Student Notes
09:14
Buying Art for Interior Design & Styling
Buying art is a personal thing; some clients have a clear idea about what they like,
whilst others really just want something to brighten up their interiors. However, the reality is that buying art is
much more accessible than we may think.
It’s important that buyers and collectors have a really positive,
affirming experience looking for artwork and making a purchase. After all, owning an original piece of art is
a joy to cherish.
Here are 10
tips for making your first purchase on behalf of your client or helping them
adding to their collection:
(1) Buy art that you love, that moves you, that stirs some kind
of reaction in you or that you connect with aesthetically or emotionally. The
art market is volatile and unpredictable and the unfortunate reality is that
few artists make it into the big leagues. Those that do, do so for a host of
reasons, not all of which have anything to do with their work. As such, the
likelihood of seeing a significant financial return on your investment is
small. You are going to be looking at the piece for many years so you’d better
love it. That said, make sure you get a certificate of authenticity from the
gallery and keep it somewhere safe, together with the invoice. You may need it
for insurance purposes or if you have discovered the next Damien Hirst.
(2) You don’t need a degree in art history but it is worth you
getting a feel for the market and prices, which means doing some research. Visit
a range of galleries, search online, stop by art fairs and ask friends. If you
are looking at the work of a quality emerging artist in a gallery you can
expect to pay in the region of £500 to £5,000 + depending on the piece itself,
the size and the medium. You can pick up small pieces on paper for less but
larger, more significant pieces will be more. Expect to pay an inflated price
if you are buying art in tourist locations or resorts.
(3) As you do your research, you’ll also refine your preferences
and start to zone in on certain styles and genres. This may happen
without you realizing. Use something like Pinterest to save images of pieces
you love or mark them in a book or magazine. Then take a step back and see
where your taste has taken you. You can then target galleries that match your
style. Anecdotally, I have seen collectors’ tastes shift over the years, moving
from figurative and representational to expressionist and abstract.
(4) Once you’ve identified a couple of galleries, build a
relationship. Like buying houses, you might land on the first piece you
see or you may need to look around and go back for several viewings. If you
build a relationship with the gallery, you’ll have someone who can look after
you, help you navigate the gallery and find the right piece.
(5) Ask questions. Find out more about the artists, their
background, the inspiration behind their work and their point of view. You
might also want to know about how long they’ve been producing art, what other
galleries represent them, what shows their work has appeared in and any awards
or prizes they’ve won. Also ask whether there are any more works by a
particular artist that aren’t on display or whether you can commission the
artist through the gallery.
(6) Prints, particularly limited edition prints, are a great and
potentially more affordable route into art buying and collecting.
However, I’d encourage you to buy original pieces. Knowing the work was created
by the artist’s hands and is truly unique is a hugely satisfying part of the
process.
(7) While art buying
and collecting is largely an emotional, intuitive experience, pragmatism also
plays a part. Measure the spaces you have in mind for the piece and
check it will fit. Can you carry it home? Will it fit in the car or will it
need to be shipped? Factor in the price of shipping and framing, if necessary,
into your purchase.
(8) Imagine the piece
in your home. Artwork can look spectacular in a white-walled
minimalist gallery but how will it look in your space? In the past I have
printed an image of the piece I’m considering and taped it to the wall to
see how it looks.
(9) Sign up to gallery newsletters and follow art blogs. This
way you’ll be able to see new work from your favorite artists and new artists
joining the gallery or emerging on the scene.
You will be invited to openings and this way you can see your favourite
artists work first hand and maybe even get to chat with the artist themselves.
(10) If your client or you already have a collection, think
purposefully about the pieces you want to add. Do you want to diversify
your style or keep to a theme? Do you want to collect more pieces from the same
artists or do you want to add the work of different artists? There are no right
or wrong answers but be intentional in your thinking.
In the UK at the moment interior designers and
art galleries work hand in hand together, and many will work on re-colouring
the artwork so that it fits into the client’s colour scheme.
Many
people have paintings or prints with which to decorate their walls, yet so
often they pay little attention to displaying them really well. As with collections, the golden rule is to
group them wherever possible. Vertical
arrangements can be very effective. Good
lighting is a must; if you want your clients to enjoy a fine painting it makes
no sense to hang it in semi-darkness.
FOR LONDON SCHOOL OF TRENDS BY SARA CORKER ( http://www.saracorkerdesigns.com/)
FOR LONDON SCHOOL OF TRENDS BY SARA CORKER ( http://www.saracorkerdesigns.com/)
BECOMING AN ART CONNOISSEUR
From Art for Dummies...
