Twilight at the League for Saturday Models

Among my Saturday Models, photo by R. Nakaya

The Great Wall of 104 16x20s, composite photo by Yves Leroux

What’s wrong with the Administration, the Board of Control and most of the members of The Art Students League of New York?  Don’t they realize that the natural light entering the League’s north-light studios is worth far more to artists than any amount of money that can be offered by any fabulously wealthy, property-gobbling real estate developer?  Everybody else does.  All over Manhattan, skylight studios once rented by starving artists have been preserved and converted into designer apartments for mega-rich financiers and lawyers.

What should be of paramount concern for League artists who paint in those north-light studios during the day is the inevitable loss of natural light that will result from the impending construction next door of Extell Development Co.’s residential condominium skyscraper, which will include a hotel and a Nordstrom department store on the lower floors.  It will be the city’s tallest building and could rise anywhere from 1,423 to 1,550 feet.  That’s extremely bad news for the light at the League.  But Extell also wants one-third of its residential tower to cantilever high in the sky over part of the League building in order to give its billionaire condo investors a peek at Central Park around a 920-foot apartment tower that will be built right behind it by Vornado Realty Trust.  That skyscraper will block even more of the natural light entering our skylight studios.

I wrote about the imminent loss of natural light in the League studios in my previous post.  Our Board estimates that if Extell builds its skyscraper straight up it would block 20 percent of our light, and the cantilever would further reduce the light by up to nearly 5 percent.  I’m guessing that those are very low-ball estimates and that a minimum of one-third to one-half of our natural light will be gone forever when both skyscrapers are completed.  Good morning, Mr. Edison, and welcome to the League.

I suppose I’m one of those cranky artists that Michael Kimmelman mentioned in a Dec. 23 article in The New York Times under the headline, “Seeing a Need for Oversight of New York’s Lordly Towers.”  At the end of his article, Kimmelman writes, “Members of the Art Students League haven’t yet voted whether to approve the sale of their air rights to Extell for the Nordstrom Tower. While the league stands to gain millions, cranky artists might still succeed where Landmarks failed, and shelve the cantilever. Here’s hoping they do.”  

In the late 1970s, I spent a little over two years studying figure painting at the League in Studios 6 and 7 on the fourth floor.  I came to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flesh color as revealed under the unparalleled light of day streaming through the skylights in those studios. I’m hopeless at describing visual effects, but suffice it to say that artificial light is simply crap by comparison when it comes to painting flesh.

Under artificial light, colors are delineated very clearly by value and hue, but they have absolutely no sensual appeal.  All subtle tones are lost, along with the delicate blue/gray atmosphere that embraces everything under indirect daylight from the north and can cause you to swoon at the first sight of an onion bathed in such atmospheric light.  Artists drive themselves crazy searching in vain for a passable studio lighting system to substitute for nature’s light from the distant sun.

In the following 30-plus years, I have faithfully attended a Saturday morning painting class for members in one or the other of the five north-light studios on the top two floors of the League.  We never turn on the lights, no matter how overcast the sky. Those sessions with League models are often the highlight of my week.  I receive such emotional pleasure from these alla prima painting sessions that I can’t bear to paint over my portrait sketches, although I have destroyed some I considered miserable failures.  I have saved more than 400 of these sketches, mostly 16 by 20s.  

A couple of years ago, Chashama, a nonprofit arts organization, allowed me to have a show of more than 300 of these portraits in one of their temporary gallery spaces in the city.   My "Saturday Models" exhibit ran from March 22 to April 8, 2012 at Chashama 461 Gallery, 461 W. 126th St.  I honestly didn’t care if I sold any paintings.  I just wanted to pay homage to all the unsung League models who posed for me and my friends.  And I wanted to give my sketches a little fresh air.  As I wrote in my text accompanying the exhibit, “This exhibit fortuitously answers my prayer of deliverance for all these former easel companions of mine.  They remained stalwart throughout the usual stages of triumph and despair as I struggled to bring them to life, but soon after they were consigned to that burgeoning graveyard of superfluous paintings familiar to us all.”

