The Fine Art of Acquiring Fine Art

Acquiring Fine Art used to be an avocation for the very, very rich. Morgan, Frick, Mellon -- these were the Croesuses of American Collecting in pre-income tax days. They, or their agents, laid siege to churches and palaces; with checkbooks for battering rams they smashed the barriers of protocol and national pride to acquire the masterpieces that now grace the collections of our museums. But for numerous and complex social, financial and legal reasons, this golden age of connoisseurship has died out, and the cultural buying spree of the few has spread to the many. Works of art, or commodities aspiring to that distinction, can now be purchased almost anywhere -- and on the installment plan on occasion. They can be bought not just at galleries, museums, auctions and artists' studios, but at coffeehouses and delicatessens, at sidewalk exhibitions, in theater lobbies and even off the walls of friends' living rooms. If more people are getting the works instead of works of art, that is simply the offspring of over-production coupled with amateurs' ignorance.

There are waiting lists for the output of certain eminent artists -- for instance, the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, whose 1959 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York had people crowding outside the doors on opening day. It was a sellout, with large canvases fetching as much as $14,000 each. These paintings are already worth about $40,000 -- nearly a 300 percent profit in just three years, or so says dealer Janis. Sensing a gold rush, prospectors have flocked to stake out their claims.

Those who take a dim view of the current rush for conspicuous consumption of culture see the art world as a fattening monster engaged in dispensing taste, flattering egos and deflecting power drives while discreetly muffling the sound of purring from the counting rooms. Those who take the crassly commercial exploitation of art in stride do not deny that the art world is overrun by phonies with plenty of loaded squares begging to be taken, but they remind agitated purists that the phonies don't endure. "Ars longa, vita brevis," they say with, among others, Hippocrates, Seneca, Goethe, Browning and Wordsworth.

"Twenty years' experience as curator and director in American museums," wrote the late director of the Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor, in The Taste of Angels, "has convinced me that the phenomenon of art collecting is too instinctive and too common to be dismissed as mere fashion or the desire for fame. It is a complex and irrepressible expression of the individual..." But art -- in addition to these qualities and to its potentialities for deep esthetic gratifications -- has more modest attractions as well. It can brighten a room with color or a pretty subject; it can be (and most certainly is) used as an investment; it brings to its owners a certain prestige and status. Indeed, its various nonesthetic attractions sometimes seem so compelling that many people have come to feel that whether they care for art or not, they must keep up culturally with the Joneses.

There are no hard and fixed rules for the novice collector. "Buy what you like," advise many experience-hardened dealers. A variation admonishes, "Buy what you understand." One ignores modern art today at the risk of being called a Philistine, but the familiarizing process, even for those favorably disposed or devoutly curious, takes time -- and it may not take hold. Literature on the subject of collecting is fairly standardized. It advises the beginner to look at as many original paintings as possible, to ask about prices as he goes, the better to gauge current values, to read up on the background of the art that interests him and to seek such help as he thinks he needs from experts -- such as museum curators and reputable dealers. John I. H. Baur, of the Whitney Museum, warns the collector not to be guided by decorators "unless they are different from most." There is generally implicit the warning to begin modestly, to proceed cautiously and to avoid bargain counters.

The general self-help rules are fine -- as far as they go. Certainly, they are harmless. One should tour museums and galleries, but not in the expectation that quality will declare itself just like that. "I would be pleased to know of a school where one learns taste," said Diderot. The history of art is full of blind curves; one may successfully navigate the classic turns of an Olympian nude by Titian only to be confronted by the seemingly doodled, lava-complexioned Femmes of Jean Dubuffet. Available road maps come in the form of texts on art history and art appreciation courses -- a sort of package deal dispensing a culturally fortified brand of etiquette. Art criticism, regarded in America with suspicion not only by artists but by the critics themselves and subject to hallucinatory images such as "an orange like a wounded signal tower," remains, for better or worse, the country's only real public forum on art.

