9. The Picture Ahead

'Everything, sooner or later, is reduced to a matter of finance."
Huxley

Art’s Present and Probable Future

Since I dropped several hints that I would give important con­sideration to the matter of money in collecting, you must be nervously wondering if I plan to evade the issue. So now let us talk dollars for just a few pages. You have probably recognized that there is often a strange reluctance to mix art and money—in conversation or in putting your collection to­gether. Many believe our thoughts should be on a higher plane. I disagree.

It seems only natural that anyone who intends to put a part of his capital into a wall full of pictures has a right, perhaps an obligation, to think about what will happen to his wallet as well as to his wall. I want to set down immediately my rea­sons for a bullish attitude toward the future value of what you might buy. Candidly, I would like you to have enough confi­dence in the probable future selling price of your pictures and your sculpture to risk an occasional plunge, provided all the proper criteria for selection have been carefully checked out. The next words you read, therefore, set out my reasons why enhancement should be the rule, unless you buy foolishly and without the required aesthetic concern in making your choices.

By now you have certainly seen that one cannot be too axio­matic in this somewhat uncertain business. But a major premise can be established: the greater the interest people display in art—the more they look at it, talk about it, and think about it —the more likely they are to buy it.

It was not too long ago that visiting an art museum was no pleasure for a gregarious man. Often the long halls had an almost ghostlike quality as I walked along their marbled floors. This was particularly true of the great museum in my own city of Philadelphia. Even Sundays were desolate, despite the many magnets in the celebrated collections. While major exhibitions did draw vigorous response, I hardly remember pushing my way through a crowd.

What a difference today! The openings are overwhelmed by the interested or, perhaps, the curious. At the recent Courbet retrospective I stood in line to gain admission. It was so crowded that I returned to the museum on a weekday and was pleased to discover quite a large attendance. Recent exhibits at other Philadelphia institutions show the same vitality in audience reaction. The Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Alliance, the Print Club, and others "play to full houses."

Now, how does this touch the art-buying public? Very di­rectly, it appears. The number of art dealers in downtown Philadelphia has almost trebled in the past decade. In the many suburbs which border the city you will find thriving private galleries or co-operative art centers accounting for substantial sales.

I recognize that I cannot afford to appear parochial in my appraisal of the art scene and its relation to the future worth of your own purchases. Let's take a look, then, at how America as a whole is behaving in the matter of art appreciation and art purchasing. Such a survey will substantiate my personal view that we are at last developing into a civilization where art will occupy a high place. Whether this can be attributed to ars gratia artis, or is just another scrap of evidence that shows our pecuniary tendencies is a problem for the soci­ologists and anthropologists.

My own conclusion is that we are taking full advantage of the increased leisure the boys with the scientific brains have given us. We have the required free time and some surplus money at last. That is why I think the facts which follow strengthen my opinion that art is a good place to put your confidence and cash.

As I have noted, museum patronage has risen very sharply. One estimate puts it that yearly museum attendance in the United States is about the same as the weekly figures for the movies. Since the movies depend a great deal on the "junior" set, this is a fine showing for art lovers.

Museum attendance is only a single example of the surge of art. Let's look at the opposite side of the coin ... at those allegedly hardheaded fellows who are supposed to think of beauty last—the businessmen. I don't know whether or not you have ever been in the offices of Joseph Seagram & Sons on Park Avenue, New York. Floors for minor executives display prints and drawings by the best of today's artists. If you reach the upper echelons, you will find magnificent paintings by Miro, Leger, Stuart Davis, and other contemporary equals. Sculpture and tapestries flank the paintings; and, as you wait for your appointment, you breathe in the atmosphere of beau­tiful art.

Cincinnati, Ohio, has never been considered the dead center of culture. Yet Cincinnati's newest hotel boasts a dramatic Miro mural in its lobby. In Richmond, Virginia, the Reynolds Metal Company shows paintings by Picasso, Kahn, Youngerman, and other famous creators. The Chase Manhattan Bank has a $500,000 collection which embraces Matisse, Calcagno, and a mobile by Alexander Calder. IBM and the Manufac­turers Trust Company also own notable collections—while the number of individual lawyers, doctors, and executives who house fine art in their offices is probably in the hundreds.

Some companies go even farther. Abbott Laboratories publishes a house magazine, Scope, which has been using fine paint­ings on its covers since 1940. Today these canvases, and others, comprise the precious Abbott collection, embracing work by Laurencin, Utrillo, Rouault, Benton. Hallmark Cards, Inc. sponsors an annual art competition which has resulted in an outstanding assembly of paintings, including the work of the Americans Charles Sheeler and Andrew Wyeth, as well as that of Vlaminck and Dali. Recently the Parker Pen Company sent a collection of modern Italian paintings from city to city, ex­hibiting them to healthy crowds in department stores.

So much for the industrialists. You might offer the ever-popular reply that it is never more than a tax dodge. I don't agree. Art has always needed and has always found a patron-church, royalty, the state. Business is simply the latest of the necessary supporters. But what is the more typical citizen do­ing in the way of buying art?

The most exciting answer comes from the PTA, of all places. The community is Chappaqua, New York. The people are even as you and I. For the most part they are married couples, still mindful of mortgages and with hardly a fat surplus in their savings books. When the idea of an art show to provide money for the PTA was suggested, eyebrows went up as far as they did when first confronted by a wilder abstraction. But the planners plunged ahead. New York dealers supplied paintings, prints, and sculpture on memorandum. Residents worked on every phase of preparing the show, from advertising to ticket selling. Final results: visitors were attracted from miles around and more than $4,000 worth of art was sold in that tiny community. For many customers it was the first exposure to art for sale.

Now for a flying jump: from the educational atmosphere of the PTA in a quiet New York town to that quintessence of commercialism—television! In St. Louis art is big box office on Station KMOX-TV. Critics and faculty members of nearby universities provide learned discussions on great artists, and detailed attention is given to regional and folk art. WNBQ in Chicago recently presented a comprehensive telecast on the paintings of Gauguin. On KFMB-TV in San Diego a special program, "The Master's Hand," discusses the work of major artists, with emphasis on the early giants.

Let us review my position and my syllogism in relation to your possible investment. I think the major premise is estab­lished: more people than ever before are looking at art. From this flows the second step in my argument—that as people see more art they will want to live with it and will consequently buy it. Now the conclusion to our deductive reasoning: since art buyers should tend to increase at a merry clip, they must eventually far outnumber the supply of things worth buying. If the ratio continues in the next 20 years, as it worked for the past two decades, these mathematical assumptions should prove valid in my application to art of the old law of Malthus.

And there you have it. The art buyers will increase geo­metrically; the art only arithmetically. In the face of this development, and with the general lift in prices as inflation­ary tendencies continue, we will go onward and upward with the arts in more ways than one. The inevitable effect of in­flation on gems, silver, art, and other valuables is too well known for me to discuss here. But it is a point you should not overlook as you take a sharp look at the art world and what it has to offer.

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