You might have skipped the frosting in writing that yourself, but I’m pretty sentimental and pretty irrational about a lot of things.  In fact, I didn’t even publicize the show at the League, figuring the models have been painted so often they wouldn’t be interested in seeing the show themselves, and the artists who have painted the same models would probably all be chorusing, “My paintings of the same models were a lot better!”  

So it went unheralded at the League, and in the public arena, as well.  That was fine by me, but a few friends and a few strangers did buy some of the head sketches for $100 apiece.  I threw in one or two for free to people who said nice things about my work.  And a very sweet elderly woman I forgot to get the name of walked out with two of my paintings under her arm without paying me on the spot, although several months later she did send me a check for them.  I had a swell time sitting in the huge warehouse/gallery, mostly all alone, listening to cassette tapes on my really great $20 flea-market boom box, the first one I’ve ever owned.  The paintings and I were on holiday for a couple of weeks, that’s all, and most of them came back home with me to reestablish their superfluousness in perpetuity.

I love the League and was horrified when one of the paintings on a web album I created for the exhibit ended up as the first item in a Google Image search for The Art Students League.  I almost passed out from anxiety.  My insignificant image should not be sullying the grand tradition of the League, where just about every famous American artist you can think of spent some time studying or teaching.  I panicked and deleted the image and the album, which resulted in the deletion of all the images from my hard drive, leaving me with only a few shaky, hand-held images of the exhibit that I hadn’t uploaded to the album. 

Now Extell and my beloved League are poised to dim the natural light in the studios and spoil my Saturday fun.  Like Ralph Rackstraw, the lowly seaman in HMS Pinafore, this Extell affair has plunged me into a “Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair.”  I’ll ask this one more time, “Why me, Lord, why me?”

Twilight at the League

The Art Students League of New York, 4th Floor Skylight Studio

4th Floor Skylight Studio

I wonder if anybody really cares anymore about painting indoors by daylight alone.  The reason I’m wondering is that The Art Students League of New York, my social club and workout facility for drawing and painting, will soon have none of it left in its historic north-light studios, at least not enough to paint by.

Maybe natural light is not so important for artists anymore.  But the north-light studios on our two uppermost floors have been the pride of the League since we moved into our current home, The American Fine Arts Society building on West 57th Street, way back in 1892.  That same year, Frank Vincent Dumond began teaching his principles of painting under the glorious and nonpareil light of day, or, more precisely, cool, indirect north light, which transforms the humblest of objects into the rarest of gems.  Dumond famously held court for 59 years in Studio 7, the biggest and best studio on the fourth floor, until his death in 1951.  His long-time student Frank Mason took over the class for another 57 years, until his death in 2009.  And Mason’s long-time student Thomas Torak continues to hold forth to this day in that very same studio. 

Double check my math, but that’s 121 years worth of unbroken tradition at this 138-year-old independent art school, which has been run by artists for artists since its founding in 1875.

Allyn Cox Drawing Class, Natural Light, 1st Floor, Glass Roof, 1940

Clay Sculpture Studio in Basement. Best Natural Light in the Building

Keith Gunderson, Morning Light, Clay Sculpture Studio, Oil on Canvas

There seems to be no huge outcry from the many students and instructors who frequent the five north-light studios on the fourth and fifth floors, the etching studios on the third floor, the drawing studio where Robert Beverly Hale taught anatomy for many years on the 2nd floor and the clay sculpture studios in the basement, so perhaps the answer to my question is “no” everywhere in the world today, with maybe a slight sigh of resignation from a few old-timers.  It seems like the best realist painters in America are dispensing with daylight entirely in their studios and are shining very bright artificial light on their subjects so they can paint them photographically.  Besides, artificial light is far more constant than even the best north light.  It provides fixed patterns of light and shade and makes rank amateurs happy painters.