Boning up via books and reproductions has the advantage of covering a lot of territory in a short time. The best reproduction, however, is a poor facsimile, distorting scale, tactile quality and color. A few years ago a man entered a well-established New York gallery and asked to see some paintings by Chaim Soutine who, of course, is in a price range beyond all but the wealthiest collectors. The dealer brought out a characteristically passionate landscape by the French expressionist painted with the turgid impastos the artist favored. The man spurned the painting. He complained that it was muddy, that the Soutines reproduced in art books were much brighter. The color plates of these books, printed on coated stock to begin with, are bright, since printing inks contain the varnish that frequently does not exist in the original.

The heart of the art market for most private citizens is the art gallery -- which is free and welcomes visitors. Each new exhibition season in New York -- roughly from the beginning of October to the end of May (though more and more galleries are staying open during the summer) -- finds as many as 10 or more new galleries in business. Some of these are branches of established galleries in Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Paris. Where once Fifty-seventh Street was the center of the New York (and U.S.) art world, galleries have fanned out through the city, from the 90s to the Battery, setting themselves up in quarters ranging from the posh to the primitive. One artist's atelier serves as a gallery by day, a studio at night. Another gallery mixes its art with odors of cooking from a kitchen in back. Arts magazine's directory lists 208 galleries in New York City, as compared to 26 in Boston, nine in Chicago, 45 in or near Los Angeles, 13 in San Francisco -- and 140 in Paris. And these are merely the galleries with regular exhibition schedules that are more or less regularly covered by the critics.

Business though it is, the gallery has also become something of a cultural public utility. Its power is enormous. It can deceive, it can entertain, it can help create trends. It can also make -- or break -- contemporary artists, for (continued on page 90)Fine Art(continued from page 66) though it has to work with what is available, to a great extent it can control what is available.

The art dealer is almost as complex a creature as the artist, and the artist-dealer and sometimes dealer-client relationship can be a stormy one, with recriminations, if not lawsuits, on both sides. Working with temperamental people in a sensitive business, and subject to crises de nerfs themselves, dealers are horse traders by necessity. Ethically the dealer is something of a schizoid because he has to sell culture as if the profit motive had been left at the church door. His commodity represents both his own and a higher "good." Dealers are the obstetricians of art and, like some doctors, their gratification is not purely economic. The gallery system has produced both idealists and thieves, experts and know-nothings. Sidney Janis, a well-known collector before he opened what has since become one of the leading galleries of modern art (representing de Kooning, Kline, Mother-well, Rothko, Guston and Baziotes, not to mention its virtual control of the world market on Mondrians), defines a reputable dealer as "a man with some conscience about art, who believes in art and who will stand behind the work he sells." (This means that a customer who has experienced a change of heart may return a work after he's paid for it and get back either his money or something of "equal value.")

The majority of established dealers will recommend another gallery if they cannot fulfill a client's needs. They will hold paintings and sculpture on reserve for a limited time to allow clients to sleep on a purchase or to have friends and "experts" inspect the work first. Also, it is supposedly a standard gallery practice to permit a client to take certain items home on approval. The dealer, who of necessity lives surrounded by art, is well aware of the striking impact of a modern work on living space; he has a strong bargaining foot in the door once his prospect goes so far as to hang a painting.

Price ranges in galleries vary considerably. In a recently published directory one gallery put itself in a $50 to $150,000 bracket, while another described its range as from "modest to astronomical." The famous Kootz Gallery includes a market analysis with its rates. Example: "Prices for the French from $2000 to Picasso; young American artists less but not for long." Other galleries may be less circumspect, but in most cases quoted prices are designed to leave the door open for bargaining and to disguise any statistics that might depress an artist's market. A few dealers deny the use of an asking price, but big collectors know that amounts are often jacked to offset bargaining losses, and they make sure their initial offer is well under the announced price. A dealer recently countered one such collectors tactics by handing him a price list which clearly left no room for haggling. "You mean this is on the level?" the man exclaimed -- and bought three items.

