Dali House

“Portrait of a Young Woman” by Pablo Picasso, 1903. Was this the same “Portrait of a Young Woman” that a New Yorker bought in 1922 for $550?

By 1922 America was already a feisty, industrial global power that had banged its stamp on world affairs, but there was still a lot of colonial thinking. The isolationist sentiment that had kept it out of the Great War for so long had come with a self-reliance that let its citizens scoff at other nationalities.

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art scoffed at the modern stuff trickling across the ocean from Europe. It would be another seven years before Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art as a cradle on Yankee soil for the new ways of looking at things. There were by then, at least, already a lot of good pictures floating around stateside.

But in 1922 the New York Times was no doubt speaking for the majority when it surveyed a gaggle of European artworks being auctioned in Manhattan and allowed itself, while pandering to the more cosmopolitan elite, a Bronx cheer at the lot.

“That there is a demand in this country for the work of modern French artists known as extremists was shown at the opening sale of the collection of French pictures belonging to Dikran Khan Kelekian [*more on him in a bit], under the auspices of the American Art Association, at the Hotel Plaza last evening,” it reported on January 31 that year. [Download the article in PDF format here.]

“What the result of the sale would be every one had been in doubt. It was the first of its kind in this country. ‘You must make your bids,’ said Thomas E Kirby, from the auctioneer’s bench, putting up the first picture, ‘we have no previous records to go upon in this sale.’”

A portrait by Matisse, the paper said, “brought a burst of laughter when it was put up. It was a small picture, a little girl with red hair, a green and black frock, orange bow on her hair, painted against a brilliant green background. The portrait had many characteristics of the work of a child on a slate, but … “

– and now it’s our turn to laugh (or cry) –

“… it started at $100 and went up to $300.”

A Matisse painting for $300. When, oh, when are they going to invent that blasted time machine? Below are Renoir’s “Portrait of a Girl”, which seems to be the one at issue here, and “Roses”, which is coming up for sale in a few moments.

“There were many beautiful things in the sale and others which, while quite normal, seemed to bring prices out of proportion to their beauty. A watercolor, by Cazanne [sic], No 31, ‘Geranium’, was simply a flourishing geranium with green leaves, not even a blossom, as someone said, in a light-toned flowerpot against a buff background. It was a small picture, altogether about the size of of a small pot of geraniums … It brought $650.

“There is little intrinsic value to a picture — its value is in the skill of the artist and his appeal to the people. Six hundred and fifty dollars would have bought a large garden of geraniums, but the sale of the picture shows that the work of the French modern artists appeals to Americans.” Cezanne’s “Two Trees” managed to earn $500.

Flash forward to May 2008. “Geranium” — by Matisse, though, not “Cazanne” — delivers $9.5 million at auction, right here in New York. Christie’s was hoping for $2.5 million to $3.5 million.

I have tried to track down some of the 80 artworks listed in the Times account, but in almost all cases either the titles are recorded erroneously or unhelpfully or they’ve evolved into new titles. Even specific titles like Corot’s “Little Seraphina, Dressed in Corot’s Waistcoat in her Chamber at Arieux” didn’t raise an eyebrow on Google.

Together the collection brought in $38,765, which astonished the reporter since “many of them were pencil sketches and very small”. There was still a second evening of sales to come, featuring “larger and more important pictures”, but the newspaper doesn’t seem to have recorded that event.

Nor could the scribe figure out why Matisse’s portrait of “a strong-featured woman, with snaky black ringlets, in an orange chair against a green background” would fetch $1,125 when it was “much less lovely” than Mary Cassatt’s “pretty young woman, seated”, which commanded only $1,000. Cassatt, he or she reported, was “an American living in Paris, well known and well liked here”. Matisse’s winner is given the title “Portrait of a Woman Leaning on her Elbow in an Armchair”, but his “Granddaughter” brought only $300, “Female Figure in the Nude” $160 and “Head of a Young Girl” a mere $120.

