.
At the MoMA Abstraction show (which I hope to write about after Miami), several vitrines held papers and publications documenting the early days of the movement. The price list shown above was one of them. (Click pic to see an enlarged image.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
The Smithsonian houses the Betty Parsons archive, where you can read through dozens of similar items, plus correspondence and other juicy historical tidbits. It's an amazing collection of art history.
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/parsbett/
It's so ironic that the only billionaires from art sales are not artists or even dealers, but more and more just people who could be buying and selling pork bellies - that is if the port bellies had a famous name attached to them to give the deal some cachet.
I do like looking at this old timey stuff because it's such a different world. Do you know when this price list was made up, Joanne?
It's true that the people who make the most money from these (or any) paintings are the collectors, who them sell them 30 years later at auction. Well, those secondary dealers aren't doing too bad, either.
My camera cropped off the date of the MoMA show, but the latest year of work listed is from 1959, so let's assume the show took place that year that year or the early Sixties.
FYI, in 2010 dollars, the $2,500 paintings would be $20,000, the $5,000 paintings would be $40,000 and the $7,500 paintings would be $60,000.
Post a Comment