Here at the League, two massive skyscrapers that will be erected next door and behind us over the next five or six years will probably snuff out most of the remaining natural light entering our studios.  Our light is already greatly compromised because of the construction of taller buildings to the north over the years, including a boarding school for the St. Thomas Episcopal Church boy’s choir.  That building reflects a noxious orange light into the north-light studios at certain times of the day.

Early Photo of the League Building on West 57th Street

Recent View of the League Building

Renderings of Extell's Skyscraper next to the League

Extell Development Co. will be erecting the tallest building in New York City right next door, an 88-floor behemoth that could rise to 1,550 feet if Extell decides to go ahead with its original proposal.  Final plans have not been divulged by the developer, but a height of 1,423 feet is the current projection.  The top 74 floors of the skyscraper will be a residential condominium tower, with a department store and hotel on the lower floors. 

A majority of The Art Students League members stupidly voted in 2005 to sell most of the League’s air rights to Extell for $23.1 million so the developer could build “higher.”  We just didn’t know how high at the time.  We thought maybe 40 floors or so.  Many of us voted "no" because we were sure the deal spelled trouble for the League down the road.

Former George W. Vanderbilt Gallery, about 1920. Currently divided into six studio classrooms

Our Board planned to use part of the “windfall” to recreate an exhibition gallery in the rear half of the first floor, a double-height, one-story structure with a glass roof that stretches north to West 58th Street.  That space was once the magnificent George W. Vanderbilt Gallery, which was completed in 1893.  The League converted that space many years ago into drawing and painting studios.  We also had plans to create two additional floors of natural light studios over that part of the League building.  Neither plan was carried forward.

Rendering of a Ground Level View of Extell's Cantilever

Now Extell wants to suspend one third of its residential tower as a cantilever over that part of our building to avoid having views of Central Park blocked by another skyscraper to be built right behind it on West 58th Street.  At least that’s one theory for why Extell wants its egregious cantilever over our building.

The League’s students and instructors don’t seem to terribly mind having this monstrosity hanging over the fully occupied studio classrooms located directly under the glass roof, which is now covered by ½-inch thick sheets of plywood and bitumen roof paper to keep the rain out.  In fact, 63 League instructors have even signed a petition in support of our Board’s recommendation to accept $25.8 million from Extell for our permission and more of our air rights so it can build its cantilever tower.  The League’s membership must ultimately approve or reject the sale and will vote on it later this month.

During the five-year construction phase of Extell’s skyscraper, I can imagine that protective netting and sheds and whatnot will obstruct the light entering through the League’s skylights and studio windows.  But we don’t yet know the extent of the protections, or how much natural light, if any, will enter the studios during construction.

Painters like me who prefer painting by natural light know that technical studies of reflected light and shadows, along with educated guesses, won’t give us the answer to the future of natural light at the League.  We know from experience with the church boarding school behind us that we won’t find out until the completion several years from now of Extell’s skyscraper and that other skyscraper behind it on West 58th Street, a 920-foot giant just north and a little to the west of the League. 

The League for many years has been the owner and sole occupant of the American Fine Arts Society building at 215 West 57th Street, which has been designated a city landmark.  In order to build its cantilever over our landmarked building, Extell had to win approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Extell says it will commence its tower about 30 floors above the roof of our five-story building.  It will be like having permanent space-station pieds-à-terre in the sky above us for billionaire investors from the Middle East and Far East.

Extell Excavation Site with one of the League's 4th floor skylights in the lower left-hand corner, recent photo by Andrew McKeon for YIMBY website

The Landmarks Commission did not examine numerous safety issues regarding the excavation and construction phases of Extell’s skyscraper right next to our historic art school, which is open seven days and five evenings a week for art classes and workshops.  Being unaware of the Commission’s seeming lack of empathy, I even went to its hearing on Extell’s cantilever proposal to prattle on nervously about a “Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads” and the like, before being cut off just short of my brilliant summation, having exceeded my allotted three minutes.

