Aesthetes' Stock Market

by LEE SIMONSON

1

CRITICISM throughout the last century failed to perform one of its most essential functions: that of relating the creative artist to his potential public effectively enough to enable him to make a livelihood and so be free to create. There have been few rulers more stupid than Charles IV of Spain, but he did more to further Goya’s career than the accredited art critics of the last century were able to do for either Corot, Manet, Cézanne, Lautrec, Degas, or Seurat, who remained free to express themselves because they could draw on a family fortune.

The bulk of what are now recognized as the masterpieces of French art of the nineteenth century would, in all probability, not have been produced if so many of the geniuses of French painting had not been men of independent means. The period of the proliferation of art criticism and the cult of aesthetic appreciation in the nineteenth century coincides almost exactly with the appearance — for the first time in the history of art — of “unrecognized geniuses,” in contrast to such innovators as Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, Goya, and El Greco, who were incessantly busy with commissions.

El Greco’s painting was modern enough in his day to arouse protests against its technique and his interpretation of traditional subject matter. The History of St. Maurice and His Companions was originally commissioned for one of the altars in the Escorial. It was never placed there. Nevertheless Greco underwent no disheartening wait for recognition. Among his first works, one year after his arrival in Spain, was the altarpiece known as the Expolio (Christ despoiled of his raiment on Calvary) commissioned by a chapter of Toledo Cathedral. When the brotherhood protested both the treatment of the subject and the price demanded, — “excessive and beyond the bounds of reason,” — a lawsuit was begun by El Greco, and a board of arbiters was appointed, consisting of an architect, a sculptor, and a silversmith assayer as chairman. It declared, in the chairman’s words: “. . . seeing that the said painting is one of the best that I have seen, if it were to be estimated for its valuable qualities it would be valued at a much higher sum”; and fixed the price at no less than 3500 reals as the equivalent “of the price generally paid for the paintings by the great artists of Castile.”

Thus was a newcomer promptly welcomed and established. Can we imagine a similar verdict being brought in by a board of arbitration composed of Paul Manship, Harvey Wiley Corbett, and the manufacturing head of Tiffany’s in the dispute between Diego Rivera and the owners of Rockefeller Center, who finally ripped his fresco, with its offending portrait of Lenin, off the wall?

There seems little prospect that, judged by its past performances and its present tendencies, what we still accept as art criticism can effect a more vital relationship between the spectator and the works of art he so proudly hails and so casually stares at. Frank Crowninshield, who as art editor of Vanity Fair so successfully increased popular appreciation of Post-impressionist painting in this country, speaks to the point when he says: “. . . it is always more difficult to differentiate between a great living master and the ruck of sentimentalists that surround him than it is to pick out the true masters of an earlier period. For when a really imposing figure has been dead forty or fifty years, we can see him with respect to the life and movements of his own time.”

The recurrent process of posthumous adulation typical of art appreciation in our time might well be symbolized by one of Rivera’s murals, the Feast of the Dead, where Mexican peasants lay a table over graves and set out on it, between lighted candles, food that is to nourish mouths stopped with dust, the thick corn gruel made of bluish maize, the round, flat loaves of bread known as Dead Men’s Bread. There could be no more appropriate name for our belated eulogies of our modern masters of art. Dead Men’s Bread might well be a catalogue heading in a library for the bulk of nineteenthand twentieth-century art criticism.

Contemporary criticism, from Diderot’s Salons of the eighteenth century to the journalistic pronunciamentos of the nineteenth century, provides an unbroken line of evidence; witness the comments of accredited art critics which greeted all the French innovators from Millet to Matisse when their canvases were first shown: The Gleaners (Louvre) — “three scarecrows in rags planted in a field, and like scarecrows they have no faces”; The Man with the Hoe — “this contempt for form and color . . . one recognizes once again the same cretin, the same idiot"; Courbet: Burial at Ornans (Louvre) — “The glorification of vulgar ugliness ... an ignoble and impious caricature”; Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Louvre) — “Is this drawing, is this painting? Manet thinks he is strong, he is merely hard”; Angels at Christ’s Tomb (Metropolitan Museum) — “The password is given and a minor school, thinking it has discovered the philosopher’s stone of art, . . . wipes out at one blow idea, sentiment, composition, line, drawing, color, charm and beauty, above all beauty”; Olympia (Louvre) — guards had to be stationed near the picture to protect it from the brandished canes of an angry crowd — “Indecency, “Ignorance,’ “Irresponsibility” . . . “Manet is the monarch of monstrosities”; Boy with a Fife (Louvre) — “a Jack of Diamonds pasted on a door”; Le Chemin de Fer — “his painting is that of a shop front and his art rises at its highest to that of a sign painter”; The Greenhouse (Berlin Museum) — “the figures seem to be cut out and pasted on a background of colored paper.”

