Mr. Market’s Take on American Art: The Oracle Speaks During Americana Week in New York Auctions

Auctions and the Winter Show at the Armory hint at the strength of the market for old American art.

Is old American art, as current lingo would have it, sooooo back? We’ll see. I’m covering Americana Week, the January suite of New York auctions of American art — painting, furniture, silver, porcelain, among other pricy must-haves — and the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory. That’s the annual extravaganza dealer show selling the best new-to-the-market things, much but not all American, mostly decorative arts. It opened yesterday. The overall art market has been in the doldrums if not at death’s door. Am I finding a pulse? Is America’s Semiquincentennial forcing a blossom to open? In 1976, the Bicentennial, celebratory as it was, furthered a boom in historical American art.

Over the last two days I’ve seen hundreds of works of art, all American, and nothing’s more rousingly, emphatically American than first-wave cowboy-and-Indian scenes by Frederic Remington, Frank Tenney, and Charles Marion Russell. On Tuesday night, Christie’s Western art sale had buyer wallets a-blazin’ and bidding wars hot. Remington’s An Argument with the Town Marshall, a nocturne from around 1905, sold for $11.8 million on a $4 million–$6 million estimate, breaking Remington’s auction record.

Remington (1861–1909) was already famous for his magazine illustrations of life on the frontier when he decided around 1900 to paint nocturnes, hoping to boost his renown as a high-end painter by emulating Whistler. He painted around 70 nocturnes before his sudden death, and they are indeed symphonies in night color, seeming monochromatic at first but subtly rich in tone as points of light, whether from stars, the moon, or candles, change the color of the sky from midnight-blue to sapphire and shades in between. After working for most of his career in black and white for illustrations, and in high-key color for his daytime cowboy-and-Indian paintings, considered as much horse pictures as Wild West art, Remington hit his high. In Town Marshall, Remington’s cowboy awakens the town and our senses, too, as we absorb the start of a shoot-’em-up melee. Did High Noon start early?

American cowboy spunk is universal. Greenland’s Inuits and Danes, beware. Once inflamed, cowboy fervor will send naysayers scurrying to their igloos. Big-money gnomes in Davos got a taste of it this week. The World Economic Forum should meet in Fort Worth or, better still, Youngstown, Ohio, gutted by globalism. I digress, but having just recovered from a near-death flu, I’m entitled.

Remington soon tackled sunsets, too. Coming to the Call, a gorgeous moose-hunt drama also from around 1905, sold for $13.2 million on a $6 million–$8 million estimate. Hunter and prey, life and death, beauty and menace — all combine to leave us breathless. The Western art in the sale belonged to Bill Koch, yes, one of the Koch brothers but best known as an investor, collector of art, wine, and maritime art, and an America’s Cup winner. His Christie’s haul — 25 objects — made $69,424,000, well over the sale’s aggregate high estimate. Minutes after Town Marshall busted a record, Coming to the Call beat it, setting another new worldwide Remington auction high. Good for Christie’s. It’s a great start to the celebrations of America’s 250th.

I went to a live auction at Christie’s on Thursday — a group of 30 or so small, delectable American paintings from the collection of Max Berry. In ye olden days, I went to sales often and covered them, since that was the best way to get fresh news to my readers. Showroom tension was a given as bidding wars unfolded among in-the-flesh collectors and dealers, many big personalities. It’s more antiseptic now, since most bidding is on the phone, and the sales can be watched online. Still, it’s a treat to be there and see auctioneer acrobatics and a different kind of psychological warfare as buyers in the ether are coaxed to go higher and higher.

Christie’s has been selling Berry’s collection over the past couple of months. Berry (b. 1935) is a lawyer based in Washington who made a fortune during his storied career in international law. He’s from Tulsa, a place I like — people are so nice there — and he hasn’t been slathered in Swamp slime. Yes, he was a big, early booster of Marion Barry when he ran for mayor of D.C. in 1978, but that’s an error in judgment, not a crime against humanity. Berry’s still with us, though AI suggests he’s dead, and he collected Chinese antiquities, scrimshaw, wine, sculptures by Calder and Giacometti, Judaica, porcelain, and American Hudson River School, Impressionism, and Ashcan art.