With more and more people buying out of income rather than capital, many galleries have taken to selling works on time as a regular policy. One lady dealer reports that she does the bulk of her business this way. The terms may be surprisingly generous, as low as $10 a month with no interest charges and no down payment. But since the art market responds like Wall Street to hot tips and buying splurges, dealers are not likely to let a work go on what amounts to margin buying when its creator's work is in great demand, or when his prices may conceivably double or even triple overnight.

The general starting price for a small painting by a respectable though little-publicized artist is between $200 and $350. Prints and drawings are attractive to the young collector simply because they come cheaper. A print is not a mechanical reproduction, but an impression of an original woodcut, wood engraving, etching or lithograph -- or at least it used to be. It is sometimes impossible to ascertain the exact composition of a modern print these days, since the printmaker is likely to supplement orthodox technique with the fascinating effects of screen wire, asphaltum, Fabulon (a floor finish) and various objets trouvés. Not precisely a printmaker, but in the family, Sari Dienes creates large scrolls by rubbing impressions from manhole covers. Purists tend to frown not only on these heretical experiments but also on the monotype (a single impression of a painting on glass or metal) and the silk screen, which its partisans prefer to call a serigraph. One of America's most popular printmakers, Antonio Frasconi, emphasizes traditional craftsmanship. His small black-and-white woodcuts can be bought for as low as $15, hand-pulled by the artist himself. His middle range for larger color prints is between $100 and $200. The works of a lesser known etcher, like Chicago's Misch Kohn, are priced around $75. Drawings tend to run higher than prints simply because they are one of a kind, but works by only partially recognized artists come as low as $50. Graphic work by substantial late and living moderns whose paintings might be prohibitively priced can also be acquired reasonably. Ben Shahn's serigraphs can be bought for $35 to $175. One dealer's brochure lists a drawing by the Austrian expressionist Klimt (whose market is rising) for $250, a Pascin sketch for $300 and a Derain nude for $450 -- prices which compare favorably to the $400 supposedly received by another dealer for a small drawing by the sensationally successful young American, Jasper Johns, whose lithographs start as low as $45. Finally, water colors are available at a slightly higher starting average than drawings, as are oils on paper.

Along with the renaissance in printmaking has come a boom for small sculpture suitable for table tops, speaker enclosures, room dividers, bookshelves and mantels. Inch for inch, sculpture usually costs more than other works of art, especially if cast in bronze. Sculptors such as Sahl Swarz, who lives and works in Verona, have been attracted to Italy by low casting charges (not to mention less mercenary inducements) which make it possible for Swarz to sell a nine-inch bronze out of his New York gallery for about $250 -- or $150 if duplicate castings are available. Modern techniques such as welding and the use of scrap metal and lightweight plastics have also shaved expenses for both the artist and collector, but a modestly sized junkyard cadaver by Richard Stankiewicz, one of the more successful younger sculptors working with discarded water tanks, old plumbing and the like, will cost the adventurous buyer $400. On the other hand, Leonard Baskin, whose large wood figures command prices as high as $10,000, produces reliefs that cost as little as $100 each.

As for collecting photographs, it is largely virgin territory. As far back as the late 19th Century, Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the old masters of American photography, was selling her prints through a regular dealer, but the aura that surrounds the princely patrons of painting has failed to form about the collector of photographs, possibly because it still is heatedly debated -- except by photographers -- whether photography is one of the fine arts. Though the enormous popularity of the medium may eventually decide the issue, few galleries can subsist now on the sale of photographs alone. The Image Gallery, a cooperative, is the only one in New York devoted solely to this field. In Boston the Siembab Gallery maintains a separate photography collection. America's major booster of the camera has been the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art, directed by the pioneer photographer, Edward Steichen. In response to a questionnaire recently sent out by the Museum's Lending Service, which, by the way, sells rather than rents photographs (price range, $25-$75), some interested buyers said they did not wish to pay higher prices for a photograph since the editions were usually unlimited and the pictures frequently turned up later in magazines. To main- (continued on page 146) Fine Art (continued from page 90) tain the rarity of the photograph it has been suggested that photographers print their work in specified editions and then destroy the negatives, just as printmakers generally destroy their plates. Photographs can be bought for less than $25 and for as much as $700, the top price announced for some studies of nudes by Irving Penn which were exhibited in a one-man show in a New York art gallery a couple of seasons ago.