A few critics challenged the detractors, but they remained for years a valiant minority until the opposition, arguing in the name of supposedly immutable and eternal aesthetic verities, was discredited: Théodore Duret, who became the first historian of the Impressionist movement, and the now forgotten Sabathier-Unger, who, when the Burial at Ornans was being jeered at, predicted: “ the picture will eventually reach a museum gallery a century or two hence . . . it will become a classic.” But the lesson is never learned. The pattern in which art criticism continues to be written would seem to have become an ineradicable convention: judgment is expressed in terms of oracular finalities, even if eventually the finalities cancel one another.

2

MANY of the more discerning judgments in modern art criticism have been made by persons either without formal aesthetic training or without the professional critic’s pretense of dealing in universal categories and who, perhaps for that reason, were more receptive to unanticipated visual experiences. Among the first to hang a Cézanne canvas was Emile Zola. Another was Dr. Gachet, an obscure rural physician who also accepted as gifts examples of Van Gogh for which his brother, an art dealer at Goupil’s, could not find a single purchaser.

Among Matisse’s first patrons, when Paris critics were howling him down as a “wild beast,” were Tchuckine, a Moscow merchant, and Michael Stein, a retired American businessman. His brother and sister, Leo and Gertrude Stein, who were among the earliest patrons of Picasso, were graduate students of philosophy with their degrees not many years behind them when they began their collections which for a decade made their studio in the Rue de Fleurus a Mecca for the partisans of Post-impressionist painting. The few art critics of the nineteenth century who saluted original talent, when it first appeared, in unequivocal fashion received their training in the workshop of literature: in France, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Zola, Huysmans; in England, George Moore in defense of the Impressionists in Modern Painting, and George Bernard Shaw in The Sanity of Art.

At a moment when the Paris picture-going public were brandishing fists and canes at Manet’s Olympia, Zola wrote, “I have said masterpiece and I do not withdraw the word.” Baudelaire hailed Delacroix as the “true type of poet-painter” and saluted one of Manet’s earliest canvases, Lola de Valence, in a quatrain that evoked its “unexpected charm of a jewel in rose and black.” But here again every attempt to reach standards of aesthetic judgment that could be universally applied proved a failure.

Reviewing the Salon of 1848, Baudelaire wrote of Millet: “Millet strives to achieve a style. . . . It is his undoing. His peasants are pedants who have too high an opinion of themselves. . . . Instead of eliciting in a simple fashion the natural poetry of his subject Millet at any cost tries to add something to it. . . . This disability in Millet’s painting spoils all the beautiful qualities which at first attract the eye to it.”

Gautier, who had hailed Millet’s earlier canvases with enthusiasm, including The Winnower (Louvre) and The Sower, by 1861 complained “of the fantastic monstrosities as far removed from reality as the whipped cream of Boucher, Fragonard and Van Loo.” Of the Burial at Ornans Gautier exclaimed, “One doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep. . . . There are heads that recall the painting of the sign boards on tobacco shops and menageries with their strange and outlandish drawing and color.” He approved the Baigneuses (Museum of Montpellier) with qualifications, admired certain details of tonality and modeling of the “monstrous” nude figure. “Is it out of hatred for the Venus de Milo that he has brought forth from this inky water this filthy body?” The painting as a whole demonstrated “great talent led astray.” But Gautier admired without qualification the pictures of Louis Boulanger and penned a eulogistic poem to him.