I don’t know Berry, but one of my most esteemed buddies was Bill Gerdts (1929–2020), the art historian and curator who advised him. I liked Bill for many reasons, among them his witty, erudite vocabulary. He found and deployed every synonym for “bullsh**” in describing woke art history. Of Frances Pohl, the pioneer in lesbian art history, he could wax prolific and piquant. “Hogwash, hoodoo, hokey-pokey drool” was how he described to me a piece that Darren Walker, the head of the Ford Foundation, wrote that pushed oppressor/victim ideology on museums. We were at a small drinks party. Lubricated or not, Bill was quick with a quip. Both Bill and Berry liked quality, not safe but tried-and-true art whose craft and beauty gave them heft.

Christie’s sale was rich in small, good landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, and scenes of everyday life, all American from the 1860s, except an outlier by Andrew Wyeth from 1972. Nothing beyond the scope of human emotion. A weathervane sale.

Homer’s Mountain Climber Resting, from 1869, has to be a leader in this constellation’s pack. Berry has owned it since 1994. I’ve seen it once. It’s tiny, 10 by 14 inches, and has wall power in part because it’s a hero picture, showing a hiker — a man of leisure, physical prowess, and adventure – savoring, and commanding, a panorama, in this case from what’s probably the peak of Mount Washington. Mountaineering was a new American sport, and Homer did versions with other figures, but this mountain climber rules his version of Olympus. Homer borrowed the figure of Dionysus, possibly Herakles or Theseus, from the east pediment of the Parthenon. On an estimate of $1.2 million–$2 million, it went for $1.8 million, which includes the buyer’s premium. Not bad.

Christie’s also sold the voluptuous The Flock of Sheep, Houghton Farm, a Homer watercolor from 1878. It’s a scene of children, not everyone’s taste, but it’s set in a lovely landscape and with a handsome dog. Homer’s a superb dog painter. It went for $650,000, not including the buyer’s premium, on a $400,000–$600,000 estimate and had to be considered in competition with Mountain Climber.

The young British auctioneer at Christie’s looked like the Prince of Wales in the 1920s, dashing enough but with subdued moves. It’s a sale of old American art, so gravity has to figure. I love Christie’s. They’re very classy and sometimes toss wit into the mix. They call the Berry sale, starting at 4 o’clock, an Evening Sale. Evening Sales are the most prestigious, but historical American art enthusiasts tend to be older or more conservative, at least culturally. We’re not exactly Early Bird Special types but definitely early to bed, early to rise. And no titters went through the crowd. Bids came evenly from in the room and on the phone, with a smattering of online offers. A fresh, bright, and summery 1899 Childe Hassan Gloucester picture went for $2 million on a $1 million–$1.5 million estimate. A Prendergast watercolor of Central Park’s Bridle Path from 1902 blasted its $1 million–$1.5 million estimate to hit $2.3 million. I heard Champagne corks popping in Christie’s back-of-house.

All in all, another good sale for American art. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s — I’ll write on Sotheby’s next week– have Semiquincentennial themes. These include the intimate and specific portraits of Washington, early copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and Washington’s letter to Benjamin Franklin introducing him to Lafayette when Franklin was our first minister to France and the American war hero Lafayette was heading back to Paris in 1779. More remote but still tangible links are to be found in a splendid high chest made in 1753 and belonging to a Revolutionary-era Quaker family in Philadelphia, as well as furniture that Benjamin Latrobe designed that’s similar to his work for Dolley Madison’s White House. Then there’s a flag fragment from Custer’s Last Stand and the partnership agreement of Apple Computer Company in 1976, measures, respectively, of disaster and triumph, one a casualty of America’s epic, fraught expansion, the other a child of our unfettered markets and entrepreneurial mettle. A stretch, I know. Let’s see how these sell in the coming days.

Any sign of Washington the evil enslaver — cue the low, hissing Wurlitzer music used in the old days on The Edge of Night when news of a husband’s bigamy reached his loyal, loving, Wellesley-grad wife? Nowhere to be seen at the auction houses, and not at the Winter Show either. They want people to buy, not hog suicide hotlines, driven there by white guilt or, worse, by shock and boredom at getting the same spoonful of woke castor oil for the umpteenth time. It’s good to see that after 50 years of Hate America First from teachers, academics, smug smart-ass reporters, the chattering class, and all their conformist duppies, the market for quality American classics, alas nearly all by dead white men, still has some shake, rattle, and roll in it as we near July Fourth.

The Winter Show, once called the Winter Antiques Show, opened yesterday at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s in its 72nd year, with profits going to the education programs of East Side House. East Side House serves young people in the Bronx, mostly with a charter high school focused on health-care careers. East Side House is 135 years old, so it’s venerable. The Winter Show’s support is old -fashioned New York philanthropy. There are plenty of rich people who not only shop there but go to the many chichi parties, such as the Winter Show opening, which honored Caroline Kennedy for her arts charity. Of course, charter schools are toxic to Mayor Mamdani and his Red/Green comrades-in-keffiyehs, so who knows. Next year, will the Winter Show profits go to legal fees for, say, that “Maryland dad” who, between going to Little League games and mowing the lawn, was “allegedly” involved in human smuggling for MS-13?