Collectors are faced with almost unlimited choices from the new, the old, the antique. Modern art is just one item on the cultural shopping list. The sound of digging in some ancient ruin can be heard round the dealers' world. In the course of a day's roaming, one can rummage through selections of Egyptian amulets, Greek amphorae, Chinese ceramics and statuary, Japanese prints, Indian temple gods, Medieval tapestries, Renaissance cassoni, Alaskan totem poles, pre-Columbian effigies and African fetishes. Now and again some undiscovered artist of more recent vintage is plucked from obscurity (usually by another artist who feels something in common with his late tribesman). Whole periods sometimes become the rage. A good example is the period lumped under the heading of Americana, which Mrs. Edith Gregor Halpert, a dealer who specializes in this field, defines as art objects produced before 1850. This takes in everything from folk sculpture to weather vanes, which because of their abstract qualities are popular with collectors of modern sculpture. The days when an anonymous American primitive could be bought for as low as $100 are gone, however. Prices on such artists as William Harnett (1848-1892) have climbed as high as $25,000, but patient shopping may uncover a fetchingly humorous decoy for under $300 or a Shaker drawing that resembles a Paul Klee for a similarly modest sum.

Deciding whether to buy a specific work of art is a congenital difficulty of the novice collector. He may at first be drawn to subject matter, to the picturesque or sentimental qualities of a theme. It will probably be some time before he knows for certain what he likes. "Today's mistake may be tomorrow's masterpiece," says one dealer. On the other hand, today's mistake may be -- a mistake. The new collector can put his judgement to a test, at small cost to his budget and his ego. Art lending services have been established by museums throughout the country as part of their educational programs. The principle behind them is simple: one may rent a work at rates determined by the value of the piece. If the customer decides to keep it after a brief period, the rental fees are applied to the cost. Purchase prices are reasonable, from less than $100 to $750. The 10-year-old Art Lending Service of New York's Museum of Modern Art carries a stock of over 500 paintings, water colors, drawings, small sculpture and prints representative of about 400 artists. Rental fees range from $5 to $35 for two months. The works are selected from a number of cooperating -- meaning eager -- galleries by members of the Museum's Junior Council, which operates the program. Works may also be purchased from certain museum exhibitions -- like the Modern's New Talent shows or the Whitney Museum's Annual. Bull markets for "new talent" sometimes begin in these prestigious precincts.

In addition to galleries and museums, art auctions offer another source for the purchase of art. They are commonly of two kinds: the major auctions of large private collections and the auctions of the contents of houses where, once in a blue moon, an art "find" is uncovered. Bidding is usually done by dealers or by front men in the employ of museums or men of wealth; the bidding is fast and high and the scene is one the amateur collector would do well to avoid. Frequently, the auctioneers try to excite the gambling instinct and often succeed in unloading relatively worthless art objects and even forgeries on the untrained and the overexcited. If you do trust your taste and your temperament, there is one kind of auction worth your attention. This is the one given to raise money for some charitable cause in which the paintings are contributed by artists, galleries and collectors. Certainly, for the action and the purchasing potential they offer, at least one of these affairs is worth attending.

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Modern art has reached a complicated crossroads today, with roughly three wide routes attracting the heaviest traffic.

