4. Ready to Buy

"The power to 'see beautiful' is all there is worth bothering about in art."
Duncan Phillips

General Criteria and Specific Pointers

When you have developed your incipient "A.Q." to the point where you are ready to buy, it is time to set yourself some general goal.

A highly personal factor now enters the scene. You will buy the pictures to hang on your walls and to enjoy for your­self; they will be chosen to provide beautiful objects for your family and friends. It is thus evident that you will have to de­pend a great deal on your personal knowledge and tastes.

It would be difficult for any book to give you concrete and infallible direction at this highly crucial point in your meta­morphosis from interested (and innocent) bystander to active collector. But I do have some pointers which can serve you as a guide in finally reaching the status of relative connoisseur.

First, I am going to reiterate a rule which you must have heard a dozen times if you have sought advice in the matter of buying pictures. I am going to restate it, nonetheless. Be­cause, if, perchance, you never were exposed to the dictum, I should be shortchanging you by taking it for granted.

The fundamental rule is this: ifyou don't like it ... don't buyit! An easy precept to follow? Not always. Many's the bargain that will appeal to you purely on materialistic grounds. Many's the dealer who will inspire you with stories of pictures which were bought against a man's better taste, and later be­came memorabilia in the art world. I warn you, without reservation. If you don't like it . . . Don't buy it!

Remember: the picture will be in your home. You will pass it a hundred times every week. You will sit near it, turn to it, think about it. Where's the sense and the true pleasure of art collecting if the work means no more than a purchase to line your coffers? Frame a hundred shares of AT&T, and you have achieved the same purpose 1 But, even in the mundane business of buying for increment, you face a real danger when you place the speculative future value of the purchase above its intrinsic desirability as a work of art. You lay yourself open to a very common practice that has been a sad experience for many new collectors, and a few older ones, who never recog­nized that the "A.Q." is the real essence of a collector's equip­ment. You will succumb to autograph collecting, rather than art collecting.

By this I mean, buying a picture only because it is signed by a great name. What folly! As you begin your visits to art galleries you will find hundreds and hundreds of Picassos. The museums hold perhaps a thousand more. How this man ever summoned up the energy to turn out so many sketches, paintings, and prints is a subject for another book. They do exist. And just because they bear the Picasso signature they command prices that would buy an entire collection in many cases. I saw a Picasso collage recently that had an entire corner missing. This gap comprised 25% of the picture's surface. The drawing, composition, and pasting-up, characteristic of the collage form, were lacking in any beauty or character. The price: $4,000! Now perhaps the autograph seekers will pass this collage on from hand to hand, and it will continue to grow in value. I sincerely doubt it. I think that when Picasso's work is brought into a sharper focus it will certainly stand as a magnificent achievement. But such nonsense as buying a dab of pencil on paper will end. I cannot believe that genuine collectors will vie for a piece of a napkin Picasso crayoned at some Paris sidewalk cafe ... or for the flyleaf of a book on which he made some characteristic flourish for a visitor to his villa. These are but autographs and must be separated from art.

You will quickly learn to spot the difference between in­ferior specimens of an artist's work and superior efforts. There are some galleries which sell purported Renoirs, Degas, Segonzacs which have a highly dubious air. They might well be forgotten, unknown even to the sellers. Or they might simply be little brushed-out exercises ... a study for a de­tail, or a preliminary rough in color. Some visitor to a studio may well have asked for an autograph on an insignificant scrap of paper—and now it is considered a prize. To be sure, there are carefully limned preliminary drawings, or croquis, which have the essence of their creators on them. Here again it is a matter of choosing for beauty, rather than because a great name is signed to the work.

Another caveat. In basing your decision on the signed name, rather than the beauty within the work, you run the common risk of buying pieces from a very early period in the artist's actual development—a time when he was immature and his efforts not worthy of a genuine collector's interest. Yet because this work is authentically signed, it often commands fabulous prices. Such output is commonly known, with some slight note of derision, as ouvres de jeunesse.