While shunning the more radical works on view, the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid the most for any painting that evening, $2,700 for Courbet’s “La Mer”, which may be 1869’s “The Stormy Sea”, also known as “The Wave”, seen above, while the Fearon Galleries coughed up $1,300 for Ingres’ lead-pencil portrait of Paganini, shown here, and PW French & Co grabbed Ingres’ depiction of Berlioz for $1,950.

Renoir was also on hand with “Portrait of Mme Paul Galimart” ($1,200), “Portrait of a Woman” ($775), “Flowers” ($600), “Portrait of a Little Girl” ($750), which may have been “Portrait of Coco” from 1900, shown here, and “Roses”, still a steal at nearly two grand.

“A small and delicate painting by Renoir, ‘Roses’ … sold to the Durand-Ruel Galleries for $1,825. A Corot portrait, ‘The Little Seraphine’, went to a buyer giving the name of Pendergast for $1,300. Durand-Riel paid the second-highest price of the evening, $2,000, for a softly toned Pissarro, ‘The Seine at Rouen: Fog Effect’.” Below is Pissarro’s 1898 “Rouen: Fog Effect”, but surely if this had been the one on sale, even the most cynical reporter would have had more to say about it.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Times article is the references to three works by Seurat: “Seated Boy”, “Woman and Child” and “A Canoe: The Seine at the Great Bowl”, which together fetched $750. These sound for all the world like his now-priceless studies for two of the most-admired paintings of the last two centuries, “Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte” and “Bathers at Asnieres”. If the bidders had only known!

Below is Pierre Bonnard’s “Race at Bologne” from 1910, almost certainly the “Boulogne Race Track” sold at this auction for $425. His “The Red-Checkered Tablecloth” from the same year is likely “Woman at the Table”, gone for $325.

Crazy old Maurice Utrillo was well turned-out in New York too. While something called “The Castle” — no doubt one of his many Montmartre scenes — claimed just $160, “The Street” and “Snow Effect” took $300 apiece. I think these might have been “La Place Dancourt”, painted in 1921, and “View of Pontoise” from 1913, which is also known as “Snow Effect”. They’re shown below in that order.

Daumier’s 1860 portrait of his engraver Hippolyte Lavoignat commanded $450, Sisley’s “In the Louveciennes Vineyards” from 1874 $700, and it could have been “Harbour at Marseilles” by Paul Signac (1906), below, that someone took home for an amazing $110 under the abbreviated title “Marseilles”.

Vlaminck wasn’t left behind. “Border of the Seine” sold for $350 — surely it was the one below left, “Bords de la Seine” from 1906 — while “Banks of the River” drew $250. Below right is “House on the Banks of a River” from about 1908.

Andre Derain seems to have done very well at this auction, with a “Landscape” nabbed for $1,300, “Roses in a Jug” for $525, “Group of Women” for $475 and 11 other pieces for $400 or under, including “The Pine”, which may be “The Stone Pine”, and “The Road”, possibly “The Turning Road, L´Estaque”, both shown below.

The recent Dali House post about Derain includes “Self-portrait as a Soldier”, which is perhaps the “Portrait of a Soldier” referred to in the Times story, and two versions of “Portrait of a Young Girl”, one of which was sold in 1922 for all of $100.

Also on hand and selling for shudderingly low prices were Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, Raoul Dufy and fellow Frenchmen Othon Friesz, Albert Lebourg, Robert Lotiron, Jean Baptiste Armand Guillaumin, René Durey, an all-but-forgotten impressionist named Camoins and a man called Jose Ortiz, who Google thinks must be either a Spanish comics artist still living or a Puerto Rican baseball player.

Degas was there, though listed by the newspaper only by his given names, Hilaire Germain Edgard, as the author of “Portrait of M Rouget”, worth $330.

The purchaser of “a distinctly cubist picture by Picasso, a ‘Little Still Life’”, was Arthur B Davies, an American artist with an astonishing secret life who sold several of his own works at the same exhibition, and so probably didn’t think twice about paying $450 for one of the Spaniard’s entries, even if it mystified the Times.

