Art: Artist to Consumer

Four years ago a black-haired, effervescent young Manhattan pressagent noticed that, while contemporary art was getting national publicity, it had no national market. He mentioned this to several artists: Peggy Bacon, Thomas Benton, John Steuart Curry, Doris Lee. All agreed that Manhattan’s 57th Street galleries were about as remote as Tiffany’s from most U.S. followers of art. Upshot of their counsels was an organization called the Associated American Artists. The young pressagent, Reeves Lewenthal, raised $10,000 to start on, and his artist friends made etchings and lithographs to sell at $5 apiece.

After two years of unsuccessful selling through department stores, Director Lewenthal decided to go straight to the people with a mail-order catalogue. His first advertisement brought 3,000 letters and in the next two years 120,000 people wrote for catalogues, 70,000 bought pictures. In 1937 the 53 artist-members of Associated American Artists made $103,000 and nothing was more thoroughly exploded than the old notion that plain Americans won’t buy black-&-white pictures. Director Lewenthal decided to expand.

This week the expansion of A.A.A. made news to an art public which has watched the course of color reproduction in the U.S. with critical reserve. On sale in 101 U.S. cities and by mail order, went a portfolio of twelve big color prints of water colors, pastels and oils by A.A.A. artists, $7.50 per print, nine of the twelve the exact size of the original. These reproductions, product of several years’ research by Edward Stern & Co., Inc., Philadelphia, appeared to be the richest and most faithful yet turned out in the U.S. Fated for popularity: Grant Wood’s Woman with Plants, which impressed the artist as better than the original oil.