One is the road that leads straight ahead -- that is, abstract art itself, with its traditions deep in the artistic history of the century. Yet its most recent out-croppings are a compote of many splinter groups of which American abstract expressionism -- a term invented by critic Robert Coates -- has been the dominating force, the first American plastic art form to export influence rather than import it. Abstract expressionism, or "action painting," was described by the critic Harold Rosenberg in a now famous essay, The. American Action Painters, as follows:

The New American painting is not "pure" art.... The apples ... had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.... The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in mind. He went up to it with material in front of him. The image would be the result of that encounter.... What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

This text soon became gospel and the "events" that followed led Hilton Kramer, editor of Arts, to accuse Rosenberg of defining "a predicament as an instance of cultural heroism."

Abstract art abroad, insofar as it too is an "event," comes under such headings as art informel, art autre and tachisme in France, and Spazialismo in Italy. In all there is what Rosenberg describes as a "gesturing with materials," which varies from the free and even dripped application of paint by the late Jackson Pollock to equally unpremeditated "actions" by informalists (such as Jean Fautrier, who works up pasty little masses on small canvases) to the "spatialism" of Luco Fontana, who makes a few neat incisions in a blank canvas with a razor blade. In the last decade, after years of opposition to their work, the Americans Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still (and, of course, the late Pollock) have become world famous and the colossi of a movement that includes James Brooks, Milton Resnick, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Jack Tworkov. At the moment of its greatest affluence abroad, however, the movement has come in for renewed opposition at home. When The New American Painting, an exhibition devoted to abstract expressionism in America, returned to the United States in 1959 after a controversial tour of eight European countries, some critics declared that the day of reckoning for action painting was at hand. A sensation in Europe (despite an anguished plea -- "Save me from the great string spider webs" -- by an English critic), the exhibition, assembled for a final time in the Museum of Modern Art, seemed to some to be on the verge of committing to history an individualistic movement barely more than 15 years old.

Nevertheless, a so-called second and even third generation is actively attempting to continue the line of succession. Alfred Leslie and Michael Goldberg are joined by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frank-enthaler and Grace Hartigan in following the explosive examples of their predecessors. But while they attack a canvas with the same physical wallop -- Leslie works with broad dripping planes and strokes of color more than six inches wide, Mitchell sends trellises of smashed line lurching over the surface -- they seem more aware of the painting as a picture than as an "event." Though the ladies don't care to be singled out as such, their prominence in the new wave emphasizes the almost refined sort of action painting that is typical of it.

Abstract art has been characterized by (continued on page 153) its diversity of styles and schools, rapidly succeeding each other -- among artists and collectors. In the last decade abstract expressionism has ruled the roost, but a style known as geometric painting has retained the loyalty of many artists and now seems to be emerging as the second avenue of escape from a hyperromantic era. Geometric painting is somewhat inaccurately regarded as "classic" with its emphasis on distinct shapes, primary color and a passion for order. Its purest form was that devised by Piet Mondrian, the Dutch artist who died in 1944 and is famed for his ascetic compositions of rectangles divided by black lines. Mondrian claimed few converts to his neoplasticism among American artists, most of whom were working on cubist models 25 years ago. Burgoyne Diller, the first American to attempt this "pure" plastic expression (around 1934) had his first one-man show in more than 10 years two seasons ago, and the revival of interest in this style may affect the fortunes of artists like Fritz Glarner, who have more or less remained faithful to the right angle. Josef Albers, who paints squares within squares of tonal color, is now in his 70s and has endured the vacillations of taste remarkably well, partly because his esthetic pedigree includes the internationally influential Bauhaus, whose faculty boasted Klee and Kandinsky. Interest has also been drawn to a group of artists, epitomized by Ellsworth Kelly and Myron Stout, who employ rounded shapes for which an English critic has invented the term "hard-edge" painting.

