The first wise rule of collecting is to start with beauty. Try to find it, try to understand it. It leads you into interesting discoveries about yourself, as you find out what kind of beauty speaks to you. It also leads you into an education in what has been beautiful in the history of man, during different times, in different cultures.
The first stop in one's education about beauty needs to be a museum. However, for many people there isn't a world class museum next door. The alternate place to learn is a library that has strong holdings in art history books. Barring that, the internet.
Many artists begin their own education with reproductions of masterworks. They assemble works they love on the studio wall, sometimes in reproductions the size of a postcard. Collectors might be wise to begin their own search in a similar manner. Before you buy real art, start collecting reproductions (including ones printed off the internet) to use in adorning your wall with images that have meaning for you. It's the first step in connoisseurship that ultimately leads to buying real works.
That said, consider this: the Degas at the top of this post is already in a museum and would be beyond the financial resources of most collectors even if it were on the market. But the nude drawn with sanguine conte by Don Srull that I saw recently in a regional art venue was priced at $300. It's a beautiful work. Whether Srull will make future works as valuable as Degas is uncertain, perhaps unlikely. But he has already assimilated certain characteristics of figure drawing, learned ideas from predecessors like Degas which he translates with wonderful and sensitive mastery.
If I wanted an elegant, classic image for my living room, I would invest $300 in a work like this.
I am not arguing that buying a beautiful drawing like this one is the end product of collecting. Quite the contrary, this might be the wise first step.
To see some paintings in my own collection, click here.
2 comments:
You could also start with ugliness or repulsion. You could learn just as much, if not more - about mankind or yourself, by examining what turns you off or what challenges your constructs.
Your comment raises an interesting question -- actually several interesting questions. But the one I have in mind has to do with "beginnings." I advised new collectors to begin with beauty because beauty involves the "ideal" and lifts us "up." However, the notion of how beauty is recognized is not trivial. Finding beauty means stretching yourself beyond commonplace notions into a more complex realm.
I wasn't, for instance, saying people should confine themselves to what is pretty. (Though if they want pretty things, why not?) But beauty in a deeper sense includes ugliness sometimes. Certainly many artists have historically sought out beauty in exactly the opposite places where one would expect to find it, as in the faces of the aged or in scenes of tragedy. (Think of Goya.)
But this subject is very complex.
The reason I didn't advise people to begin with ugliness or repulsion is that a whole philosophy already advises that exact idea. Indeed, the current wisdom is that art is defined by its being "disturbing," a notion that I reject and which I think we see underminded by centuries of the opposite.
Second reason goes back to "beginnings." If you are a new collector, why start with the negative. I think there needs to be a reason and I cannot, myself, find any very good one for starting with subjects that make you feel troubled, particularly if you're going to be living with the image day by day.
And I would take issue with the statement that we learn "more" about mankind through the ugly. That's a philosophical difference. I think beauty is so difficult and problematic that the evidence is we learn more through exploring it. Making pretty things is not so hard. Making, finding, discovering, exploring beauty is, I think, very very hard work.
Thanks for your comments. Hope you'll contribute again.
The Art Writer
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