Market Reports
THOMAS COLVILLE
Owner
Thomas Colville Fine Art
In Paris and Rome this summer, I visited some of the great museums as well as some not so well known... Sometimes it is easier to make discoveries where not everybody is looking. Now collectors are crowding around contemporary art where only the super-rich can buy major works. Even the price of second level examples by popular contemporary artists is out of reach for the average collector. It should make sense now to seek visual pleasure where others may not be looking. American art of the 19th and early 20th century is just the place today. While the availability of masterpieces is not what it was thirty years ago, first rate works are still coming on the market at comparatively reasonable prices.
Based on my sales from this past season I have observed the following market trends.
With the demand for the work of current women and African American artists at an all-time high, there has also developed an interest in these categories from earlier periods. I have recently sold major paintings by Mary Fairchild Macmonnies Low and the African-american abstract painter
Alvin Loving for a fraction of the prices of comparable contemporary artists of similar stature. There are great opportunities now in first rate works on paper. The Hood Museum recently acquired a major early Joseph Stella drawing of Pittsburgh. Early genre painting continues to be of interest to museums.
The Virginia Museum recently acquired an important David Gilmour Blythe. American impressionism, not as enthusiastically sought after by collectors today, is a relative bargain compared to pre-2007 prices. I was able to sell a John Twachtman Connecticut landscape for half of what it would have cost 12 years ago. I am also finding a lot of new interest in American abstract works from the 1930s and ’40s, and have recently sold paintings by Charles Green Shaw, George L. K. Morris, Albert Gallatin, Werner Drewes and Raymond Jonson. Finally, Rockwell
Kent, who for years was stigmatized for his political views is enjoying new market attention, and I was able to place a large Greenland painting in a major private collection.
Collectors and museum curators through access to the internet can now more easily recognize opportunities when they encounter works of both imagination and enduring quality. The expansion of visual literacy and an overall increase in critical discernment is no doubt due to the wide dispersal of visual information in this digital age.
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