Modern art's third road is that of realism. As abstract expressionism has swarmed over the cultural landscape, knocking off museums and galleries one by one, in a campaign that goes back to the mid-Thirties, realism has lost the prestige value that the market rewards with high prices. (In 1940 a group known as the American Abstract Artists picketed the "reactionary" Museum of Modern Art, which today is first in line for the fruits of their revolution.) But the pendulum may be swinging back; in the spring of 1962 the Museum of Modern Art will devote a major exhibition to figure painting. Some of the new realists are not so new, having resisted the sirens of abstraction while exploring the free spaces of modern art in their own ways. Associated at least geographically with the New York School, a catch-all designation for the avant-garde spirit of the New York art scene, these artists have emerged as counterrevolutionaries in spite of themselves. Yet their realism is as varied as the "actions" of the abstract expressionists. Fairfield Porter's bleached and taciturn family scenes, portraits and cityscapes derive from Corot, Vuillard and Hopper. Leland Bell, on the other hand, attacks the figure again and again with loose ribbons of paint and translucent washes that never rest. Philip Pearlstein specializes in Roman ruins and the rocks of the Amalfi Coast.

Nothing has so dramatized the shift in modern American painting as the swiftly formed San Francisco School that has swept out of the West with a muscular realism which some observers have criticized as abstract painting in realistic guise. Despite their programmatic emphasis on the figure, the Bay Area realists tend to suppress precise detail beneath a rich lather of paint whose expressive qualities derive from abstract expressionism. When he turned from abstractions, David Park, an early San Francisco innovator who died in 1960, merely inserted chunky figures that seemed to catch at the viscous streams of paint. But Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff have since polished up the style. Diebenkorn, who made his first big impact on the East in 1958, is not only the most influential painter of the group but is probably the most expensive younger painter (39) in the United States. His $900-$ 10,000 bracket exceeds the range of the most publicized new-wave abstractionists such as Leslie ($525-$7500) or Mitchell ($600-$4500) and easily outdistances the New York School realists, including Porter ($250-$2400) and Bell ($200-$1500). Diebenkorn's $900 painting -- there was only one in his exhibition last season -- measured about 8 by 6 inches. (The larger prices sound impressive -- they are meant to but how much work is actually sold at these prices remains a gallery secret.)

The eccentric expression of a group of way-out artists known as neo-dadaists is also currently in vogue. Exploiting the current appetite for anything "new" or "different," the neo-dadaists, like their namesakes of 1917, make a work of art with anything that comes to hand -- ties, stamps, dolls, buckets and even more peculiar objects. Some recent productions have been wired for sound, blinking lights and absurd movement. The Swiss artist Tinguely, who dropped leaflets from a plane over the city of Düsseldorf, Germany, some years ago, advising the residents that "immobility does not exist," produced a giant machine that was designed to destroy itself (in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) -- and failed; he has also developed machines which "paint" abstract pictures when set in motion. Robert Rauschenberg, a young American, has wrapped an automobile tire around a stuffed angora buck. Rauschenberg's friend, Jasper Johns, is considered by some a neo-dadaist because of his eccentric subject matter -- numbers, flags, targets and fool-the-eye sculpture of books, light bulbs and beer cans; others consider him an underground realist. But while this neo-dadaist revival may be ushering in the electronic era of modern art, it constitutes only one of the more manic aspects of the contemporary scene. (A Parisian named Yves Klein coats a model with paint, then has her roll around on the canvas according to his directions. Print collectors take note.)