Many other opponents of the cantilever also testified about safety, loss of light, shadows on Central Park, outsize scale, community input, inadequate compensation, etc.  After the testimony, both pro and con, the Commission Chair said, “Thank you very much,” and the Commission immediately took a vote to approve Extell’s cantilever 6 to 1.

All the Commission was tasked to consider, we learned, was whether a guy 6 ft. 4 in. tall would look directly across the street at the League and see the cantilever.  The Commission knows that in New York City nobody ever looks up for fear of stepping in something in their path.  Oh, and lest I forget, Extell, the Commission, and the Art Students League’s governing Board of Control, which is pushing for the sale, all confidently predict that the cantilever will have minimal effect on the light entering the League Studios.  Yeah, right!

It looks like Extell’s cantilever is a done deal, thanks to our foolishness for selling the developer our air rights in the first place back in 2005.

We don’t have to lose heart just yet, however.  Here is an online exchange between two readers of a New York Times article about past and future development on West 57th Street:  “But don't the studios in the Art Students' League need light?”   “$20M buys a ton of fancy bulbs.”

Well, we all know you can’t count on anything being around forever.  Not even daylight.

Art is a Business

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), The Painter’s Triumph, 1838, Oil on Panel, 19.5 by 23.6 in., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Painters don’t necessarily subscribe to a trade magazine for the arts because they like its content.  Some just enjoy being tortured emotionally from a distance.  How else can I explain renewing for a second year my subscription to The Artist’s Magazine?  Almost nothing in its current issue was of genuine interest to me and almost all of it annoyed me.

Take the cover of its current issue, for instance.  It celebrates as “breathtaking” an oil portrait made to look like a photograph, but without the seamless unity of same.  The result is something that almost resembles a human face, but not quite, when given more than a momentary glance.  All the little changes in color and value are carefully executed and fused.  But they are slightly out of sync and distracting from the whole, resulting in that “humanoid” look all photographic oil portraits convey when examined more closely than is warranted.  A flat facial plane showing no sign of the creator’s involvement in the process via exciting brushwork or beautiful flesh color are the main characteristics of such work.  In this portrait, for example, the nose is lying flat against the cheek, with no sense of the inch or more of air space that separates the two.  All the areas where discrete accents would bring life and dimension to the face are mushed together indecisively.  The flesh color is bland and generic.  A blow-by-blow examination of this portrait would be tedious in the extreme, so just give it more than a momentary glance yourself and you will see what I mean.  But why bother, would naturally be your response to my suggestion.  Should be good advice for me, as well, but I hate effusive praise of the objectively unworthy with a passion.

The American Impressionist Robert Philipp, one of my teachers at The Art Students League, used to bluntly admonish his students when painting from the model that “you gotta make ‘em look human.”   That’s all.  You can’t get your portrait to look human by painting from a photograph or painting photographically from life.  You have to will the portrait to come alive on your canvas as you observe, and feel empathy for, the living, breathing characteristics of the sitter posing in front of you, for as long or as short a time as it takes to reach your goal of a lifelike portrait.  A quick head sketch executed from life, even if it borders on caricature, often has far more human qualities than a polished portrait that took many days to accomplish, with or without the sitter in place.  That point was made in the only article in the current issue of the magazine that interested me.  One 18^th Century British portrait painter used to put down his brushes as soon as he heard an on-site witness utter, “that looks just like her.”   

No oil portrait created in the last 75 years or so can honestly be characterized as “breathtaking.”  Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, et al are long gone, and the art world is a much different place now.  Painters today either can’t paint as well as the aforementioned, or wouldn’t have the slightest interest in doing so.  But critical judgment is cast aside when you have to fill the pages of a periodical with articles on substandard art in order to give your faithful readers the confidence that they also can create substandard art. 