Victor Hugo in turn acclaimed Boulanger as “the greatest artist of his time” . . . composed a panegyric to Millet’s Sower, and saluted Delacroix’s Sardanapalus as a “magnificent thing and so gigantic that it is beyond all words.” And Zola, while he continued to admire Manet, Pissaro, and Monet, found the painting of Millet’s Goose Girl Bathing (1863) “soft and indecisive. One might think that the artist had painted on blotting paper. . . . I do not feel that the landscape has any reality.” In 1879, fourteen years after his defense of Olympia, Zola recanted. As correspondent of the Messager de l’Europe, published in St. Petersburg, he wrote, “At one moment they [the Impressionists] had great hopes for Manet, but Manet appears to be exhausted by his hasty methods of production; he is satisfied with approximations; he does not study nature with the passion of the true creator.”

3

ARE painters themselves, with their experience of the creative process, better guides? Unfortunately not; they have almost invariably been narrow in their taste and violently intolerant of their peers, living or dead. Nothing seems more plausible than Whistler’s contention made on the witness stand in the case of Whistler vs. Ruskin: “I should not disapprove in any way of technical criticism by a man whose life is passed in the practice of the science he criticizes.” But in practice painters have invariably been contemptuous of techniques or forms of aesthetic vision other than their own.

Michelangelo experienced no qualms when Perugino’s frescoes were wiped from the wall of the Sistine Chapel to make place for his Last Judgment, having been in the habit of referring to Perugino as a man without any sort of talent. Of Raphael he wrote in a letter, “All that he knows of art he learned from me.” El Greco said of Michelangelo, “He was a good Italian and a good man, but he simply could not paint.” Wilson, the English landscapist, described Gainsborough’s landscapes as “fried spinach.”

Ingres told his pupils, “Turn away from Rubens in the museums, whenever you meet him,” and felt that Delacroix’s “delirium of the brush” would lead to the decadence of French art. When Delacroix in 1851 was a candidate for election to the Academy, Ingres wrote to Robert Fleury, “I regret to see you support, in the person of an artist whose talent I recognize, . . . doctrines and tendencies which I believe dangerous and must reject.” Delacroix, after visiting Ingres’s studio, remarked: “I left him there in the full chill of creation.” Of Millet he wrote in his journal (April 6,1853), “. . . of the small number of his works, varying very little one from the other, that I have been able to see, one finds profound feeling but one that is also pretentious, which struggles with a method of painting that is either arid or muddled.”

Courbet dismissed Manet’s work as a pack of playing cards. Manet once remarked to Monet, “As Renoir’s friend you ought to induce him to give up painting. You can see for yourself he’s not cut out for it.” Sisley protested to Renoir, “You’re mad; what an idea to paint trees blue and the earth violet.” Renoir found that only Courbet’s early work had any value. Manet referred to Cézanne as a bricklayer who seemed to lay on his paint with a trowel. When Van Gogh showed some of his canvases to Cézanne and asked his opinion of them, Cézanne replied, “To speak frankly, your painting is that of a madman.” Beauty may be truth, truth beauty, and either presumably instantly recognizable by both poets and painters. But Shelley, who had completed the second and third acts of Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla, on first seeing the Sistine Chapel, wrote that Michelangelo’s “Jesus Christ is like an angry pot-boy, and God like an old alehouse-keeper looking out of a window.”

4

BUT once the period of indecision was over, once an agreement was reached as to who the masters were, the value of their paintings, expressed not in terms of words, but in terms of francs, pounds, and dollars, rose at a constantly increasing rate; indeed, the increase in market value ranged from several hundred per cent up to several thousand per cent in the course of fifty years.

In 1872 Paul Durand-Ruel bought twenty-three paintings from Manet for 35,000 francs. Among them were: The Beggar for 1500 fr. ($300), sold in 1912 to the Art Institute of Chicago for 100,000 fr. ($20,000); The Guitarist for 3000 fr., sold to an American collector for 200,000 fr. ($40,000); L’Espagnol, a portrait of Manet’s brother in costume, for 1500 fr. ($300), eventually sold to Mr. Havemeyer in the 1880’s for 100,000 fr. ($20,000); and Le Liseur for 1000 fr. ($200), sold to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1916 for 150,000 fr. ($25,500). The increases here represent approximately 6666 per cent for the first three pictures, and 12,000 per cent for the fourth.