I spent Thursday afternoon at the Winter Show press preview. I’ve been going to the fair for 35 or so years. It’s among my three or four favorites for quality and seriousness among dealers and collectors. This year is no different. In ye olden days, dealers and art skewed heavily to American, prewar, and antiques, from very high-end furniture, silver, porcelain, and textiles to duck decoys, folk portraits, and samplers. The market has changed, and many of the old-time dealers have retired and collectors have died. The gods of taste cursed brown furniture long ago, along with gleaming silver that, once in a while, needs to be polished. That’s life.

Material for America’s 250th? Some dealers embraced it. Others didn’t, many because they don’t do American colonial and Federal art, many because they’re oblivious to the anniversary, but the diminution of old American art at the Winter Show is a huge, sad loss.

A few things pleased me as a patriotic American, bibliophile, and art historian, and I often remind that we art historians are historians. The British dealer Peter Harrington, based in London but whose New York shop is new, offers a treasure: Alexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume first edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, or Democracy in America, published between 1835 and 1840. “Seminal” aptly describes the French aristocrat’s take on American character. The volumes are a presentation copy inscribed by Tocqueville (1805–1859) to Léon Faucher (1803–1854), a French journalist who reviewed the book for the first time and who was, for a few short months in 1851, France’s prime minister. He was a figure in the ugly tumult following the 1848 revolutions.

Tocqueville and Faucher were friends in the 1830s but grew apart as Faucher shifted from journalism to politics. “Faucher is a man of great honesty, great courage, and great knowledge, except in the knowledge of men,” Tocqueville wrote. “He is active, obstinate, and injudicious. . . . Such men are the ruin of a ministry, indeed, of a party.” Tocqueville was canny and observant in all things. Faucher, by the by, liked the book. The four volumes, priced at $125,000 for the set, are in purple quarter calf with mottled sides, green vellum quarters, and marbled endpapers.

Harrington’s got serious things for serious collectors and connoisseurs, such as a handwritten page from Boswell’s manuscript for Life of Johnson and, for those of us who prize the Weather Channel as high entertainment, a weather log meticulously written by Admiral Nelson during his yearlong siege of the French fleet at Toulon. And what can be more precious and timely than a very early edition of Mundus novus, Amerigo Vespucci’s 1504 narrative of his voyages to what would be first called the New World and, before long, named America after him. It’s $375,000 and on reserve.

Topical indeed is Levy Galleries’ fancy Chippendale armchair from around 1770. It lived in the house on Philadelphia’s 6th Street and Market Street that was the home of George Washington and John Adams during their presidencies. They lived there as tenants when Philly was the new nation’s capital. The primary wood of the chair is mahogany, with lots of intricate carving. Washington indeed slept in the house but also probably sat on this chair. Its mate is at Winterthur, the great American decorative arts collection in Delaware. It’s priced in the low seven figures. Its proximity to Washington’s patootie and its quality are reasons enough to covet it, but there are others, lesser in weight but important. The chair has stayed with the family since it was made and was undiscovered until now. That’s a Philadelphia and, to a lesser extent, Boston story.

I’m always amazed to learn that fabulous things that went into houses in Boston and Philadelphia in the late 1700s and early 1800s stayed there as the houses descended through many generations, only to appear on the market after the families give up the ancestral manse — when they’re tired of divided ownership, sick of living in high-tax places with crappy weather, or simply ready to go condo or enjoy one-floor living.

I usually stop at Levy Galleries because they have great things and still stick to brown furniture, except for gilded mirrors here and there, and exude quiet grandeur. Levy started in 1901 as Levy and Ginsburg, Jews selling stuff. In the Teens, they found more success selling old American furniture than other wares, so they focused there. After the First World War, a rising America led to more respect for old American things, and that led to the Colonial Revival movement in the 1920s, new respect for folk art, the market revival of Hudson River School painting, and much, much more. Four generations of Levys drew first from low-lying fruit and then, over time, from their immense knowledge and contacts and connoisseurship. I’m profoundly philosemitic. That the Levys were Jews advancing the art and heritage of WASPS adds gloss to the story.

I’ll write more about the sales and the Winter Show next week.