notes

Most of the cognoscenti are aware of the pending sale of a fair amount of the stock in trade of venerable Munich dealer Bernheimer. Trading since 1864, current pater familias Konrad Bernheimer will consolidate a portion of their stock of old master paintings into London based Colnaghi, the equally venerable Bond Street dealer of which he is chairman, with the rest sold-  including the family’s castle Bur Marquartstein.

It is impossible to imagine this decision was not arrived at sans a monumental weeping and gnashing of teeth. Purportedly bowing to the desire of Bernheimer’s daughters to limit dealing activities to exclusively contemporary art and photography, it beggars belief that, following the family’s herculean efforts to recover and rebuild their fortunes following the unparalleled predations of World War II, a generational change could accomplish such an effect.

The sad conclusion I’m left with is that the family needed the money, and with the sale of even their family seat, they appear to be, to coin a phrase, tapped out. It will be interesting to follow the fortunes going forward, to judge whether and to what extent the Bernheimer marque will contribute to the contemporary art market.

Not precisely an integral component, but very much in evidence is the runner, or as American slang, and a TV series, has it, the picker. These fellows- and I am not being sexist, as I have never, ever come across a woman picker- wander the countryside or cityscape, by which I mean their particular patch, find something they consider worthwhile and then sell it on, occasionally at auction, but more frequently to someone higher up the food chain, by which I mean a dealer with bricks and mortar premises. Seldom do pickers maintain retail premises themselves.

‘Picker’ always sounds disgusting, and many pickers, with unwashed vans, broken down cars and threadbare clothes oftentimes are. One gentleman of our acquaintance could often be seen driving his finds around in a long-used BMW rag top, and comical as it was, frequently had some overlarge case piece projecting from the rear seat. Interestingly, we’ve never done much business with pickers, and the aforementioned we would see often trading with one of our erstwhile neighbors. That’s largely because, as with very nearly all pickers, he was, as the dealer he traded with, somewhat, shall we say, omnivorous in his pickings. Sometimes furniture, sometimes Victorian paintings, sometimes, and oftentimes, looks like, but not quite. With all that, rarely something that was truly remarkable.

However, one thing our described picker has in common with all others- they always sell on for not much in the way of profit, at least in hard money. Yes, perhaps the item they purchased for $1 they would sell on for $2, or more likely, the item they paid $50 for they would sell on for $100, but in the great minds think alike category, the dealer buyer, as with our neighbor, thought the same way, selling on cheaply and quickly. Throughout the trade, though, this is a familiar phenomenon, with the rare good object, as cream rising to the surface, making its way ever upward in the class of dealers. Frankly, we found that, rather than fighting the great unwashed at the disparate sales throughout the world’s landscape, watch what it was that came within the ambit of colleagues we knew were heavily dependent on the picker- and make purchases of what might truly be worthwhile from them. This sounds predatory, and perhaps it is and not in the best capitalist tradition, but I am reminded of a conversation I had with our old neighbor one day. I asked him about a pair of mid Georgian library armchairs he had in stock and what became of them, to find he’d sold them on fairly quickly to the London trade at what I told him was, in my opinion, a very modest profit. He told me that he would rather make a few dollars on a back to back sale than gamble on waiting a year with the prospect of making substantially more. That’s one way to do it, and answers the question of how to make a small fortune in the trade. Ignore the prospect of making a large fortune.

Apropos Brian Sewell’s recent death, I’ve reread the first volume of his memoir, Outsider. It’s interesting, because in the reading, it’s clear to me that Brian was very much on the inside, but he felt an outsider because he lacked family position- indeed, was illegitimate- and was gay, or as he has it, much more opprobriously, queer.

Still, he seems to me more than sufficiently inside the trade during his early years to add gossip of the spiciest kind. I’m tempted to add a few flavorings of my own, but as we still have to swim in the same ocean, I’ll hold back- for now.

A couple of things I can say for certain, that the trade is still peopled with characters who perhaps one finds maddening on the day, but in the evening, can engender laughter, and for all that, though the players may have changed, their roles remain the same.  One gaggle of players, the major auction houses as an element in the trade have changed some players and some of their role, but still remain familiar, and at times maddeningly so.

The auction houses in former times, and certainly for Brian Sewell’s tenure in the auction world, were for nearly everyone in the retail trade the wholesale resource for all manner of material, from the best to the execrable, matching, as it were, the types of dealers that populate the landscape. Though the major houses are vaunted for their longevity, and in the last few decades for their sales of artwork with stratospheric prices, they were, certainly through the ‘60’s and into the ‘70’s, performing their traditional role of merchandising at public sale all manner of personal property. In the days in which London was the overarching art market city, sales tended to be primarily art and antiques that could then find their way into the retail trade. ‘Public sale’ should have been cited in inverted commas earlier, because, traditionally, the saleroom was a hothouse environment where the same auctioneers developed shall we say cozy relationships with the trade, such that often dealers were tipped off about upcoming sleepers, intentionally miscataloged to allow the dealer to obtain a gem amidst a welter of rubbish. Money for this privilege did in fact change hands. Has this practice, the result of greater transparency due to the huge disbursal of catalog material through online sales, faded from view?