The intrinsic signature of the painter, or the sculptor, is stamped on canvas or paper, or in metal and stone, with per­sonal intensity. You will see such signature on and in the work itself. Only when you feel that your own "A.Q." is ready to separate the beautiful from the pedestrian are you ready to make a major purchase.

And now we strike a major theme . . . the matter of qual­ity. I recognize we are walking the plank again, and the deep sea of ambiguity gapes under us. We must take such risks. For, in the final analysis, it is only genuine quality that sets one man's work off from a second-rate talent or an imitator. It is quality alone that makes for style, and individuality. It can come only from the artist who has something to express with fire and imagination and who has developed the tech­nical arsenal to transmit his feelings into his chosen medium so that when you see the work you, too, feel something of the creator's emotion.

In trying to describe what we mean when we say quality, let us think of Japanese painting for a minute. You can recog­nize a pattern here that is different from any other mode. You can see it both in color and in design. And you can see that such style . . . such individuality . . . clearly grew out of the conditions which produced it—the race . . . the times . . . the thinking processes and the mores of the country. It is an idealization of a civilization.

So it is the ability of an artist to see things in a particular way—his own special eye, as it were, which stamps quality upon a work—provided that the necessary technical proficiency has been developed. Often it can be a greatly exaggerated way of seeing, as was made evident in Michaelangelo, and you can grasp this at once in his David. You can see it in Miro, Picasso, and, in a less obvious but more important sense, in Cezanne, the greatest force in the creation of today's style in painting. It can come only from the deep springs of an artist's creative force, coupled with his personality and technique.

Quality will always stamp itself on the work in certain, sharp, unmistakable signs. In drawings it will appear accord­ing to the individual artist's point of view, style, and method. It will show in the sparkle, the spontaneity, and the general character ... in what has been omitted ... in the balance between force and fragility. The very line of the drawing itself will set forth the style, the clarity of the line, as in Giotto . . . shades and light, as in Da Vinci. It will show in the brush work and the depth of color of a painting . . . the shadows of a Caravaggio . . . the jewel-like or powerful palette of the Impressionists. In light of developing one's abil­ity to instantly recognize style, you may enjoy the story of Picasso eating a bowl of soup. His dinner partner noticed a hair in the plate and pointed to the thin black filament float­ing in the liquid. Picasso said: "Ah, yes. A Matisse!"

In order to learn an artist's style, you must keep looking at his work—in museums, galleries, even the portfolios and books discussed previously. As you look at it, keep thinking of what he was trying to express. If you do some reading on the history of art and the history of great artists, the authors will throw much important light on this aspect of your approach to art. It will be valuable as your interest and awareness flourish. For much of the joy in collecting lies in talking with fellow collectors, teachers, museum officials, and gallery owners about the work you like. Whether you buy or not, there is unbounded enjoyment possible for you in the exchange of ideas and opinions—the search for meanings and values.

And as you wonder about what the artist tried to express-about his emotional furnace at the moment he fired up for his burst of creative energy—you might consider how he achieved his results . . . just how he got the emotional bullets fired from his viscera and brain, through his arm and fingers and onto his easel or into his chisel. Because this aspect of under­standing and appreciating is so important to a collector you found a fairly intensive explanation of modes, means, and techniques in the preceding chapter. In order to understand the work before you at any moment, you must put yourself at one with the man who created it. This experience has been brilliantly explored in a chapter of Concerning Beauty by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. He calls it "The Aesthetic Transac­tion." You will find it quite helpful, but not essential, in seek­ing out an explanation of where a viewer stands in relation to the art he sees and the man who created it.