There
have been many gifted and sharp-eyed curators (keepers and protectors) in the
129-year history of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — hundreds of them,
expert in fields as diverse as ancient Egypt, Arms and Armor, and Prints,
Drawing, and Photographs. Line up the letters designating the advanced degrees
held by the curators who worked at the Metropolitan over the years — those
M.A.s, M.F.A.s, and Ph.D.s — and they’d stretch from Maine to Oregon. Yet, the
single most accomplished curator in the history of the grand institution had no
advanced degree and was self-taught in art history. He was, for most of his
life, a stockbroker. His name was William Ivins, and he was responsible for
establishing the all-encompassing Prints collection. He was perhaps the most
legendary “eye” or connoisseur in the history of the Metropolitan.
What
is an “eye”? Simply, someone who can instantly spot quality in art in all its
subtle gradations. How did Bill Ivins become such a special “eye”? First, he
had the urge to know about art, and second, he possessed an inborn talent for
appreciating art, which he may not have recognized for some years. But he
needed more than that. He recognized he’d never be able to appreciate art in
the right way if he didn’t get saturated.
The
bottom line of connoisseurship and art appreciation is saturation — seeing it
all. Ivins immersed himself in prints, tens of thousands of them of all kinds
and levels of quality. Soon he was cataloging in his keen mind every unique
quality — the strokes of genius and the glitches, too. If you examine every one
of thousands of existing prints of Rembrandt van Rijn, those in great condition,
the messed up ones, the genuine articles, the copies and fakes, in a shorter
time than you think, you’ll be able to recognize quality. Ivins did. Just by
opening his eyes and looking.
DISTINGUISHING
THE GOOD FROM THE BAD
If
you keenly examine every painting, sketch, or drawing by that grand Flemish
master of the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens — there are hundreds — you’ll be
able to distinguish yards away which one is real and which questionable. If you
saturate yourself in absolutely everything Claude Monet ever painted, no matter
if that painting is hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, in the Getty in Los
Angeles, or in the bedroom of some wealthy private collector on Park Avenue,
you’ll become an expert in Monet. After a total immersion, you’ll be able to
spot a top piece — or a phony — a hundred feet away.
You
don’t have to start at such heights. If you saturate yourself starting with
those ceramic green frogs or clowns on black velvet, you’ll soon gravitate to
something better and better, and before you know it, you’ll be blissfully
soaking up Rembrandt prints, or Monet paintings, or drawings by Peter Paul
Rubens. Gravitating upward is the normal process — it’s all but automatic with
the passage of time.
EXAMINING
THE REAL THING
Book
learning and attending countless lectures by the best art professors and
scholars may help sharpen your eye. But they won’t equal a gradual and complete
saturation. When you look at works of art, grill them as though they were
living human beings. Ask questions! Why is something this way, and something
else that way? Peel the work of art like an onion with your eyes! Interrogate
it.
For
example, a certain piece had been given to the Metropolitan in the early 1930s
by a wealthy industrialist who’d specialized in collecting medieval
reliquaries. Finger reliquaries are the rarest of the rare — and ones
embellished with emeralds were unique. This object was stunning and very
costly, but it was not 13th century. It was a fraud. To find out something like
this, you might ask questions like the following:
Why
can’t the emerald ring be removed? That was a bad sign, for no genuine finger
reliquary would ever be adorned, when it was made, with such a secular
ornament. Rings were always added later in homage to the saint whose finger
bone was preserved in the finger.
Why
were there three small silver hallmarks on one of the feet? The problem was
that they were typical export marks only applied to gold, not silver, and
during the 18th, not the 13th, century, in France, not Germany.
Why
was the black material making up the inscription (which happened to be
unreadable, by the way) actually made of common tar? The material should be a
hard jet-black enamel (called niello).
The
problematical answers to the questions all summed up to the reliquary being a
fake, made, no doubt, to trap the rich collector who had to pay dearly because,
naturally, the emerald was real. In time, through saturation, art connoisseurs
can conduct their own interrogations and find whatever inconsistencies existed.
You can’t learn how to do this by reading books or attending seminars.
KEEPING
YOUR EYE IN TUNE
It
doesn’t matter how you go about gorging yourself. To see originals is vital,
but photographs can keep your eye constantly trained. One of the keenest great,
late art dealers never went to sleep without poring through dozens of
photographs of a wide variety of works. Keeping his eye in tune.
Saturation
means not only examining all the originals of the artist or period. It also
means a judicial reading of the scholarly literature and picking through
specialist magazines. But the bottom line is looking, looking, and more
looking. Looking will transform a totally untrained person with a keen mind and
good vision (for it helps a lot to have great eyesight or polished glasses)
into a superior art expert. And the beauty is that anyone can do it with a
little obsession and a little time.
The
bottom line is never pass up the opportunity to look hard at any work of art
(even those frogs), and pass your fingers over its surface (if you’re allowed),
and ask a bunch of sharp questions. You will invariably discover something
revealing and profound.
TIPS
FOR APPRECIATING AND EVALUATING ART
Art
is for enjoyment, fun, lifting your spirits. Looking at art should be a pleasurable,
immediate experience. You can read about art, but looking at it is the only way
to appreciate it. To enlarge your appreciation, follow these tips:
Look
at ten works of art each day and your life will change for the better.
