Great art is often considered priceless, but collectors and dealers
know better: Art is priced not only on quality but also on how it is
perceived as fitting into the art-historical continuum.
by Daniel Grant
Great art is often considered priceless, but collectors and dealers
know better: Art is priced not only on quality but also on how it is
perceived as fitting into the art-historical continuum. And, sometimes,
a dealer’s determined efforts to promote a client can help secure his
or her place in history. Take dealer John Driscoll of New York City’s
Babcock Galleries, who firmly believes that 95-year-old Massachusetts
artist Will Barnet, whom he has represented since 2004, is one of the
most important contemporary artists working today. “I define an
artist’s importance by three criteria: How much he or she captures the
soul of a moment, how much he or she influences subsequent generations
of painters, and how much he or she expresses an individual style,” the
dealer says. “Barnet succeeds in all three of these areas, and I
believe that when the history of this artistic era is written, his work
will be remembered.”
Driscoll has expended a considerable amount of effort over the last
several years making sure this becomes a reality. “I’ve been trying to
reposition how people think of Will,” Driscoll says. “It’s all about
perception—the buyer’s perception of just how important an artist’s
work is. We are helping people understand that Will is one of the great
masters of the 20th century and that his work will have lasting
significance.” In other words, he is remarketing Barnet in an effort to
elevate the artist’s stature.
To accomplish this goal, Babcock Galleries has taken a number of
steps to further expose the artist, the first of which has been
creating more exhibitions of the artist’s work, including solo shows.
In addition, in 2006, Barnet was Babcock’s featured artist at The Art
Show, the annual New York City art fair sponsored by the Art Dealers
Association of America. The gallery has also been attempting to arrange
exhibitions of Barnet’s work at more prestigious museums.
A second effort at raising awareness of the artist is producing more
books on Barnet. Driscoll himself is compiling published essays on the
artist and reviews of his artwork for a book that will be titled Will Barnet: Art and Anthology,
while Richard Boyle, the former director of the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, is currently writing a monograph on
Barnet. Townsend Wolfe, a former director of the Arkansas Arts
Center—which has a sizeable number of the artist’s works on paper—is
presently writing a book about Barnet’s drawings.
The third element of this plan is simply to bring more of the
artist’s works to market, which has meant foraging through the vast
assortment of paintings and works on paper that Barnet has not yet
exposed to the public. Although the artist continues to produce new
work, the paintings that Babcock Galleries has been putting up for sale
are primarily older. “Many of these pieces have never been shown,”
Driscoll says. “We’re starting to make the public aware of some of the
pieces that haven’t had much exposure, such as his gouache and
watercolor work.”
A fourth endeavor has been to refocus sales to major private and
institutional buyers. “We are working very hard to identify museums and
collectors who we want to purchase Will’s work,” Driscoll says. “We are
trying to get his work into the hands of people who are going to make
sure that, if they own the art personally, the next steward is going to
be a museum or a like-minded collector. It’s our goal to place this
work in collections that will matter in the future.”
As a part of this effort, the gallery has significantly raised the
prices for the artist’s paintings, drawings, and prints. When Babcock
started representing Barnet in late 2004, the prices of his paintings
“topped out at $100,000. We’re now selling drawings for prices his
paintings used to go for,” says Lisa Koonce, an assistant director at
Babcock Galleries. Adding to Barnet’s value is the fact that, unlike
some artists, he does not believe that he has to develop an
identifiable style by which he can continually be branded. According to
Driscoll, the artist has been growing artistically from day one—his
artistic output reflects an inquisitive, creative mind, one unconfined
by predictability.
Time will tell whether Barnet’s career can withstand the great
claims being made by his dealer. Driscoll’s predecessor at Babcock
Galleries, Michael St. Clair, had embarked on a similar mission of
promoting three artists—Childe Hassam (1859–1935), Marsden Hartley
(1877–1943), and Alfred Maurer (1868–1932)—-with the intention of
elevating their stature in the history of American art. The experiment
proved successful, and the gallery still handles those three artists.
“I was always looking for an artist I could bring into the gallery who
had the stature of those artists,” Driscoll says. “In fact, I always
thought about Will in that context.”