The situation is worse than ever now, since American Artist magazine was taken over and eliminated by the publishers of The Artist’s Magazine.  So this is the last industry magazine of its kind, other than that Professional Artist magazine, which used to hawk outdoor art shows and juried competitions under a former name and is now gearing up for prime time.

When I read these magazines to recharge my annoyance battery, I tend to forget that art is a business like any other and the passion painters felt in former times to chronicle their world is no longer of paramount importance. 

A good case in point is an article in the current issue of The Artist’s Magazine that celebrates paintings of isolated houses and barren interior rooms that look just like snapshots taken by a photographer who couldn’t seem to find any worthwhile center of interest through his viewfinder.  The rather large paintings have no intrinsic visual interest in color, form, brushwork or subject matter, at least in reproduction, and apparently exist merely to prove that the artist can copy all the straight lines of a clapboard wall or all the segments of an old cast-iron radiator under a window.  How exciting is that!  Repeat after me, “Just take a photograph.”  Apparently the only passion evoked in these trivial exercises was in the artist’s yeoman struggles with the elements as he lashed his easel to the ground to tepidly copy some of his subjects en plein air.  It’s hard to believe that while standing on terra firma in the great outdoors, surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, he was inspired to paint photographically.  The artist accompanies his paintings with a turgid essay on “fertile metaphors” and the like in an attempt to obfuscate the intrinsic visual blandness of the work itself. 

What can I say?  It’s an art world I never made.  But it’s just like the sage advice given for all bad things foisted on the great unwashed by mercenaries.  “If you don’t like it, just ignore it.”  That certainly narrows the field for me.

One Zorn is More Than Enough

Anders Zorn, Samuel Untermeyer, 1901, oil on canvas, 102 x 77 cm., New-York Historical Society

The New York Historical Society a couple of blocks away from me currently has a wonderful exhibit in honor of the 100th anniversary of the provocative 1913 New York Armory Show that introduced Americans to Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and showcased their American contemporaries who were also challenging the hierarchy of traditional realism in the art world of the time.  The Society’s exhibit includes 100 of the more than 1,000 artworks that were in the 1913 show, as well as a lot of related historical material to put the exhibit in context.  “This exhibition is an exploration of how the Armory Show inspired seismic shifts in American culture, politics, and society,” the museum proclaims. The 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” was on view from February 17 until March 15 at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. 

George Bellows, The Circus, 1912, Oil on canvas, 33-7/8 x 44 in.
The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA

One of the small group of American painters who helped organize the Armory Show was George Bellows, who has a couple of paintings in the current exhibit, including his 1912 work, The Circus, a large painting that attracted me for what might seem like an odd reason to most people.  The reason is that above the broadly painted performers and spectators is a large expanse of murky gray that is palpably atmospheric.  It is an absolutely beautiful patch of murk.

Bellows was a terrific bravura painter in his early years, despite basing some compositions on a precise geometric formula concocted by Hardesty Maratta, a painter who thought he had rediscovered the Greek science of proportion through the multiplication and division of geometric shapes like equilateral triangles.  That’s what they say, anyway.  Bellows apparently organized his spectator’s view of the circus performers under the Big Top by driving small pins into the canvas to create a geometric grid.  The subject was a charity circus organized by his wife, Emma, which proved to be a financial flop, according to the Historical Society notes.  “George got more out if it than anyone else,” she said, as he was inspired to create two more circus paintings of the event.  All three paintings are in the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.

