Going to market

One of the oldest items in the Getty Research Institute’s juicy little exhibition “The Business of Art: Evidence from the Art Market” is a handwritten record of a straightforward transaction. Penned in ink on a small sheet of plain white paper by Bolognese artist Guercino, the receipt acknowledges payment for three paintings commissioned in 1663 by the Prince of Massa, Alberico II. The price was determined by the number and size of figures in the artwork.

Three centuries later, doing an art deal was much more complicated. About 1969, Willi Bongard, a German economist, art journalist and teacher developed the Glory Formula. This mathematical equation calculates artists’ fame -- and thus the value of their work -- by factoring in recognition accrued through an intricate hierarchy of exhibitions, collections and publications.

Between those extremes lies the evolution of the art market, with all its economic realities, backroom mysteries, social implications and gossip. The exhibition condenses the saga into trenchant examples and case studies, but it’s merely the most visible part of a much broader investigation at the Getty.

“The story of how objects of art get from the point of the artist’s production to where they are today is a huge topic, and we have huge holdings,” says Gail Feigenbaum, associate director of the institute, which advances understanding of the visual arts through its collections, databases, publications and programs. “The exhibition is a way to present some highlights of our collections in a narrative fashion. We hope researchers will find new evidence to use in their work and maybe new considerations of historical issues. At the same time, it’s a great show for the general visitor who has a little curiosity about how all this goes in the heady, glamorous world of the art market.”

One of the primary strengths of the institute’s library is its mass of material on the history of collecting and the art market. That collection -- which supplied dealers’ stock books, artists’ letters, scholars’ diaries, collectors’ inventories, auction reports and photographs for the exhibition -- also provided a theme, “Markets and Value,” for the 2003-04 visiting scholars and inspired a conference, “Beauty and Truth for Sale: The Art of the Dealer,” at the Getty’s Williams Auditorium on March 29-30.

The cast of characters falls into four categories: artists, dealers, collectors and scholars. But their roles often overlap. Artists function as dealers, promoting their work or that of friends and negotiating prices. Dealers collect and collectors deal. Scholars might seem to be above the fray, but they too get involved -- however inadvertently.

“Scholars, critics, researchers and historians all shape the value of art,” Feigenbaum says. “You think you are pure, but you give an expertise and you are participating in the market. Your assessment of quality, authenticity or attribution makes you a player, like it or not. You go to graduate school and think about truth and beauty, but there’s this whole other world that affects the truth-and-beauty factor.”

The workings of that world shifted dramatically as private enterprise replaced a system of art production controlled by church and state patronage. The exhibition offers insights into the individual aspirations and sociological phenomena that shaped the change.

In the artists section, correspondence reveals their survival skills, including self-promotion and diplomacy. A letter to a patron from Guido Reni, an ambitious contemporary of Guercino, states that unlike “ordinary” painters who charge a fixed price per figure, Reni is “somewhat extraordinary” and deserves a higher fee.

The show catches up with Paul Gauguin before he made his reputation as a painter, when he was a stockbroker and an agent for his weekend art teacher, French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. In a letter to Pissarro, Gauguin reports that a colleague at the stock exchange has commissioned him to purchase two paintings and that they will be Pissarros.

Sculptor Alexander Calder pursues a 1955 commission for a small mobile from collector Douglas Cooper in a handwritten letter containing a sketch of the project. “But we said nothing about the price,” Calder writes. “What did you have in mind?”

Among documents on scholars, modernist critic Clement Greenberg, who championed Abstract Expressionist and Color-Field painters and became so involved in their careers that he frequently breached ethical standards, appears as an artist’s agent. In a letter to London dealer John Kasmin, Greenberg diagrams the proper way to display -- and sell -- Jules Olitski’s paintings.

Collectors also have their foibles. Joseph Gillott, the inventor and manufacturer of steel pen nibs, kept a picture transactions ledger listing his activities as “sales,” “bargains” and “deals” while revealing himself as a businessman who treated his collection as a financial asset. Baron Northwick, who allowed the public to view his huge collection at his home in London, maintained a network of agents whose capers were sometimes described as a recreational sport.

