As you can well imagine, some articles are more rewarding for a journalist to write than others. I’d put one I wrote that was just published as the cover story of Art + Auction magazine, January issue in the very rewarding category.
Headlined The New Allure of Old Master Sculpture, it features an area of the art market that is far too rarely noticed. Yes, you see a piece mentioning Renaissance bronzes every now and then, but that’s most of the coverage.
Yet it’s an exciting category, full of discoveries, re-discoveries and re-attributions (see what Eike Schmidt, curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, has to say about that), and the opportunity for collectors to purchase excellent works of art at prices that are a small fraction of a comparable painting. One example I cited:
A few years ago, the Tomasso Brothers, based in Leeds and London, discovered an unknown gilt bronze of Prometheus by Giambologna (1529-1608), court sculptor to three Medici grand dukes. “The equivalent to that would be finding an unknown Bronzino portrait, which would cost £10 million,” says Dino Tomasso. Prometheus is on the market for about £1 million.
And another:
New York paintings dealer Richard Feigen tells how he was approached in 2009 by the Birmingham Museum of Art, which had received about $1 million from a donor who wanted it spent on a triptych altarpiece. “For that amount, I told them, you’d get something insignificant,” Feigen said. Instead, he steered the museum toward a marble relief by Mino da Fiesoli (1429-1484) that was in his gallery in an exhibit organized by London sculpture dealer Sam Fogg. The museum purchased the elegant portrait of a young woman in profile; it’s now the centerpiece of a gallery filled with Italian paintings.
Also interesting is who’s collecting — Old Master paintings and drawings collectors, to be sure, but also contemporary collectors, like Francois Pinault, and contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst. And of course you know about Jeff Koons.
The experts are quick to credit museum exhibitions for some of the revived interest — “Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture” at the Metropolitan Museum in 2006-07; “Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze” at the Frick Collection in 2008-09, and let’s not forget “Adriaen de Vries, Imperial Sculptor” which went on view at the Rijksmuseum, the National Museum in Stockholm, and the Getty Museum in 1998-2000 — de Vries (1550-1626), though compared to Michelangelo in his day was all but forgotten soon after until that exhibition.
The cover boy was a St. Sebastian I wrote about last January for the Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately but understandably, Art + Auction no longer posts its articles on line (at least for a few months). But you can find the issue on newsstands — not everywhere, but in enough places. I hope.
Old Master week in New York is coming at the end of this month — time to go hunting.
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Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tomasso Brothers