Well, no. As an example, a well-known expert for one of the major houses, when we had inquired of her about consigning a piece of good quality that we knew we had no market for, our enquiry was always followed a day or two later by the arrival of a gentleman who we never saw otherwise, invariably enquiring about the item. Otherwise, we never, ever saw him. On another occasion, we sought to recover from the same house a collection that was consigned from the bankruptcy estate of a defunct public institution. The heirs of the original donor sought to recover the collection for sentimental reasons, although it was already in the hands of the auction house. The aforementioned expert had already seen the collection and given it a value and, we understand, was going to offer it shortly in a lower end sale as a job lot. On behalf of the heirs, we offered to purchase it at mid range auction estimate plus their normal commission. Whereupon the expert communicated to us that she had had another look, and felt her original estimate was too low, and raised the price significantly. We said okay, and she raised the price again, and then yet again. Well- we did finally acquire it, and as we were collecting the items from the saleroom, were met with icy politeness by the expert who gave us to understand she was of the opinion we had scooped her. By the way, this is someone who regularly appears on ‘The Antique’s Roadshow’, but where’s the harm, as no one believes anyone or anything they see on TV, do they?

Part of my daily routine during my tenure in London was, upon leaving the tube of an afternoon at Highbury Corner, fishing out 40p for the purchase of the Evening Standard from the news agent. It was in this way that I first became acquainted with the redoubtable art critic Brian Sewell.  Reading art history at University College, I was initially of the opinion that Brian, as a Courtauld laureate, was heavily dosed with the snotty pills that always seemed the baggage of the competing program we at UCL usually considered as brand x. Even Brian would acknowledge that much of this was a holdover from his mentor, the controversial but none the less brilliant Courtauld director, and Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt. Indeed, as Brian has noted, it was as Blunt’s protégé at the time of Blunt’s public unmasking that catapulted Brian into prominence. Tina Brown, then editor of Tatler, sought to make hay out of Blunt’s predicament by asking Brian, who had no prior experience, to be the magazine’s art critic.

I must say that Brian did Blunt proud by standing fast against the tide, rejecting influences that might have altered his strongly held- and not always well reasoned- opinions about art and contemporary culture. Whatever these opinions were, they generally accorded with mine, so I naturally considered him tremendously insightful. What he did, in an accent both in print and orally that was incredibly posh, was, using my own vernacular, to call a spade a spade. There exists a trope in art history known as the emperor’s new clothes, and this was something that doubtless was one of Brian’s favorites. If some manner of artistic production was crap, despite fawning accolades in other quarters, he was not afraid to say so, and I must say that crap would have been one of his least objectionable adject
ives. Some of the leading lights of contemporary art were the subjects of a Brian Sewell lambasting. He was no friend of the recondite or high concept which did, in his view, mask the artist’s shortcomings. Amongst my colleagues, those to whom canonical work spoke strongest loved Brian; those who tended to cleave to animals in formaldehyde hated him.

Still, Brian was level with criticism, and in one of his last TV appearances, a BBC series about the Grand Tour, gleefully pointed out the moneyed rapaciousness of the 18^th century English milordi, whose spoliation of Rome and the campagna of anything that smacked of antiquity forced the papacy to preserve what was best in what became the Vatican Museum.

It was through a mutual colleague that I met Brian, and despite his prickly public persona, I always found him charming, and surprisingly humble. The posh accent and the mannered, attenuated diction seemed less pronounced in person, or perhaps it just suited him.  Despite a stream of what could only be called one night stands, he never plighted his troth, and was at times lonely. His dogs assuaged this, and he never lacked for friends.  The passion he brought to his work never seemed to dim even as illness assailed him late in life. But for my own self, consider I’ve been extremely fortunate that Brian’s career extended through and nuanced so much of my own.

For about the umpteenth time, someone has brought to my attention an article published late last year in the New York Times about changing patterns of taste and how it has affected the antiques trade. Offhand, I would say that this change in pattern has more to do with the pervasive presence of le gout big-box than a rejection of le gout Rothschild but nevertheless, a run away from so-called ‘period rooms’, themselves more a holdover of Victorian style than an accurate homage to history. We’ve considered this change a given for as long as we’ve been in business. For myself, I love spare with items of period and type that link together to give interest, and not to overwhelm. That’s what we have in all our own living spaces- which includes where we work- and it is this that gives us our own look, and it is, at the end of the day, our look that sells the stock in trade that are its component parts.

With all that, I nevertheless have to acknowledge that what many people paid for period items even 10 years ago was expensive. Not, mind you, for things like the Badminton Cabinet, but for more vernacular pieces. I attended an auction this morning in the English Midlands wherein a fairly standard, workmanlike but very unprepossessing late 18^th century oak bureau was offered, and it sold for what it should sell for. However, it was sold along with the payment receipt and invoice from when it was sold by the retail trade in 1982. I was floored, not just that 30 years ago it commanded such an atrocious price, but that someone would be fool enough to pay it. But at some point in the past, dealers had so little invested in their inventory, and their cost of carry was so low, that they could mark items up hugely and wait until someone, and there always is someone, to whom the piece spoke and who also happened to have that much money in their wallet.

Now, of course, with a plethora of databases that any Luddite- by which I mean myself- can access, what’s reasonable both in terms of price and quality can be sussed out, and a reasonably informed dealer can speak reasonably to a reasonably informed punter about the merits of what’s on offer, and how price might be affected.

And prospective buyers are increasingly spoiled for choice, not just from vendors of period material, but also from the welter of online resources for contemporary- by which I mean brand new- pieces that are, as they say, both cheap and cheerful. But there’s still plenty of room, and sufficient demand, for the period item, provided it’s reasonably priced.  And that reasonable pricing, I hope, is the real change.