As for dealers, they emerged in the 18th century and rose in “an amazing trajectory,” Feigenbaum says. “We didn’t just want to work with the end of things that was crass, commercial and gossipy. But the dealer is the star of the show. Let’s face it, the dealer is pulling the strings. These figures emerge as arbiters of authenticity, taste and connoisseurship and, in more recent times, they sometimes shape the production of artists.”

The star of star dealers -- in art history and the exhibition -- is Joseph Duveen, who built an empire from the 1880s to the 1930s by buying artworks from impoverished Europeans and selling them to rich Americans who formed the nation’s finest private collections. His clients included John D. Rockefeller, Henry E. Huntington, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon.

Duveen’s archive, a trove of information that provides a detailed account of his business, is housed at the Getty Research Institute. The exhibition offers glimpses of the dealer, who operated on a grand scale while cloaked in secrecy. In a 1907 coup, he bought the entire inventory of Rodolfe Kann’s gallery in Paris and lived on the premises with his staff while he wooed potential clients.

A full-service dealer, Duveen sold paintings, sculptures and decorative arts. He also worked with the Parisian design firm Carlhian & Co. to install the artworks in custom-designed rooms complete with period and reproduction furnishings. American socialite Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice commissioned Duveen to decorate four homes. A photograph of the drawing room in her New York townhouse is a spectacular example of the dealer’s talent for ensconcing his clients in Old World luxury. Rice paid $2 million for that room in 1925; today’s price, when adjusted for inflation, would be $21 million.

Duveen’s penchant for theater comes through in his 1921 sale of Thomas Gainsborough’s painting “Blue Boy” to Huntington. The dealer staged a farewell exhibition in London and arranged private viewings for special clients at his New York gallery before escorting the picture to California. The brouhaha in the British press about the loss of the painting prompted Cole Porter to write an elegy, “The Blue Boy Blues.”

The secretive side of Duveen appears in office records that give code names to clients, artists and competitors. Among collectors, Baron de Rothschild was “Ritzy,” the king of England was “Kinky” and William Randolph Hearst was “Hasty.” Duveen also used spies to keep track of his best clients’ comings and goings and occasionally bribed servants for information that might lead to a sale.

Duveen and many other merchants will come under scrutiny in the conference, in lectures and panel discussions with scholars, curators, conservators and dealers. One session will grapple with dealers as tastemakers. Another will consider how dealers conducted business during the Nazi era.

Connecting the dots

The Getty has taken an unusually strong interest in art provenance, or the history of ownership, since 1983, when the Getty Provenance Index was established under the direction of art historian Burton Fredericksen. The index evolved into a huge database, packed with information on who owned artworks over the years, where they were housed, how much they cost, what they were called and to whom they were attributed.

Formerly a branch of the Getty Art History Information Program, dismantled in 1998, the index now is under the umbrella of the Getty Research Institute and has a new name: the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance.

The current exhibition and scholars program and the coming conference all grew out of an attempt to integrate the index’s database with the research library’s holdings into “a constellation of resources on the history of collecting,” Feigenbaum says.

Maria L. Gilbert, a longtime staff member of the Provenance Index and its successor, came up with the idea for the exhibition. To prepare it in time to coincide with the conference and the “Markets and Values” scholars program, she teamed with Mark Henderson, who works with special collections and visual resources at the institute.

It’s a challenge to present a show of documents because they don’t have much visual impact, Feigenbaum says. “But Maria’s idea was so good, we just had to do it. These are really good documents.”

The point of all these activities, Feigenbaum says, is to “relate the institute’s resources to the larger intellectual inquiry into art collecting and the way objects of art have an afterlife. We want to see what scholars will do with this stuff. What kind of interesting narratives are going to emerge from this material? We hope to connect the dots between contemporary research and our collections.”

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‘The Business of Art: Evidence from the Art Market’

Where: Getty Research Institute, Getty Center, Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Ends: June 13

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300