Sculpture, having remained largely aloof from the palace revolutions of the day, is gaining for itself a reputation as the most solid citizen of abstract art. Sculpture calls for hard physical labor and technical skills that can't be faked, and the materials involved are usually expensive. Abstract sculpture runs largely to open-form welded metal constructions (as opposed to the solid statuary of old), though direct carving and bronze casting are making a substantial comeback. Welding has lightened the monumental works of David Smith and Reuben Nakian, two elder statesman of the modern movement, and on the whole, abstract sculpture has retained its experimental vigor, using scrap metal (very popular now), scrap wood and plaster. In another, quite different category are the serpentine loops of highly polished stainless steel of precisionist José de Rivera, an artist of the older generation that includes Herbert Ferber and Ibram Lassaw. At 61, Louise Nevelson has scored an astonishing success with her bizarre wooden constructions that cover entire walls, while Peter Agostini has overthrown more conventional modeling for direct casting in plaster of virtually any object -- including plungers, light bulbs, crumpled paper and buckled pieces of sheet metal. James Rosati, who was the subject of two feature articles published simultaneously in Arts and Arts News in 1959, produces work that has a Brancusi-like simplicity. Raoul Hague's reputation, founded on a sculpture of stocky, organic forms, seems to grow in proportion to his absence from the exhibition rat race. Among younger sculptors, abstract expressionism has infiltrated the work of John Chamberlain, who twists scrap metal into masses that resemble demolished automobiles. Chicago's young Richard Hunt has attracted attention with the expressively organic character of his bulbous and tentacular metal figures.

Interestingly, modern sculpture has admitted the human image without a fuss, or at least without the fanfare that has attended its inroads into abstract painting. But by avant-garde standards, the representational sculptors have been most reactionary, concerned with human and spiritual values for the sake of something besides art. Leonard Baskin's bald, gimlet-eyed, slightly paunchy men are both heroic and anxious. William King exorcises the demon of conformity with a man in a gray sheet metal suit, while the redemptive aspects of faith are explored in the religious subjects of artists like Jack Zajac.

No categories, however arbitrary, are broad enough to contain the various eruptions of the modern style. Abstract expressionism, for instance, includes the mangled figures of a de Kooning and the looming color masses of a Rothko. No "ism" will hold Lee Bontecou, who constructs volcanic-looking objects with canvas and wire that are neither paintings nor sculptures, or the strong many-materialed collages of Chicago's Harry Bouras, or H. C. Westermann, whose spooky toy houses and gingerbread idols constitute a nightmarish comment on the morals and mores of the modern world. The realists themselves come in more than 57 varieties. Larry Rivers paints a half-realistic, half-abstract idea that could be called semiabstract, as could the paintings of two highly respected older artists, Balcomb Greene and Milton Avery. Finally, such perennial favorites as Morris Graves and Jack Levine, the former a nature-mystic, the latter a social realist, indicate the broad perimeter of the battle between revolution and tradition in modern art.

The effects of all this esthetic turmoil on the investment picture remain to be seen. There is talk that the investment opportunities of abstract expressionism have been, if not exhausted, noticeably diminished by the high starting prices. The lowest price for a de Kooning, if one were available, would be between $3000 and $4000. One collector has reportedly put a $200,000 price tag on his mural-sized Pollock, while another was offered $10,000 for a Pollock which measures about 36 by 28 inches. In 1940, Franz Kline painted 10 large canvases for a Greenwich Village bar for five dollars per painting and materials; his large works are now among the most expensive in the world. Even some museums have been forced to buy on the installment plan, and the feeling seems to be growing that modern art, especially by younger painters, is pricing itself out of the market. One dealer predicts that the moment of truth will come when their work hits the auction circuit in large numbers. For the time being, the bidding on younger abstract expressionists is largely in the speculative stage, with collectors gambling on the hope that one may turn out to be a goose that produces golden eggs. (Paintings may be bought directly from an artist at less than gallery price, if he does not mind violating his contract with his dealer.) No living American abstract painter today commands the prices of less glamorized but more popular artists, such as Andrew Wyeth, who received the highest sum ever given for a painting by a living American -- $35,000, paid last year by the Philadelphia Museum for the highly representational Ground Hog Day. In addition, modern European masters continued to be the big drawing cards in the auction market. A Cubist Composition by Braque, now 79, was knocked down for $145,000 at an auction of modern work in April of last year, a sale that netted $871,850 through bidding via closed-circuit television from New York to audiences in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas. (When Degas was asked how he felt about one of his paintings bringing $100,000 at auction, he replied, "Just as the horse that has won a race feels when a beautiful cup is given to the jockey.") An indication of what abstract art (by established names) is bringing at auction can be drawn from the $11,000 and $9000 paid in 1960 for paintings by Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, two French contemporaries of our older abstract expressionists, neither of whose works had previously been sold in New York at auction. The shock waves created by auction prices spread rapidly through the market. Commenting on the galleries' record 1959-1960 season, Leslie A. Hyam, president of Parke-Bernet Galleries, a leading New York auction house, noted a general rise in prices over the previous season of at least 20 percent.

