Art: Boom In Old Masters

Europe’s refugees, made shrewd by wars and revolutions, long ago discovered a special value in art—namely, it is the most golden of all gilt-edged investments. Buying by wealthy refugees last season set Manhattan’s 57th Street galleries and auction houses humming like stock exchanges, helped roll up the biggest art business since 1929.

Index of this boom were the annual sales figures announced last week by Manhattan’s largest (and newest) art dealer, Gimbel Brothers Department Store. Gimbels’ sales—$5,255,000—more than doubled last year’s. Fifty-Seventh Street’s largest art auctioneers, swank Parke-Bernet Galleries,* ran second with $4,007,823.35, an increase of 10%. Smaller dealers reported similar increases. What share had been bought by refugees could not be positively figured, for Manhattan’s art impresarios are as secretive about their clients as doctors about their patients. But most of them agreed that refugees had bought about one-third of the total.

Contemporary U.S. art slumped far below normal. Old masters sold best. Close behind them came a bargain-counter rush in medieval halberds and maces, paneled Tudor interiors, stained-glass windows, Louis XIV chairs, a heterogeneous collection of like knickknacks. The flush market was fed by the breaking up of such huge, tax-harried U.S. estates and collections as those of William Randolph Hearst, Harry Payne Whitney, Mrs. Christian R. Holmes.

At the Parke-Bernet Galleries, fabulously wealthy Belgian Baron Cassel van Doom stumped pompously to every important sale, solemnly focused a pair of high-powered binoculars on everything that reached the auction block. At Gimbels 84-year-old Spanish Millionaire José Lazaro Galdeano, his loud necktie half hidden by a grey spade beard, bought right & left, walked off with one of the season’s most expensive buys ($26,742): François Boucher’s L’Amour, reputedly posed by Mme. de Pompadour (see cut).

Last week the Spaniard was bidding for the year’s prize white elephant, William Randolph Hearst’s $500,000 dismantled Spanish monastery. Marked down to a mere $19,000, it involved an important joker: the buyer must cart it away. Even to a nearby site, the freight would run into big money.

Season’s biggest sale at Parke-Bernet was 18th-Century British Painter John Hoppner’s Portrait of Miss Frances Beresjord (see cut), bought for $39,000 by the famous art-dealing firm of Duveen’s. It was lavishly topped, however, by the season’s record high ($175,000), for Renoir’s Mussel Fishers at Berneval (one of the two highest-priced Renoirs in existence). The buyer: Merion, Pa.’s terrible-tempered Dr. Albert C. Barnes.

Why Refugees Buy. Some collectors bought mainly to fill out gaps in carefully balanced art collections. Many another buyer regarded his purchases as a hedge against possible inflation.

Reminisced one Manhattan dealer: “I remember sometime after the last war selling a Vigée-Lebrun for $90,000. And in the very worst year of the depression—1933—I resold it for $70,000. When you consider the decline in the value of gilt-edged stocks in that year the $20,000 drop was scarcely anything at all.”

Refugees bought art for still further reasons. Old masters are readily transportable, fairly negotiable, less liable to confiscation than currency. And unlike diamonds, they can cross nearly every international boundary duty-free.

* This week Parke-Bernet will auction off no tons of pea coal, 35 cords of wood. Commented Auctioneer Otto Bernet: “There is a good deal of local interest in the coal.”