Typical subjects are Kabuki actors, teahouses, geishas and courtesans, sumo wrestlers and land- and seascapes.

“Japanese prints across the board are undervalued in terms of their art historical significance and the expertise and craft that went into them,” says Los Angeles dealer Veronica Miller of Egenolf Gallery. “Meiji prints are the most undervalued by the market in general.” Her tip: “Hundred Famous Views of the Moon” prints by Yoshitoshi (1839–92) can be found for less than $1,000.

Sebastian Izzard, who has monitored the market for more than two decades as an auction house specialist, appraiser and dealer, thinks the soft print market reflects Japan’s weak economy over the past decade, as well as changes in Japanese taste, which right now is “more Western in feel and enamored of the decorative, more modern prints of the late 19th and 20th centuries.” He reports that the “classic six” of Japanese print-making—Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hiroshige and Hokusai (creator of the iconic 1831 “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”)—are all well under the money they brought 15 years ago. Izzard recently reappraised a collection of classical Japanese prints that he had originally appraised in 1991 and found that the same group was worth 40 percent of its prior value. In 1989 a Sharaku print sold at auction for $460,000, a price since unmatched. “One would be hard-pressed to find prices anywhere near that today,” Izzard says. “The sorts of prints found in textbooks, the great names of Japanese print-making like Hiroshige and Hokusai, are not expensive at the moment.”

AMERICAN SCULPTURE
It may be time to take a look at American sculpture, long in the shadow of American paintings. Alice Duncan, director of Gerald Peters Gallery in New York, thinks sculpture in general is always undervalued against paintings because of technical issues (like patina and casting dates) and some people’s qualms about art produced in multiples. “Learn to rely on your response to a work. Then look at the piece negatively, as a dealer does. It has to prove itself,” she says. “Whatever isn’t current taste tends to be undervalued, so trust the work you respond to.” Duncan mentions Anna Hyatt Huntington; Charles Grafly, a Philadelphia sculptor who studied and then taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and whose students ranged from the very famous Paul Manship to the little-known Albin Polasek (a 1910 Prix de Rome winner whom Duncan also cites); and Isadore Konti, in whose New York studio Manship once was a studio assistant. Works by Huntington sell for $8,000 to $50,000, Grafly for $15,000 to $80,000, Kontis for $8,000 to $30,000 and Manship for $40,000 to more than $1 million.

Joel Rosenkranz of Conner Rosenkranz in New York points to a group of 19th- century American sculptors who studied in Italy and produced large and small classical marble figures, often depicting women: Hiram Powers, Chauncey Ives, Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis, an artist of black and American Indian heritage known for works expressing Abolitionist ideas. And he notes that the years book-ended by 1893 (the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago) and 1939 (the New York World’s Fair) saw an explosion in figurative American sculpture of high quality. “Sculptors like John Gregory and Bessie Potter Vonnoh were producing small classical bronzes of great refinement and beauty while, at the same time, modernist impulses from Europe energized a new American aesthetic” that led to the more abstracted figures of Elie Nadelman. Rosenkranz notes that more young scholars are entering this field and more catalogs and books are coming out—including one on Harriet Frishmuth by his partner Janis Conner and others (Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth. A Catalogue of Works, available through Christie’s).INDIAN SCULPTURE
Hugo Weihe, director of Asian Art at Christie’s New York, suggests looking at Indian sculpture from the early Classical period. New money, it seems, is attracted to the flourishing contemporary segment of the market. “The earlier art perhaps requires a bit more connoisseurship,” Weihe says, “but great Buddhist and Hindu sculpture are universally beautiful and easily comprehensible, and have a spiritual aura around them.” He calls attention to Buddhist figures made in Gandhara of a blue-gray, mica-flecked schist from the first to the sixth century, and to Hindu bronzes from the Chola dynasty, late ninth to late 13th century, arguably the high point in Indian bronzes. Currently, prices range from around $1,000 for a little Gandharan piece to $1 million for an 11th century Khmer sandstone figure of Uma, which sold for $1,127,500 at Christie’s in 2004. The Royal Academy in London has just had an exhibit of some of the best Chola bronzes, which is likely to increase awareness in this category.

Long-time Asian art dealer Doris Wiener of New York agrees that Indian sculpture from the 2nd century B.C. to the 14th century A.D. is largely undervalued: “It’s gone up in comparison to itself, but percentage-wise, it doesn’t compare to Western art.”