The rise has taken many artists along with it, artists who could be bought cheaply two or three years ago. A painting by Fairfield Porter comparable to one that cost $300 a few years ago now costs $750. In less than two years the prices of Lee Bontecou's constructions soared from $250-$900 to $500-$3000. Once a really hot prospect turns up, the price levels shift crazily. Take the case of 30-year-old Jasper Johns. Three years ago the Museum of Modern Art purchased three works from John's first one-man show. Let a museum place its imprimatur on a work, and collectors react as though they had just had cataracts removed from both eyes. Johns was an immediate success and his high price now runs well upward of $5000. Similiarly eight of young (24) Frank Roth's paintings were sold before the opening of his first one-man show in 1960 -- three to museums. His price range is now $1400 to $3000. Jan Muller, who died in 1958 at the age of 35, once sold paintings for as low as $50. Now his paintings begin at "not under" $1000.

Dealers advise the young collector to search out the comers. "If you want to make money," one said recently, "there's a great group of partially recognized talent to choose from." For what it's worth, the writer went on to list Miles Forst, Alfred Leslie, George Segal, John Grillo, Wolf Kahn, Mary Frank, Alex Katz and Richard McElroy -- a mixed bag that includes both representational and abstract painters and a single sculptor, Mary Frank. Noted art critic Clemont Greenberg recently picked out two Washington, D.C., abstractionists, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, as "the best new Americans working today." Usually an artist over 35 is difficult to promote as "promising," that enticing adjective for collectors who want to get in on the ground floor. But this situation may be changing in a market that shows need for fresh blood.

In pushing the newer artists, dealers generally try to follow the rule put so succinctly by Fortune magazine years ago: "To arrive at prices high enough to create prestige but low enough to sell pictures." Since prices on a given painter go by size rather than quality, dealers are saved from the potentially embarrassing need to make value judgments -- though, by some coincidence, they invariably admire the works they handle anyway. Some dealers reason that the average collector feels that a low price is an indication either that the work is inferior or not in demand -- which in their minds come to the same thing. (Big taxpayers who buy paintings to contribute to museums at increased evaluations and claim the deductions -- a practice now being looked into by the Justice Department -- prefer higher prices.) The master art salesman of them all, Sir Joseph Duveen, who stocked many a millionaire's private collection at the turn of the century, used the high price psychology himself. He would tell a difficult client, "You can get all the pictures you want at $50,000 apiece -- that's easy. But to get pictures at a quarter of a million apiece -- that wants doing."

Last season one dealer's client balked at what he considered too steep a price for a painting by a well-known living American artist, now on in years and with a Whitney retrospective exhibition behind him. Whereupon the man's wife chided him. "But aren't you glad the prices are rising?" She understood that for the moment at least, the high price was an infallible index of both investment value and prestige. The price in question was a mere $2500 or so, but the lady was thinking like Duveen.

Works of art are as individual as fingerprints. Each is one of a kind; each in its own way is unique. But some are masterpieces, and as such they are "priceless." True, some may be had for a price -- say, the $970,000 Andrew Mellon paid for Raphael's Cowper Madonna, but while such a figure indicates the extent of the fascination the work has exerted over the minds of men, it does not tell anything about the work of art. The collector who is an investor -- and one suspects that his type predominates -- cannot be immune to the esthetics of his inventory; his profits depend on it. He may, in fact, be more discerning than the tyro who buys out of love. But for love or money, art cannot be described nor its meaning bared. They are the unknown qualities at which the present can only guess and which history must finally approve.