Mlle. Victorine in the Costume of an Espada (now at the Metropolitan Museum) was also bought in the same transaction, for 4000 fr. ($800). It was later sold to Mrs. Havemeyer for $15,000 — an increase of approximately 2000 per cent. Les Paveurs de la Rue de Berne was sold by Manet in 1878 for 1000 francs; in 1899, at the Chocquet sale, it sold for 13,500 francs. The Torero Saluting was purchased from Manet by Duret in 1870 for 1000 francs; in 1894 it brought 10,500 francs at auction, and was eventually sold to Mrs. Havemeyer by Durand-Ruel for $8000 (4000 per cent increase). At the auction sale in 1884 of the pictures remaining in Manet’s atelier at his death, Jeune Fille dans les Fleurs brought 150 fr. ($32). In 1935 at the sale of the George Bernheim Collection in Paris it brought 130,000 fr. ($8580), an increase of nearly 10,000 per cent. La Leçon de Musique at the atelier sale of 1884 brought 4400 francs. At the Rouart sale in 1912 it was knocked down for 120,000 francs, an increase of nearly 3000 per cent. Claude Monet and His Family, given to Monet and then returned to Manet as a result of a quarrel, was bought by a German collector in 1910, toget her with Manet’s portrait of Desboutin, for 300,000 marks ($75,000).

Le Linge was appraised at 1500 francs in the inventory of Manet’s estate. At the atelier sale of 1884 it was bought by his family for 8000 francs. It was bought in the 1920’s by the German picture dealer Cassirer for $80,000, and in 1936 acquired by the Barnes Foundation for what the Art News stated was a record price, reputed, among New York picture dealers, to be $100,000. This seems more than probable in view of the fact that about fifteen years ago the Portrait of Mme. Brunet and Le Chiffonier were sold for between $70,000 and $80,000; in 1933 a member of the firm of one of the most important New York picture dealers remarked to me that a certain Manet still-life was a bargain at $50,000. The price of any important example of Manet that changed hands today would be within a price range of from $50,000 to $100,000.

Daumier earned a living and delighted a large public as a political caricaturist. But his paintings and water colors were unrecognized and during his life virtually unsalable. Occasionally they were disposed of through the efforts of his friends. Jules Dupré wrote him in a letter: “You will find enclosed herewith 200 francs. Sensier must have sent you 300. So your five drawings of lawyers are finally placed to the great satisfaction of those who have acquired them. I feel they have been sold for less than they are worth, but I did not dare to ask more for fear of failing to dispose of them.”

In 1878, a year before Daumier’s death, a small group of friends and patrons organized a retrospective exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s galleries, of no fewer than ninety-four paintings, drawings, and water colors. Not one was sold. The exhibition failed to cover its expenses, leaving a deficit of 4000 francs for the organizers to meet, despite an enthusiastic press. “One speaks of great painting,” wrote Viollet-le-Duc. “Well, here it is.” And Fouché: “Daumier, known to the public as a draftsman, is certainly one of the greatest painters of the modern schools. He has everything: freedom of style, drawing, color, idea. The day will come — let us hope it will be soon, for Daumier is old and in want — when veritable collectors will fight to acquire at high prices these paintings by a great master.”

The prophecy has been fulfilled, again half a century late. Of two Daumiers in the sale of Corot’s effects in 1875, one brought 1500 fr. ($300) and in 1902 sold for 25,200 fr. ($5400); the other, which sold for 1660 fr. ($252), brought 295,000 fr. (approximately $11,800) at the Bureau sale in 1927. In the Rouart sale of 1912, Un Coin de Palais brought 14,100 francs, Un Coin du Théâtre (now in the Chester Dale Collection) 15,000, Trois Avocats (now in the Duncan Phillips Collection) 27,000, Les Buveurs (now in the Adolph Lewisohn Collection) 35,000, Le Liseur 46,500, Crispin et Scapin 66,000, and Scène de la Révolution 69,300. In 1913 Le Wagon de TroisièmeClasse (Metropolitan Museum, Havemeyer Collection) was purchased at auction in New York (the Borden sale) for $40,000. In the Bureau sale, 1927, Don Quichotte et Sancho Panza brought 1,290,000 fr. ($51,600).