“Careful examination of the ‘Still Life’ might discover it either a game scene — there looked in one part to be a bird’s head and a basket — or a collection of Chinese porcelain, there being something in it having the appearance of a vase. The writer of the catalogue, having no guide but his eye, described it as ‘a confused mass of geometric forms of very definite, but erratic, outlines’.”

This, on the other hand, is very definitely “Compote Dish & Pitcher By Window”, more than likely the piece identified in the Times as “Still Life: The Compote Dish”, which sold for $575. Picasso also sold “Woman’s Head” for $160, “Man Seated” for $120 and yet another “Still Life” for $775.

Though only six years remained to him in this world, Davies could take his time deciphering his Picasso. At the auction he pocketed $1,500 for “a study in nudes” entitled “The Summit Thicket”, $1,000 for “A Pool of Fragrance”, which would have looked something like the black and white version here, $800 for “Shadow Valley”, $700 for “Velvet-Eyed Venus”, $240 for a matched pair of images called “Seated Girl”, $210 for “Figure Drawing”, $150 for “Wrestlers”, $140 for “Athlete” and $100 for “Nude Study”. That’s nearly 5,000 bucks and not a bad day’s take for a guy from from the Ash Can School.

Below are Davies’ paintings “Nude in Landscape” and “Dance of the Fireflies”.

Arthur Bowen Davies (1863-1928) left his commercial career behind to delve into the romantic and spiritualist side of art even as most of the Ashcan group — The Eight — made a name for themselves depicting gritty urban reality. The others (Robert Henri, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, John French Sloan and George Luks) wanted to show American cities glistening with factory sweat. Fitting Davies in with that bunch, said a biographer in 1923, “is a problem”. He was, as the title of one of his paintings suggested, the “Dweller on the Threshold”.

Once called the greatest living American artist, Davies was often consulted about art’s direction, by Abby Rockefeller among others, and he’s been credited with creating the tolerance toward modern art that paved the ground for the pivotal 1913 Armory Show. It proved to be a Pandora’s box whose contents swallowed him and his memory, though there’s another good reason why so few people today have heard of him.

You can read more about Davies on the website of the Hyde Art Museum in Glen Falls, New York, but there’s a whole lot more to him, as shared last October by Sherill Tippins on “the Chelsea Hotel Blog” Living With Legends, who cited as her source Bennard B Perlmann’s 1998 book “The Lives, Loves and Art of Arthur B Davies”.

She says Davies, a bit of a globetrotter, amassed quite a lot of great art — more than a dozen Picassos, five Cezannes, four Matisses and a lot of Middle Eastern pieces — at his Chelsea Hotel studio apartment. Also stashed there was a 28-year-old woman named Wreath McIntyre, who’d been his model since she was 14.

This would have come as a shock to his wife Virginia and their many children back on the farm in Arthur’s hometown, Utica upstate. Nor would it have pleased Davies’ other wife Edna and daughter Ronnie, who went by the surname Owen. Arthur sent Edna and Ronnie off to Europe, but then in 1928 an astrologer told him he would soon die overseas and, as a card-carrying fatalist, he booked passage to Europe and said goodbye to Wreath. He died of a heart attack in Europe two months later.

Edna returned to America and presented his cremated remains to Virginia by way of an introduction, and when Virginia finally got to see her husband’s Chelsea rooms she found “an Arabian Nights treasure trove”, auctioned off most of it and burned a lot of the rest because she found it “unsuitable”.

Below, “Sleep Lies Perfect in Them” from about 1908, kinda creepy given Arthur’s triple life, but scroll down further for two other pieces that show different dimensions of the man.


Davies’ “Dances” from about 1914

Davies’ “California Mountain Scene”, 1905

* Dikran Kelekian (1868-1951) — portrayed here in 1943 by Milton Avery — was an Armenian-born American collector who primarily promoted Islamic art and antiquities. By the turn of the century he had dealerships in New York, Paris and London, and in 1904 he put on a sizeable exhibition at the St Louis World’s Fair.

At age 83 he fell to his death from the 21st floor of New York’s St Moritz Hotel. That’s where Dali had beached when he finally came to America in 1939, but he’d moved to the St Regis by the time Kelekian took the plunge.