Edward Willis Redfield (1869–1965), Overlooking the Valley, 1911, Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 39 5/16 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

After the Armory Show portion of the exhibit there is a gallery full of wonderful paintings done by other artists of that period, including a gorgeous landscape by Edward Willis Redfield (1869-1965), a giant figure in the world of plein air painting.  Redfield was a miracle worker.  He took his huge canvases (up to 50 inches) outdoors in every kind of weather and completed his powerful, impressionistic landscapes on the spot in a few hours with thick, juicy brushstrokes and brilliant color.  What expressive feeling his works convey.  In 1947, Elise, his wife of 54 years, died, and shortly thereafter, when he was 78 years old, he burned a lot of his canvases that weren’t up to his high standards.  And from that point on he painted a lot less often into the 1950s and took to making furniture and other crafts in his last years.  He made it to 96.

The New York Historical Society, founded in 1804, is the oldest museum in the city.  It has changed greatly since the early 1980s, when I frequently roamed the dusty and unpopulated galleries to look at its impressive collection of Hudson River School paintings, Audubon watercolors and the 19th Century plaster sculptures of Civil War scenes and daily life executed by John Rogers, who was hugely popular in his day.  The museum is now a greatly enhanced, modern museum with a fine store, a fancy restaurant and other modern conveniences, including a slickly produced website.  And there’s now a hefty $14 entrance fee.  I think it used to be free or a dollar or two to get in.  I can’t remember.

Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907), James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), 1901, Oil on canvas. New York Historical  Society

Before I left the museum on a recent Sunday afternoon I went to a long gallery on the first floor to look at yet another magnificent exhibit, especially for this old lapsed portrait painter, a treasure trove of portraits from the Gilded Age in the Historical Society’s collection done by artists such as John Singer Sargent, James Carroll Beckwith, their teacher Carolus-Duran, George Peter Alexander (G.P.A.) Healy, Daniel Huntington, Eastman Johnson, Léon Bonnat, Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and Théobald Chartran.  The Sargent wasn’t one of his best, but still a pleasure to see. 

George Peter Alexander Healy (1813 –1894), Emma Cecilia Thursby (1845-1931), 1879. Oil on canvas. New York Historical Society

Some years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the biography of the prodigious G.P.A. Healy, written by a granddaughter. He enjoyed enormous fame as a portrait painter, supported a large family, and endured many trials and tribulations along the way.  He painted just about everybody you ever heard of in the mid-19th Century, both in Europe and America.  Well, that’s not quite true, but he produced more portraits than any other artist of his day -- over 600.  His last recorded words, uttered when his eldest daughter asked him if he was comfortable as he lay dying, were, “Yes, and happy -- so happy!”

And so was I, all by myself on a recent Sunday afternoon at the New York Historical Society, finishing off my visit in grand style by spending a lot of time with these superb portraits.  But the best was yet to come.

As I made my usual way around the long gallery, from left to right, and was nearing the end of the exhibit, I came across the star of all the paintings on any floor of the Historical Society that day.  It was a breathtakingly lifelike portrait by the incomparable Anders Zorn.  His portrait of the lawyer Samuel Untermeyer was absolutely brimming with life.  I took a seat on the bench opposite for 10 to 15 minutes or more, transfixed by the magical power of oil paint in the hands of a preeminent master of the medium.  Of course other visitors to the exhibit walked right by the Zorn with barely a glance at the label on the wall.  How could they be expected to know what was signified here if they hadn't created at least a tiny bit of this same magic themselves?

Yes, one Zorn was definitely more than enough!

The Insignificance Blues

Is there anything more insignificant on God’s green earth than the life of an old painter who can’t sell his paintings?  What possible excuse can he give for his existence?  Many of my painter friends, who are in the same boat as I am, say with conviction that they don’t care if they sell their paintings or not.  “I’m painting for myself,” they chorus.  Aren’t we a selfish, self-involved lot!