Shortly after Millet’s death in 1875 the atelier sale of his paintings, drawings, and pastels brought 321,000 francs according to Paul Durand-Ruel, who conducted the sale. But after paying Millet’s debts only 20,000 francs remained to his family. Their situation was so precarious financially, despite the official recognition and a certain degree of popularity that Millet had achieved in the last ten years of his life, that Corot within a month of his own death sent Mme. Millet 15,000 francs. A contribution box labeled “for the benefit of the artist’s family” and hung at the door of an exhibition of pastels that preceded the auction netted the widow and her nine children an additional 2000 francs.

At the atelier auction, L’Eglise de Gréville was bought for the Luxembourg for 12,000 francs. The highest price paid was 24,000 francs for La Mort du Cochon. In a contract offered Millet for twenty-five paintings by the Parisian picture dealers, Arthur Stevens & Co., in 1860, the highest price offered for a single painting was 3000 francs for Tobie; three were priced at 2000 francs, eleven at 1000 to 1500 francs, and the balance at 300 ta 600 francs. The highest price paid to Millet during his lifetime was 16,000 fr. ($3200), by Durand-Ruel in 1873 for La Femme à la Lampe, sold in 1906 for 400,000 fr. ($80,000), and was acquired by Henry Frick. In the same year Durand-Ruel purchased from Sensier, one of the earliest collectors of the Barbizon school, his fiftythree Millets, both paintings and pastels, for 116,450 francs, or an average of approximately 2200 francs apiece. Among them was a smaller version of The Gleaners.

Millet had originally sold The Gleaners to Sensier for 40 francs. The picture, now in the Louvre, was purchased privately by Mme. Pommery in 1889 and bequeathed to that Museum, to offset the loss of The Angelus, secured by the American Art Galleries at the Sécretan sale in 1889 for 553,000 francs. The fantastic rise in price of this painting is one of the most sensational records of the aesthetes’ stock market. It was purchased from Millet in the sixties by a Belgian, Baron Papleu, for 1000 francs, after the picture dealer Stevens had failed to make good his offer of 3000 francs in 1860. Stevens then acquired it and sold it to the Belgian minister in Paris for 3000 francs in 1864, who exchanged it with a M. Tesse for another Millet he preferred. Tesse sold it to a M. Gavet for 8800 francs, who, in 1870, sold it to Durand-Ruel for 30,000, who in turn sold it to W. J. Wilson for 50,000. At the sale of Wilson’s collection in 1881 it was acquired by Sécretan. He in turn sold it to the picture dealer Petit for 200,000 francs and repurchased it for 300,000. At the auction sale of Secretan’s collection in 1889 it brought 553,000 fr. ($110,600). It was eventually sold to M. Chauchard for 800,000 fr. ($160,000) in 1910. The value of the painting had, in fifty years, increased to 800 times its original purchase price, a rise of 80,000 per cent.

Corot’s paintings rose in market value at a similar rate of acceleration. The nine Corots which DurandRuel purchased in 1873 cost 19,500 francs, an average of slightly over 2000 fr. ($400) apiece. In 1912 at the Dolfuss sale, La Femme à la Perle brought 150,000 fr. ($30,000), La Petite Charette dans les Dunes 256,000 fr. ($52,100); in the same year at the Rousell sale, Danse sous les Arbres au Lord du Lac brought 310,000 fr. ($70,000). L’Incendie de Sodome was purchased from Corot by Durand-Ruel in 1875 for 15,000 francs, sold to Camando for 20,000, purchased from his estate by his son for 100,000, and eventually sold to H. O. Havemeyer for 125,000 francs. La Toilette, for which Durand-Ruel paid the artist 10,000 francs in 1873, at the Defosse sale in 1899 was bought by his widow for 175,000. Shortly before 1914 she refused an offer of 800,000 francs, according to a statement in Durand-Ruel’s memoirs. Four landscapes painted for Decamps and used as murals in the dining room of his house at Barbizon were bought by Leighton, the English painter, for 4000 fr. ($800). They were sold in the sale of his effects in 1896 for 6000 guineas ($31,500).

