Art: Art over the Counter

This year the biggest annual business in the U.S. art market for the past decade will probably be done by a Manhattan department store, Gimbels. Last week Gimbels’ art turnover was running at a rate estimated at close to $6,000,000 a year.

Gimbels’ venture in art selling started last winter when the agents in charge of William Randolph Hearst’s art hoard cast about for some method of converting it quickly into cash. Dr. Armand Hammer, head of Manhattan’s Hammer Galleries, gave them the idea of selling it through a department store. So successful was the Hearst sale that Gimbels decided to keep on selling big art collections on consignment, put ace Art Salesman Hammer in charge.

Gimbels sells art objects like hotcakes. With the Hearst collection already half disposed of, it knocked down and dispersed the collection of the late Clarence Mackay and the fittings of J. P. Morgan’s yacht Corsair. Last month when Gimbels announced a sale of 500 original Turners from the collection of the late John E. Anderson (priced from $11.75 up), buyers from all over the U.S. joined a public stampede. In two days the 500 Turners had been sold.

Last week Gimbels scattered over its art floor 1,000 Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Oriental antiques from the collections of Manhattan’s Mrs. John Morrin and Boston’s Mrs. Wilmot Evans, did a rushing business in sphinxes, mummies, antique jewelry (from $1.45 up).

Gimbels has several big advantages over the auctioneers. It can regularly sell art on credit and on the installment plan. Its tremendous turnover permits lower commissions than the auction galleries. Most important: plain people take to the fixed price tags and businesslike counter displays of department-store art as naturally as they would to a furniture or clothing sale. Said Salesman Hammer:

“People are a little terrified at going into an art gallery. They feel that they are surrounded by professionals who make them timid. But no one has ever had an inferiority complex about going into a department store.”