When I indicated in the first part of this chapter that it would make good sense for you to set up a general goal, I meant that you should decide in what particular forms you are interested . . . from posters to oil paintings. Should your chosen field be painting, for example, then you must decide which periods . . . and, finally, which artists. When you have made the personal decision best for you, depending on inclination, time, finances, and other personal considerations, study as much as you can of the individual artist's work—his technique, his ability to express himself with clarity and force. You may find that certain periods show amazing virtuosity, beauty, and subtlety. Ten years later he may paint with half the vitality, none of the subtlety, and his palette may grow un­disciplined or dull.

Maurice Utrillo is a splendid case in point. During his heralded "White Period" the canvases glowed with an inner light. They possessed a gentleness, for all the firmness of out­line and the solidity of composition. Later, ill and desperate, Utrillo painted by rote, copying, it is even alleged, from pic­ture postcards. Today you will come across Utrillos of both the creative period and the time of his illness. If you have learned to differentiate, by watching, comparing, and con­sidering, you will rarely, if ever, be deceived.

I am about to set down a few specific aids that may serve you as a guide in buying your first painting or drawing. Before I do that, I want to return to the credo I enunciated a few pages back: // you don't like it . . . Don't buy it! I hope that I have given you enough solid reasons for you to consider this a cardinal rule. There is a strange tangent that deserves some of our attention. This is the matter of liking a picture for subject matter, for its illustrative theme, or because it adds to the decor of a room. All of these are insufficient, if not poor, reasons for making a decision—for liking a work.

Now, here are the aids I promised you.

Keep abreast of what the important galleries are presenting in the way of shows for young painters. Gallery owners will hardly be espousing the cause of poor painters, or painters they do not believe will catch the art public's eye. Watch particularly for juried shows of new talent at museums and schools. Get the catalogues of such shows and check off the prize winners. Here you will be guided by the collective judg­ment of a jury of the artist's peers, or superiors. While I have joshed a little about experts, it is logical to assume that a jury of artists is hardly likely to make a group error in too many cases. Jackson Pollock was an early exhibitor at the big Annual at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Phila­delphia, and you could have snapped him up for a few hundred dollars. Today a Pollock commands upward of twenty thou­sand dollars.

Follow Art News, The Arts, and similar magazines. Note particularly which of the younger artists are sponsored by leading dealers. Check off the shows being given for such new arrivals. See the shows if you can. If not, send for the catalogues and watch for reviews in the newspapers and art journals.

Make a try at discovering what leading collectors are buy­ing. You may get a hint from a dealer or you may get the facts from your reading of the art periodicals as suggested above.

Always look at more than one example of an artist's work before you make a purchase. It may sound as though I am looking for an issue, but it is true that, even in the fine arts, accidents can and do happen. Almost anybody can paint one good picture in 500 tries. But if the other 499 are daubs he is definitely not an artist. James Joyce elaborates this point in some detail in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.He asks whether a man who whacks at a piece of wood and acci­dentally carves a figure is an artist. Joyce thinks not. I agree!

Keep an eye peeled for examples of old schools, as well as contemporary paintings. Do not forget those fifteen thousand years between the wall paintings and Cezanne!

Remember that, if you are still a bit shaky in the collector's knees after coming this far, you can easily rent a painting before you buy it. You can do this on a moderate payment basis in some cases, and usually the amount of the rental will be applied toward the purchase price. Or a gallery will often be happy to have you take a picture home on approval, so that you can see if it is one you will continue to admire.

Mrs. Albert M. Greenfield has given me two interesting tests to apply to a selection before making your final decision. (Her collection, including paintings by DeKooning, Klee, Picasso, and Balthus, is a highly personal one—made on her own recognizances—so I believe her advice quite worthy.) She says that after she leaves a gallery or exhibit with a defi­nite picture in mind, she waits several days. If she feels a sense of loss—a constant sensation that something is somehow lack­ing in her composure—she knows that the picture is right for her, one she would like to own. Another interesting crite­rion she applies was suggested by a prominent critic. His theory is that a well-regarded picture is remembered as being much larger than its actual dimensions. I think you might well use these thoughts as you are gathering all the material and emotions and responses you will want in making a decision.

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