Monet, like Renoir, was one of the Impressionists who lived long enough to benefit by the appreciation of his work. In 1881 he received from Durand-Ruel 300 francs a canvas; in 1883, 600 francs; in 1884, 8001200 francs; in 1887, 1000 1600 francs; and in 1887 for the first of his water lily series 6000-7000 fr. ($1200—$1400). This rising scale was later reflected in the auction room, where a number of his canvases, between 1897 and 1900, brought from 12,000 to 15,000 fr. ($2200 to $3000), the highest bid in that period being 22,000 fr. ($4500) for AuJardin in 1898. In 1928 Effet de Neige brought 190,000 fr. ($11,600) and Les Bateaux à Argenteuil 481,000 fr. ($19,240).

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THE rise in the market value of Post-impressionist masterpieces has been as spectacular and over a shorter period. The sales of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Seurat were almost entirely posthumous, the rise in value running from 0 to the $110,000 paid for Cézanne’s Bathers in 1937.

Cézanne stored his pictures between 1887 and 1889 in Paris with “le Père” Tanguy, a former Communard and dealer in artists’ materials, who was authorized to sell them at 40 francs for the smaller sizes and the larger ones for 400 francs. Vollard saw his first Cézanne at Tanguy’s shop. Chocquet was his only steady patron, having acquired thirty-three canvases by 1899 at prices that do not seem to have been recorded. After Tanguy’s death his Cézanne’s were sold at auction in 1894. Four of them brought respectively 145, 170, 175, and 215 francs. At the Chocquet auction sale of 1899 the Panorama Auvers sur Oise, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, brought 1400 fr., ($280), at the Viau sale, 1907, 14,200 fr. ($2850), and at the Strolin sale, 1921, 65,500 fr. ($4890). Its sale value today would be not less than $25,000 and would probably be nearer $50,000. A Still Life (Bliss Collection, Museum of Modern Art) brought $21,000 at the Kelekian sale in 1922. The early L’Enlèvement, which brought 4200 fr. ($840) at the Zola Collection sale in 1903, brought $24,000 at the Havemeyer Collection sale in 1930. In 1913 Woman in Crinoline (Museum of Western Art, Moscow) was sold by Vollard to Morosoff of Moscow for 30,000 fr. ($6000), and he purchased the Still Life of Pears and Peaches (Museum of Western Art, Moscow) for the same price. If 400 fr. ($80) represents the market value of a Cézanne canvas in 1889, their rise in value by 1913, seven years after Cézanne’s death, was 7500 per cent.

Cézanne’s son in 1938 was holding Les Stacks, a study of chimneys, for 1,500,000 fr. ($60,000). In less than fifty years the market value of an example of Cézanne has risen from $41 to $110,000.

Seurat died in 1891. In 1901 one of his pictures sold for 27 francs. A year later a retrospective exhibition of fifty-three of his drawings and paintings was held; none was sold. In 1937 at the Sullivan Collection sale a pencil study Un Bras Levé sold for $2000 and another pencil study 11½ by 8 inches, La Jeune Fille de Chevalet, brought $5700. André Fage in Le Collectionneur de Peintures Modernes says that La Parade was bought for 3,000,000 francs. If the acquisition was made in 1930 when the picture was shown by Knoedler in an “Exhibition of Masterpieces by 19th Century French Painters” the price paid would have been the equivalent of $120,000; if it was made in 1936 when the acquisition of this work by the Stephen C. Clark Collection was announced in the Art News, $183,000.

That the acquisition of masterpieces of modern art is made with money is not often publicly admitted, a reticence that reminds one of the Victorian reluctance to admit that intercourse is a necessary preliminary to childbirth. Love was then so lovely it could not be associated with anything as animal as sex; and art is still so “spiritual” that the public must not be reminded it is somehow connected with anything as material as ready cash. In millionaires’ galleries pictures are supposed to have come from the anywhere into the here, but not from picture dealers.

In 1891 Gauguin, in order to raise funds for his first voyage to Tahiti, sold thirty of his pictures at public auction and realized 9860 francs, or slightly under 330 fr. ($65) per painting. In 1912, at the Rouart sale, Papaete brought 31,500 fr. ($2800), a Landscape 32,000 fr. ($6400). At the Degas sale, 1918, La Belle Angele brought 32,000 fr. ($5760), and four other canvases, Tahitienne, Femme Arrise, Paysage Tahiti, and Jeune Tahitienne 14,000 francs ($2520) each. L’Oiseau des Isles (Museum of Western Art, Moscow) was bought by Morosoff from Vollard in 1919 for 27,000 fr. (approximately $4400); in 1908 he had purchased The Big Buddha, now also part of the Museum of Western Art Collection, for 20,000 fr. ($4000).