The truth is we simply can’t sell our paintings, and can’t even give them away to our relatives because nobody wants paintings from a painter who can’t sell his paintings.   Don’t you just love reading those incredible stories in the art magazines about all the 20-something painters who sell everything hanging on the gallery walls at their very first solo exhibitions? How do they manage that?  How many rich uncles do they have?  I sold quite a few paintings at my first solo exhibit, but it was far from a sold out show.  It was at a startup gallery in New Jersey run by a prickly woman of means who closed shop in a couple of years after she had exhausted the goodwill art purchases of all her friends in the area.  As a matter of fact, the only galleries I approached that I could get into at the beginning were startups that didn’t last long, because a gallery owner’s life is not so attractive when sales dwindle after the first few exhilarating months in business.  Now my friends and I are hoping for someone on a white horse to do the marketing for us.  That just isn’t going to happen. 

People still like to be entertained by hand-made art and artists, though, despite living in a digital world, so the art market is fertile ground for the few entrepreneurs who know how to promote their creative enterprises in outrageous fashion.  I was walking on East 23rd Street the other day when a huge crowd of excited onlookers was gathered in front of the storefront window of a Housing Works thrift shop around 3 p.m.  Mostly made up of young people, the assemblage was deliriously happy about something.  Many were taking pictures of the window display with their cellphones and digital cameras.  I couldn’t see any reason for this activity, so I asked one of the onlookers at the back of the crowd what was going on.  He said, “Banksy.”  I said, “What?”  He said, “Banksy.”  I said, “Oh, yeah,” vaguely remembering that this temporarily notorious British street artist was creating quite a stir in New York at the time.  I continued walking, not knowing or caring what Banksy had perpetrated in that window display and feeling quite smug and superior to that idiotic mob’s reverence for celebrity.  But I discovered later while viewing a hastily constructed Banksy website called “Better Out than In” that he had actually done something quite funny with this particular prank in his October “artists street residency” invasion of the city, which included placing high-profile graffiti on various buildings and wrangling an Op-Ed piece in the eagerly complicit New York Times that disclosed his negative opinion of the new World Trade Center building. Wasn’t everybody simply dying to get his opinion on the matter?  The Times certainly thought so.  Attention must be paid, boys and girls.

A thrift store painting vandalized then re-donated to the thrift store. 

Banksy, 'The banality of the banality of evil ' Oil on oil on canvas, 2013

One World Trade Center

For the more traditional approach to fame and fortune in the art world, it helps greatly to be young and full of yourself if you are going to attempt to sell your oil paintings on your own.  Most gallery owners in New York are wealthy and full of themselves also, so they respond positively to those artists who are a lot like they themselves.  Otherwise, it helps to be wealthy or a Yale graduate to begin with.  That usually opens a lot of gallery doors for your paintings.  Teachers of art sometimes get recommendations to galleries in the hinterlands from their well-heeled students who buy into their confident approach to picture-making.  I don’t know of a single contemporary artist who would be in a well-known gallery in New York City on the obvious strength of his work alone if it were to be adjudicated by a panel of his peers.  And that’s the truth!

The route to a gallery connection in this great city of financial greed incarnate is littered with the bones of artists at all skill levels who are routinely tossed aside for a number of reasons, including the undeniable fact that most gallery owners find you incredibly boring and your work impossible to hype.  The quality of the painting is a secondary consideration for most gallery owners, who approach the business like a branch of the home decorating industry.  Very few gallery owners are able to stay in business selling paintings that they themselves truly love and choose to show on their walls, whether they sell like hotcakes or not.  I did know one gallery owner like that myself.  What a shame, for me, that he’s no longer in business.

There are a lot of ways to sell paintings on your own without some of the aforementioned improper credentials, but as you get older, the auxiliary work gets harder and you just want to spend your remaining time painting.  It takes great stamina to drive for hours in a van loaded with paintings to sell one or two at a weekend outdoor art show that cost you $400 to enter, especially if you don’t own a van.  And who wants to vacuum the apartment and set out crudités and wine just to have a home show to sell one or two paintings?  Who wants to pack and ship paintings you sell for a few bucks on eBay?  Who wants to email digital images to 1,000 art galleries in America that show similar work, because, if by some chance they might be interested, you would have to carefully pack and ship paintings to them at your own considerable expense and effort, with no guarantee your paintings will sell in the first place?  Who wants to move to some little touristy town where you don’t know anybody in order to open up your own storefront gallery at considerable cost of time and money?  Who wants to take time from painting when you are finally getting to understand a little bit about how it’s done?  Remember Renoir’s last recorded words, “I think I learned something today.”  That’s what painting boils down to for many of us old-timers who refused to pander to the art market in our younger days. 

