Independent 20th Century was built to counteract the hype cycle. The trade’s downturn is its biggest test

Independent 20th Century occupies a unique place on the signal-to-noise continuum of art market indicators. Its third edition (until 8 September) features 32 exhibitors from 22 countries at Casa Cipriani, a lush event space and restaurant inside the Battery Maritime Building at Manhattan’s southern tip. The conventional wisdom would position the fair as an unfortunate fit with the continuing caution that has defined this year in the trade, since its mandate is the work of artists who are neither reassuringly canonical nor tantalisingly speculative.

Yet this conception of art market dynamics has always been an oversimplification, and it underrates the potential appeal of this particular event in this particular trade moment. In fact, Independent 20th Century was engineered to be an antidote for precisely the hangover the art market has been enduring for close to two years, Independent’s founder and chief Elizabeth Dee tells The Art Newspaper.

“It goes back to the origin story of this fair at the end of 2020, when we came here [to Casa Cipriani] with masks on, standing 10 million feet away from each other with this post-apocalyptic feeling” and tried to envision what type of fair could be done whenever the world returned to something resembling normal.

“Fast forward to 2021,” she adds. “We had just been through the 2020-21 ultra-contemporary inflationary period. The market was all about emerging artists, and prices were going upward in a way where no one felt like they could control it.” This art trade phenomenon overlapped with the sound-barrier-breaking boom in NFTs that was being powered by the same blast-off in lockdown-era investment income, low interest rates and boredom-amplified speculation.

In contrast, art of the Modern period was “relatively unimpacted by major price increases during the [Covid-19] pandemic”, Dee writes in the introduction of the Pre-Fair Market Report produced by Independent. “Collectors were saying, ‘I’m still buying shockingly available works from artists who were in the zeitgeist of the 20th century, from auctions and galleries. I have time to do research. This feels like an opportunity space,’” she says of late 2021.

This chorus from the buy side spurred reflection within Independent. “We were asking ourselves, ‘Could we bring like-minded folks together to think about what this [canon] would look like for future generations?’” Dee says. Major voices in this internal discourse were Sofie Scheerlinck, who joined as Independent’s chief operating officer after a stint as the global managing director of The European Fine Art Foundation (Tefaf), as well as Joe Nahmad of Nahmad Contemporary and Alma Luxembourg of Luxembourg + Co—both of whom, as dealers in their thirties, had what Dee calls “really enlightening” alternative perspectives on how to define Modernism today.

Bolstering the reassessment from outside were a spate of major institutional shows led by The Milk of Dreams, Cecelia Alemani’s central exhibition for the 2022 Venice Biennale. It received almost universal acclaim for rewriting decades’ worth of art history, with women and non-Western artists revealed as under-recognised pioneers of Surrealism and other contributions.

The bottom line: even as prices were holding relatively steady, the canon of 20th-century art has been expanding from the standpoints of gender identity, ethnicity, geography and more. Independent launched the new fair to offer private and institutional buyers a dedicated platform to update these priors in their brains and their collections alike.

Museum moves and the middle market

So, Independent 20th Century opens in the late summer of 2024 with a golden opportunity to prove its concept. The caveat for observers hoping for a quick answer, however, is that this may be the one fair where institutional activity is actually a better gauge of success than first-day sales—and there was plenty of the former during the preview on Thursday (5 September).

“We’ve seen everyone we hoped to see right off the bat,” says Jeff Bergman, the director of Manhattan’s Ryan Lee gallery, referring to serious private collectors but more pointedly to curators and other museum professionals.

The gallery, a mainstay at Independent 20th Century, has devoted its stand to two artists: Richmond Barthé (1901-89), an openly queer sculptor active in the Harlem Renaissance movement, and Emma Amos (1937-2020), who rose to prominence in the 1980s through her depictions of superstar Black athletes paired with exotic animals. Both artists sought to counteract racial prejudice by celebrating the Black body—Barthé through the lens of classical sculpture, and Amos through kinetically rendered portrayals of her subjects in motion. The two bronze Barthé casts on offer, Black Narcissus (1929) and African Boy Dancing (1937), are respectively available for $110,000 and $175,000, while Amos’s works range from $35,000 for a single work on paper to $350,000 for Chorus Line, a Muybridge-esque painting of a dancer moving, with fabric and handwoven elements.

Asked if the gallery has different expectations for Independent 20th Century than other expos, Bergman says Ryan Lee has “had great success at this fair because of our depth of understanding of this market, and this fair spotlights artists who don’t usually get that in the big top circus of fairs”. Even so, one calculus has not changed. “Our financial expectations are the same as any other fair: that we’ll be successful, and that we’ll see curators and collectors that we want to draw into this space,” he adds.

Some dealers were able to capitalise early. Almine Rech, exhibiting what gallery director Ermanno Rivetti wryly called “a speed dating course on” Karel Appel’s (1921-2006) works from the 1950s through the 70s, had placed the artist’s faux naïve figurative painting Personage (1969) with the Olivia Foundation in Mexico City by opening morning; the canvases on view range from €200,000 to €500,000 each. At the joint stand of Galerie Michael Janssen and Marisa Newman Projects, buyers had pounced on five Surrealist paintings from the 1980s by Susana Wald, at prices between $50,000 and $100,000, by the end of preview day. Connecticut-based James Barron Art sold eight colourful gouaches by the American emigré artist Janet Sobel (1894-1968), seemingly influenced by the folk art of her birthplace in Ukraine, by Friday morning; similar works remaining on the stand were all priced under $50,000, according to Independent’s Online Viewing Room (OVR), which digitises every piece on view in the physical stands alongside text commissioned from professional writers, availability status and, generally, pricing information (though some instances of “Price Upon Request” remain).