In 1921 the Worcester Art Museum acquired La Femme Accroupie for $20,000, the first example of Gauguin to be acquired in this country by a public institution. If one takes the average sale price of Gauguin’s canvases in his auction of 1891 as indicative of their market value at that time, the market value of an example of Gauguin in thirty years, 1891 to 1921, had increased 300 times, or 30,000 per cent. The figure would probably be quadrupled if the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston would disclose what it paid for its Gauguin: a similar canvas, if not the same one, was offered to another museum for $85,000.

Comparatively few Van Goghs have changed hands publicly. But the record of auction prices for the last thirty years follows the same ascending curve.

From the Munich Museum.

With Renoir the same case history repeats itself. In 1879 the Impressionists — among them Degas, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir — organized their first exposition. It was apropos of this exhibition that the press coined the word “impressionist” as a term of ridicule. Desperate for funds, the following year they held their first public auction, with police in attendance to prevent a riot, while spectators jeered and howled at every bid. The seventy-three pictures brought 11,496 francs, an average of about 156 fr. ($31) apiece. Among them were Monet’s Printemps, 205 fr. ($41), later bought by Tschudi for the Berlin Museum for 40,000 fr. ($8000), Degas’s Intérieur de Coulisse, which brought 400,000 fr. ($80,000) at the Rouart sale in 1912.

Renoir’s La Source brought 110 fr. ($22), and was later bought by the Prince de Wagram for 70,000 fr. ($14,000); La Toilette, sold to Duret for 140 fr. ($28), was bought by Durand-Ruel in 1894, at the sale of Duret’s collection, for 4200 fr. ($840) and resold in the early 1900’s to an American collector for 100,000 fr. ($20,000); in 1912 Durand-Ruel estimated the market value of La Source to be 200,000-300,000 fr. ($40,000-$60,000), and at that time was offered 350,000 fr. ($70,000) for La Loge, which Renoir showed at the exhibition of 1874. In 1928 the New Yorker’s “Paris Letter” reported a small still-life of peaches priced at $18,000, a Baigneuses at $40,000. When La Danse à la Campagne was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston its market value was not much less than $100,000. The Mussel Fishers of Berneval was purchased by Durand-Ruel in 1879 for approximately $90 and kept by the firm until it was sold to the Barnes Foundation for $175,000 in 1942; the purchase price was proudly announced to the press by Dr. Barnes himself.

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To BUY the right pictures can be more profitable than to buy the right stocks, and the ability to anticipate a rise in the aesthetes’ stock market provides a rate of return on invested capital not to be had unless one had been in “on the ground floor” and been able to buy original shares of Ford Motor stock, General Electric, or Standard Oil. Anyone who bought examples of Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, and Cézanne at market while these men were alive, held the purchases for forty or fifty years, and then sold them at the current market would have made a profit running into thousands of per cent. Any European capitalist who had invested in these painters would not only have preserved that portion of his fortune intact but would have vastly increased it, despite every post-war deflation, the collapse of the mark, the devaluation of the franc. His profits would not have been paper profits, but would have been realizable in cash in foreign exchange at any time, for the values established were international and accepted not only in Berlin and Paris but in London and New York. The gilt-edge securities of the aesthetes’ stock market, in contrast to almost every other form of security, have been secure, and in this country the picture market has maintained the “higher plateau of values” which caved in under the feet of Wall Street in 1929.

But it is not necessary to go in for what stock exchange investors call the long pull to realize extraordinary profits, as the records of resale Paris auctions show, provided a collector is content merely to double or triple his money in a continuous bull market.

These profits of 100 per cent or more were realized despite the fact that from 1919 to 1927 the exchange value of the franc in dollars declined from an average of approximately 14 cents to 4 cents. In every case the increase in value of the paintings listed below more than offset the decline in exchange value. What better “hedge” against deflation could have been found than a work of art?

