As a young dealer of American art, I sometimes looked enviously at dealers in Old Masters and French Impressionist art. Not only did they have excuses for frequent trips to art fairs in Europe, but they also had a worldwide clientele. The major Impressionist and Modern sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were black-tie, invitation-required, champagne-fueled, evening affairs with plenty of what the daily papers called “celebs” in attendance. You might find a Hollywood movie star, a Japanese industrialist, and a member of European nobility pursuing the same work of art.
American art was, however, the Rodney Dangerfield of the art market. Our auctions were decidedly daytime affairs, with bankers from Toledo and oilmen from Texas holding up their paddles while we dealers stood at the back, sipping lukewarm coffee from Styrofoam cups. It seemed that nobody outside America wanted 19th and early 20th century American paintings. There were a few exceptions – the Japanese liked Andrew Wyeth and Grandma Moses, and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza put together a formidable collection of American art – but such collectors were rare.
The fact that European collectors were uninterested in American art until the second half of the 20th century, however, has turned out to be a blessing for me in one respect: dealers in American art never have to worry about lawsuits from the heirs of European Jewish collectors.
At the recent national conference of the Appraisers Association of America, Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman for the Americas, gave a talk called “Expanding Dimensions of Provenance.” The Nazis, as is well known, plundered Jewish collections in Germany and the European countries they occupied, often with the assistance of art dealers who turned a blind eye to where the paintings came from. After World War II ended, the immediate concern for legal authorities was the return of artworks that had been taken from museums, but the past 50 years have seen increasing efforts by the heirs of murdered or displaced private collectors to recover works once owned by their ancestors.