Most of the stands referenced above tack toward the higher end of what is on offer at this edition of Independent 20th Century. According to the Pre-Fair Market Report, the most crowded price bracket is for works offered at $20,000 to $50,000 each; it encompasses 98 of the 387 pieces for sale here (26%). That share is slightly up year-on-year, from 22% last September, when the fair displayed only 239 works.

True to Dee’s statements about counterbalancing runaway prices elsewhere in the trade, Independent 20th Century and its exhibitors have prioritised the lower end of the middle market. More than 40% of the works offered in the past two editions have been priced from $10,000 to $50,000: 45% in 2023 versus 42% in 2024.

The retreat from the richest price brackets is conspicuous in the pre-fair data. Only three works in the fair’s current iteration are priced above $1m, compared to eight last September—a year-on-year decline from 3% of the pieces exhibited to less than 1%. Proportionally, the largest drop was for works priced from $250,000 to $500,000; it plummeted by more than half year-on-year, from 12% in 2023 to around 5% in 2024. In contrast, the share of works priced at $5,000 or less has stayed roughly consistent over this time, at between 7% and 8%.

Context construction—offline and online

Talk to almost anyone involved with Independent 20th Century for more than a few minutes and the word “context” will probably become a motif. This makes sense given that Dee has long argued that so-called context collapse plays a key role in degrading the visitor and dealer experiences at large-scale art fairs. But it is notable that every Independent 20th Century exhibitor this writer spoke to on preview day mentioned it in some capacity.

Take Diane Rosenstein Gallery and its solo presentation of the queer feminist artist Sarah Schumann (1933-2019), whose practice centred on collage, the synergistic use of multiple materials and the foregrounding of women as heroic forces. Born in Berlin in 1933, Schumann fled her home country during the rise of the Third Reich, only to return in 1968 and live the remainder of her life there. The stand functions as Schumann’s first exhibition in New York and the estate’s first collaboration with Rosenstein; the gallery will present a solo show of her work at its Los Angeles headquarters in early 2025.

“I wanted to do this [show] here, at this fair, because the curated context that Sofie, Elizabeth and Matthew create is fantastic for an artist,” says Rosenstein, referring to Scheerlinck, Dee and curatorial adviser Matthew Higgs. “The environment and the space are fantastic, the sophistication of the visitors, collectors and curators is great. It’s the best way to present this level of breadth of an artist’s work.”

The stand features works Schumann made between 1959 and 1998, beginning with her early collages, many of which combine unsparing postwar documentary photographs with lyrical imagery of the female body, and ending with a series of works featuring Marilyn Monroe, who Schumann regarded as a feminist icon (and whose visage the artist began incorporating into pieces in the early 1960s). Prices range from €10,000 for one small collage from 1960, up to €85,000 for the bravura, large-scale mixed-media paintings that anchor the stand.

Sonia Dutton, the founder of the nomadic Dutton gallery, echoes Rosenstein’s comments. Her stand pairs two untrained artists from radically different contexts: Selby Warren (1887-1979), who she classifies as “a proper bushman” that began painting his memories after retiring in a rural village almost five hours’ drive from Sydney, Australia; and Rose deSmith Greenman (1898-1983), a hearing-impaired former clerk in Massachusetts who drew obsessively for seven years after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease at age 72.

Dutton’s participation at Independent 20th Century came about after Dee was drawn to the works by Warren and deSmith Greenman on the gallery’s stand at last spring’s Outsider Art Fair in New York. The difference in clientele between the two events was apparent to the dealer immediately.

“Today has been really rich with institutional attention, whereas Outsider [brings] a really specific type of collector only interested in self-taught artists,” Dutton said on the afternoon of preview day.

Amid the many challenges of building a sustainable middle market, Dutton says that dealers who specialise in untrained (and often neurodivergent) artists face a particularly steep uphill climb. Collectors in this niche are used to paying either blue-chip prices for pieces by the small handful of untrained stars (such as Henry Darger and Martín Ramírez), or else, say, $50 for works they might find at neighbourhood junk sales.

This phenomenon makes the curatorial context of Independent 20th Century vital to elevating other artists in this niche. “Self-taught and visionary art deserves to be part of the art world and all these other contributions to the canon,” Dutton says. Warren’s works on the stand are priced from $5,000 to $14,000 each, while deSmith Greenman’s individual drawings are being offered for between $1,800 and $12,000, with at least one having sold by the end of the preview.

As visitors to the stand repeatedly interrupted our interview to ask for information about Dutton’s presentation, this writer jokingly asked when she thought she would be able to get a little rest. “Because of the number of institutions who have expressed interest, quite a few hours,” she said. In this art economy, it was a good problem to have—and one manifested by Independent’s willingness to think laterally in a consensus-driven market.

• Independent 20th Century, until 8 September, Casa Cipriani, Manhattan