The market in certain modern painters being steadily a bull market, to be in and out of that market even at short intervals, buying and selling, rebuying and reselling, can be highly profitable as a comparison of the highest bids at Paris auctions at intervals of six years will show:

In the auction sale at Lucerne of the Post-impressionist paintings from German museums considered too subversive by the Nazi regime to remain on view there, Matisse’s still-life Komposition in Blau from the Frankfurt-am-Main Gallery brought 8000 Swiss francs ($1800), his Three Women with a Tortoise 9100 Swiss francs ($2047.50); Picasso’s Buveuse Accroupie (1903) 42,000 Swiss francs ($9000), his Acrobat et Jeune Harlequin 80,000 Swiss francs ($18,000). The market value of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon acquired by the Museum of Modern Art was about $20,000. In this country, representative paintings by Picasso, depending on their period, command prices of from $10,000 to $30,000.

The possibilities of profit-taking by manipulating the gilt-edged securities of the aesthetes’ stock market were pointed out by André Fage, acting as investment counsel, in Le Collectionneur de Peintures Modernes, a carefully documented investors’ guide. Collections of paintings can be assembled like investment portfolios, satisfy a variety of tastes, and at the same time be a capital asset, provided that market trends have been expertly appraised. A collection of one picture per painter of the Barbizon school, nine painters, including Corot, Rousseau, Millet, and Daubigny, was worth 150,000 to 300,000 francs in 1930; a collection of eighteen Impressionists and Neoimpressionists, including Cézanne, Manet, Pisarro, Sisley, Renoir, Degas, was worth 800 to 1,800,000 francs; “stylists,” including Matisse, Gauguin, Picabia, and Puvis de Chavannes, was worth 500,000 to 700,000; a collection of pointillistes — Seurat, Signac, Cross — was worth from 60,000 francs to a maximum which could not be set, because of the scarcity prices paid for Seurat’s limited production. “The truth is, that the market for Seurat, as they say on the exchange, is extremely tight.”

But the patron of art might have assembled his collections by subject matter rather than by schools: landscapists running from Courbet and Corot to de Segonzac, 750,000 to 1,800,000 francs; still-lifes, including Cézanne and Van Gogh, 500,000 to 1,000,000 — without Cézanne and Van Gogh, 130,000 to 200,000; genre painters, including Daumier, 300,000 to 1,500,000; and so on through paintings of Paris, paintings of snow, paintings of trees, paintings of nudes.

There is a solid financial foundation for every taste and a predictable financial future, provided a few essential rules are observed: “Such collections are to be assembled eclectically and with complete objectivity. . . . Buy when times are bad; sell when times are good. . . . Never buy a picture without having seen it.”

The posthumous glorification of art in excelsis tends to keep the modern art market restricted and uncertain. The collector of moderate means, like most art critics and museum curators, hesitates to risk his reputation, even among his friends, by taking a chance on a newcomer. Moreover he could not, as a rule, afford living quarters with enough wall space to hang more than three or four of the pictures he might acquire. The wealthy collector, well aware of the history of collecting in the last century, prefers to wait and then invest $5000 to $20,000 or more in a single canvas that will contribute to his prestige, prove a sounder financial investment than many of his stocks and bonds, and at his death be an asset to his estate or a means of perpetuating his name as a museum donor.

But if the lag in public appreciation of pioneer artists cannot be shortened it can be compensated for. In France in 1920, a law known as le Droit de suite made a percentage of the receipts from all works of art sold at public auctions payable to the artist or his heirs. The percentage is on a sliding scale, beginning with one per cent on sales up to 10,000 francs and rising to three per cent on 50,000 francs and over. At the Gangnat sale in 1925, 225,000 francs went to the heirs of Renoir and Cézanne, 150,000 to Daumier’s. The percentage might well be higher, for these sums represented a very small fraction of the spread between the original purchase price and the sale price of most of the pictures involved.

This French law is an innovation that should be duplicated in this country, with its scope enlarged to include private resales as well. The artist might then stand to benefit during his lifetime as his reputation became established and his work commanded higher prices. Such a law would in effect be an equivalent of copyright, which gives to authors and composers legal title to royalties over a long period.

Painters and sculptors have every right to some share in the profits which their genius makes possible. Every art patron should welcome the opportunity of contributing to such an effort, a necessary first step in aiding the artist in his struggle for economic security in the world of today.