Playing the Market

...Again, this summer, at the height of a particularly difficult season, only two younger painters sold everything that they exhibited in their one-man shows...

...An exhibition of New York as seen by artists of the past 200 years—ranging from the Hudson River School and even the Russian Romantic Aivazowsky to Prendergast, Dufy, Léger, Mondrian, and the New York Abstract Expressionists—would be sure to attract huge crowds in any Paris museum if properly promoted...

...Paris dealers have now developed a habit of putting the works of their most successful artists in these auctions, even abroad, at the risk of having to buy them back or withdraw them from sale if the bidding proves too low...

...In addition, such a show would make it possible to present works by some of the younger and more experimental American artists in a context that somehow suits the French temperament better than many recent attempts to promote our artistic avant-garde...

...Actually, the indifference of the French public to much American art should be attributed to the inefficient manner in which it is all too often presented here...

...Interestingly, Petlin cannot be considered to be representative of any of the more highly publicized new American trends and, at the same time, cannot be classed as an American of the Ecole de Paris...

...In some quarters, it is felt that France's indifference to new American trends might be the result of hostility or resentment aroused by New York's sudden prominence as a rival international artistic center to Paris...

...Does this mean that Paris art lovers would be interested almost exclusively in American art of the past...

...When all is said and done, the fact is that French art lovers tend on the whole to be less interested in trends or in novelty than the New York public...

...They continue to display paintings, furniture or bibelots that belonged to their grandparents or, if not real heirlooms, might have belonged to them...

...Generally, an American artist is first shown in Paris only after he has achieved considerable success in New York...

...They are read as official spokesmen of a school of art or even of an individual artist, and tend to write for their fellow-converts rather than for the public at large...

...in Feininger, elective affinities with Jacques Villon...

...Edouard Roditi, an American poet and art historian now residing in Paris, is author of Dialogues on Art...

...Thus, American art in general has no established values in Europe outside the galleries that try to sell it...

...ON ART Playing the Market By Edouard Roditi Paris A couple of American foundations and other projectminded institutions have recently revealed an interest in European reactions to contemporary American art...

...In this respect, I have long toyed with a project of my own which has so far failed to interest any sponsors...

...In Paris, the most widely discussed shows are often those that save one the cost of travel or the trouble of research: masterpieces borrowed from Swedish or Bulgarian museums, monster shows of Goya or Delacroix, retrospectives of Boldini, Maurice Denis or other neglected "period" masters...

...They are also less responsive to publicity and ballyhoo, though there has been no lack of these in Paris in recent years...

...A Parisian home that is too exclusively or blatantly modern smacks of recently acquired wealth...

...Reporting on it for Arts magazine, I wrote: "The French intellectual world is always much more surprised to discover, in our cultural tradition, writers like Henry James or painters like Whistler, Mary Cassatt and Sargent, than to be told again and again that the New World can produce only what is utterly new...

...One of these was an American, Chicago-born Irving Petlin...

...Unfortunately, very little American art turns up in these European auctions...

...Parisian art lovers tend to visit a gallery because of its reputation, no matter what artist happens to be exhibiting there...

...The private French galleries that have sought to market individual American artists—as opposed to American members of the School of Paris—have in most cases been new galleries which also have only the following of a clique and little experience of the public relations aspects of their chosen task...

...In the last few years, the same dealers and collectors have tended to bid at all major auctions in West Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, 'Bern, Milano, Paris and London...

...promoters should stress in their approach to the French public...

...American art, on the whole, has thus far lacked authoritative French spokesmen...

...But the geographical distribution of these various markets has also tended, thanks to modern communications, to stabilize price trends and make arbitrage operations, or speculation on differences between the prices of two or more markets, increasingly difficult...

...it must fit into an ensemble of period-pieces, like a refrigerator in the Regency kitchen of Brighton's Royal Pavilion...

...In New York especially there seems to be concern over the apparent failure of French critics and collectors, and of the French public in general, to appreciate the full importance of the kind of American art that, since the breakthrough of Pollock, Kline, Rothko and other masters of this school, has had such sensational successes with the American public...

...When some years ago Paul Facchetti exhibited Jackson Pollock for the first time in Paris, he was still known mainly as a photographer and his relatively unknown gallery failed to attract the crowds that Pollock might have drawn in other premises...

...Most French critics, for instance, are already committed far more than their New York colleagues to specific trends...

...A few months ago, for example, in the American Cultural Center of the Rue du Dragon the United States Information Service sponsored a fine retrospective of paintings, drawings and sketches by John Singer Sargent...

...Ileana Sonnabend's recent shows of Rauschenberg, Dine, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and other masters of American Pop art and NeoDada have been, in this respect, somewhat more successful...

...His prices are then far too high for a newcomer to the Paris art market, where his works represent a somewhat speculative investment...

...Modern art enjoys but limited prestige in such homes...

...in Fiorine Stettheimer, a New York analogue of Marie Laurencin...

...Even in their homes, French collectors often prove to be more eclectic than Americans...

...Frequently, modern furniture and large-scale abstract-expressionist paintings simply fail to conform to the proportions of older apartments, unless the apartments are extensively renovated and all mouldings are removed from walls and ceilings at the occupant's expense...

...The legend of our incurable infantilism is beginning to wear very thin...

...A couple of years ago, an important Tobey retrospective in a Paris exhibition drew crowds that were as large and appreciative as those at the recent Sargent show...

...Besides, most French interiors are set in much older buildings than the urban apartments and the suburban homes of American cities...

...in Stuart Davis, an artist who can compare in some ways with Léger or the later Matisse...

...Skira's books on Paris and Venice, as represented in the works of artists of the past, have proven to be extremely popular in France...

...French collectors, however, have shown reticence in their purchases of American art for other reasons as well...

...Some shows of American art, however, have elicited enthusiastic response in recent years from a less specialized "general" public of Paris art lovers...

...Besides, Paris art prices depend, perhaps even more than those of New York, on a real art exchange of supply and demand that cannot be as easily manipulated as that of New York...

...On the occasion a few years ago of the State Department-sponsored "Fifty Years of American Art" exhibition at the Paris Musée d'Art Moderne, many French critics and spectators were delighted to discover in the works of Prendergast a painter of much the same temperament as Vuillard or Bonnard...

...Continuity in American art, rather than its more shocking novelty, thus appears to be what U.S...

...This exchange, operating outside the galleries, obtains its quotations from the auction rooms, which in Europe are more numerous and more widely scattered than in America...

...A gallery is thus like a brand, representing a style or trend and guaranteeing quality...

...But even these attracted, on the whole, a previously committed international avant-garde...

...it takes time for a new gallery to acquire this kind of following...

...With luck, though, these dealers can obtain—on an open and almost official market—prices that will justify those that they demand for similar works in their own galleries...

...For it is generally shown without any understanding of the peculiar structure of the French art world, on the false assumption that the art public is everywhere the same and must inevitably respond in the same way to the same techniques of promotion or exhibition...

...If a critic like Alain Jouffroy suddenly eommits himself in Paris to defend or present New York's Pop art, his arguments bear weight mainly with readers of a certain international avant-garde that in itself constitutes a somewhat isolated clique...

...Another handicap for American art, especially in France, resides in the fact that Europeans adopt a more historical approach to art than most Americans...

...No New York dealers have as yet systematically sought to obtain such official quotations for their artists on Europe's open art-market...