But like everything else in this American life, youth must be served.   Whenever my mind drifts to this subject, I recall Noel Coward’s great song lyric, “Why sit and fret, daily regret, things that have gone before.  There’s a younger generation, knock, knock, knocking at the door.”

We take some dubious comfort from knowing that the brains of most artists are not hard-wired to the business of business.  We are reminded of this every time sympathetic friends kindly praise our paintings to the skies.  “Your work is so good, you should have a show,” they say.  And we say, “Yeah, sure, but who’s going to make that happen for us?”

What Sargent Exhibit!?

John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Hugh Jackson, 1907, Oil on Canvas, 58 x 39 in., Private Collection

I recently saw many examples of the best work of John Singer Sargent, my favorite painter, in an exhibition in New York City that hardly anybody knows about.  More than 40 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings are currently on view in an elegant brownstone on East 70^th Street just a few doors down from the Frick.   Usually, crowds are lined up around the block to view a Sargent exhibit, but when I walked up the steps to the first-floor gallery on opening day I was the only visitor to the exhibition.  I was greeted very warmly by several staff members, including one attractive young woman who shared some information with me about Sargent and the unheralded exhibit itself.  Almost all of the works are in private collections and about a third of them are available for purchase.  

At first I thought the staff might have incredulously mistaken me for the client they were expecting to arrive shortly, until I learned that the same warm reception was afforded to all the starving artists I later told about the exhibit.  “Tell all your friends.” I was advised.  And I was happy to be the bearer of such good tidings to all I encountered in the following days.  It was the first decent scoop I’ve had since my journalism days 35 years ago.  Not only was the reception uncharacteristically welcoming for a New York City gallery, all visitors of no account, financially speaking, are gifted with the gallery’s beautiful hardcover exhibit catalogue!  Incredible!

I learned about the exhibit while perusing one of those glossy art magazines at the local Barnes and Noble.  The magazine featured the exhibit in a cover story that told you all you wanted to know about the exhibit except the address of the gallery, which I was unfamiliar with.   I confirmed this fact with a fellow browser, a tall, lanky, long-haired, globe-trotting plein-air artist from the Netherlands by the name of George America.  Mr. America was as puzzled as I was.  But at least the gallery listed its website address on its two-page ad in the magazine, which I eagerly looked up when I got home.

So there you are.   A little serendipity cheers the cloudy existence of this woebegone New York City painter.

Oh, and by the way, the magnanimous gallery that is spreading such low-key goodwill among my fellow urban artists is Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC.  You could look it up.

Young Girl Wearing a White Muslin Blouse, 1885, Oil on Canvas, 19 ½ x 15 in., Private Collection

Charlotte Cram, 1900, Oil on Canvas, 34 ¾ x 24 in., Private Collection

John Ridgely Carter, 1901, Oil on Canvas, 33½ x 26½ in., Private Collection

Venetian Wineshop, 1902, Oil on Canvas, 21x27½ in., Private Collection

Edwin Booth, 1890, Oil on Canvas, 87½ x 61¾ in, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Siesta (Group with Parasols), 1905, Oil on Canvas, 22 3/8 x 28 5/8 in., Private Collection

The Siesta, Watercolor, 1905, 14 x 20 in., Private Collection

Venetian Interior (A Spanish Interior, The Wine Shop), 1902-03, Watercolor, 22 ½ x 18 in., Private Collection

Peter Harrison Asleep, 1905, Watercolor, 12 x 18 in., Private Collection