19TH-CENTURY LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS
In “Sleeping Giants, Part One,” we cited 19th-century European painting, notably Barbizon landscapes, as possibly undervalued, especially compared to Impressionism, and we still think this is true. Polly Sartori, Sotheby’s senior director of 19th-century European art, champions in particular the works of Gustave Courbet, who in his later years was loosely associated with the Barbizon group. “He’s the true definition of a ‘sleeping giant,’ the first great Realist and one of the first truly abstract painters,” she says. “Although an acknowledged giant during his lifetime, today there are just a handful of passionate Courbet collectors worldwide.” His diverse subjects—portraits, still lifes, marines, genre paintings—all evince a truly modern approach. A major Courbet retrospective will be featured at the Metropolitan Museum and the Musée d’Orsay in 2008–09. Keep in mind, though, that prices for giants, even sleeping ones, can be big. Courbet’s highest price at auction is just under $3 million for “Portrait de Jo: La Belle Irlandaise,” which sold at Sotheby’s in 1998. The record high for a Cézanne, on the other hand, is $60.5 million.

Contemporaneous with the Barbizons and Courbet but on the other side of the channel, Victorian landscapists were holding sway, few of them household names at present. But a recent exhibition on the works of Benjamin Williams Leader (1831–1923) at Cambridge Art Gallery in Santa Monica, California, and the thriving business of New York’s Rehs Galleries Inc., which specializes in Victorian painters, suggest real value in this category.

These British landscapists often painted en plein air (a defining characteristic of the Barbizons) and were united in their enthusiasm for—and sometimes romanticizing of—the English countryside. This colorful cohort includes Leader (who, like the Barbizons, was deeply influenced by John Constable’s realistic approach to nature), Henry John Boddington, Sidney Richard Percy, Edward Charles Williams, Henry Jutsum, William Gosling, Alfred de Breanski, Henry H. Parker, Alfred A. Glendening and Albert Goodwin. Gallery owner Howard Rehs points out that you’re likely to pay one-tenth the price of an American Hudson River painting for good British Victorian landscape art.
 
FRENCH FURNITURE
Art fair feedback is that Art Nouveau furniture is the new black, nudging if not displacing recently hot mid-century Modernism. With so many acquisitive eyes on the 20th century, it’s time to look further back in time for some good furniture buys. And, surprisingly, this means classical French furniture. While recent big-name auctions of formal French pieces have done extremely well—for example, the Partridge and Maurice Segoura sales at Christie’s in 2006 and the Safra sale at Sotheby’s in 2004—these have been personality sales, in effect selling the taste and cachet of the owner. In the big picture, though, French furniture seems to be suffering from a degree of neglect. “Once the backbone of the Paris Biennale, this year the French furniture dealers were beginning to look like a niche market,” reports Will Strafford, head of European furniture and decorative arts at Christie’s New York. “They were significantly outnumbered by vendors of 20th-century art and furniture, by tribal and Chinese and antiquities dealers.” Strafford believes that compared to 20th-century furniture, 18th-century pieces of decent quality are a good value. For example, he says, you can get “a perfectly nice” pair of Louis XVI open armchairs for $2,000 and a Louis XV commode “even with a little floral marquetry thrown in” for $5,000 to $10,000, which is about the same price you would have paid for that commode 20 years ago. Strafford points out that French pieces are complex constructs of veneers, gilt bronze mounts, marble tops and so forth, and while you can expect repairs and perhaps some replacement parts, the fewer the better.BYRDCLIFFE
Say “Woodstock” and some people think of an acid-fueled music festival, while others picture a long-running art colony with some famous alumni. Fewer think of Byrdcliffe, a precursor artists’ colony established at Woodstock in 1902 by British ex-pat Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his American wife, Jane Byrd Mercer McCall. They bought 1,200 acres, constructed buildings and
created an artistic commune for craftsmen who, like Whitehead, were influenced by the back-to-nature theories of British Arts and Crafts notables John Ruskin and William Morris and their American apostle Arthur Wesley Dow. Underwritten by Whitehead’s considerable wealth, the group produced a variety of art and artifacts, and it was common for the artists to work in several mediums, including weaving, ceramics, furniture, prints, photography and painting. The furniture-making operation was short-lived, but Byrdcliffe remains a retreat for artists and thinkers. The Byrdcliffe group included Jessie Tarbox Beals, Bolton Brown, Dawson Dawson-Watson, Hermann Dudley Murphy, Birge Harrison and Zulma Steele, who later emerged as a pioneering American Modernist. A 2005 Steele exhibition at Spanierman Gallery in New York featured her intensely colored landscapes, and the exhibition catalog described her as “one of the first women artists to translate regional scenery into paint.” She is known for her monotypes (as well as ceramics and other decorative arts). As for Murphy, Colleene Fesko, vice president of Skinner Auctioneers in Bolton, Massachusetts, says, “His work is difficult to categorize, and I believe it to be undervalued. America’s Whistler—at one time tonal, Aesthetic and Boston—deserves many second looks.” In all, it’s a group to keep your eye on.

Roberta S. Maneker is an Art & Antiques New York correspondent.