Art
and politics never mix.
Art
is not utilitarian.
Forget
about art as an investment. Maybe in 50 years the prices of your works will be
higher than when you bought them, but probably not.
Collect
living artists. That way you’ll never buy a fake. You’ll also gain great
satisfaction in knowing you’re supporting a cause not usually known for its
economic well-being.
Every
work of art, except for those finished yesterday, has changed from its original
appearance.
A
reproduction is always a pale reflection of the original.
Be
sure to watch what kind of art your children are creating. One — or more —
could have that super touch.
To
judge whether a work of art is any good, ask the following questions about it
to see how many can be answered yes:
Does it express successfully what it’s
intending to express?
Does it amaze you in a different way each
time you look at it?
Does it grow in stature?
Does it continually mature?
Does its visual impact of mysterious, pure
power increase every day?
Is it unforgettable?
THE
GREATEST ART WORKS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Any
compilation of the greatest art is sure to be subjective. But the works in the
following list are the ones that made the cut for Thomas Hoving, former
director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of Art For
Dummies. He looked upon these works as friends and found something new and
inspirational in each every time he looked at them.
King Tut’s Golden
Mask
|
The Isenheim
Altarpiece by Grünewald
|
The Sculptures of
the Parthenon
|
El Greco’s Burial
of Count Orgaz
|
The Scythian Gold
Pectoral
|
Velázquez’s Las
Meninas
|
Nicholas of
Verdun’s Enameled Altar
|
Rembrandt’s
Return of the Prodigal Son
|
Giotto’s Arena
Chapel
|
Goya’s The Third
of May, 1808
|
The Ghent
Altarpiece by van Eyck
|
Renoir’s Luncheon
of the Boating Party
|
Leonardo’s Mona
Lisa
|
Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon
|
Michelangelo’s
David
|
ART HISTORY TIMELINE
By Jesse Bryant Wilder
The history of art is immense, the
earliest cave paintings pre-date writing by almost 27,000 years! If you’re
interested in art history, the first thing you should do is take a look at this
table which briefly outlines the artists, traits, works, and events that make up
major art periods and how art evolved to present day:
Art Periods/
Movements |
Characteristics
|
Chief Artists and Major Works
|
Historical Events
|
Stone Age (30,000 b.c.–2500 b.c.)
|
Cave painting, fertility goddesses, megalithic structures
|
Lascaux Cave Painting, Woman of Willendorf, Stonehenge
|
Ice Age ends (10,000 b.c.–8,000 b.c.); New Stone Age and
first permanent settlements (8000 b.c.–2500 b.c.) |
Mesopotamian (3500 b.c.–539 b.c.)
|
Warrior art and narration in stone relief
|
Standard of Ur, Gate of Ishtar, Stele of Hammurabi’s Code
|
Sumerians invent writing (3400 b.c.); Hammurabi writes his law
code (1780 b.c.); Abraham founds monotheism |
Egyptian (3100 b.c.–30 b.c.)
|
Art with an afterlife focus: pyramids and tomb painting
|
Imhotep, Step Pyramid, Great Pyramids, Bust of Nefertiti
|
Narmer unites Upper/Lower Egypt (3100 b.c.); Rameses II battles
the Hittites (1274 b.c.); Cleopatra dies (30 b.c.) |
Greek and Hellenistic (850 b.c.–31 b.c.)
|
Greek idealism: balance, perfect proportions; architectural
orders(Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) |
Parthenon, Myron, Phidias, Polykleitos, Praxiteles
|
Athens defeats Persia at Marathon (490 b.c.); Peloponnesian
Wars (431 b.c.–404 b.c.); Alexander the Great’s conquests (336 b.c.–323 b.c.) |
Roman (500 b.c.– a.d. 476)
|
Roman realism: practical and down to earth; the arch
|
Augustus of Primaporta, Colosseum, Trajan’s Column,
Pantheon |
Julius Caesar assassinated (44 b.c.); Augustus proclaimed
Emperor (27 b.c.); Diocletian splits Empire (a.d. 292); Rome falls (a.d. 476) |
Indian, Chinese, and Japanese(653 b.c.–a.d. 1900)
|
Serene, meditative art, and Arts of the Floating World
|
Gu Kaizhi, Li Cheng, Guo Xi, Hokusai, Hiroshige
|
Birth of Buddha (563 b.c.); Silk Road opens (1st century b.c.);
Buddhism spreads to China (1st–2nd centuries a.d.) and Japan (5th century a.d.) |
Byzantine and Islamic (a.d. 476–a.d.1453)
|
Heavenly Byzantine mosaics; Islamic architecture and amazing
maze-like design |
Hagia Sophia, Andrei Rublev, Mosque of Córdoba, the
Alhambra |
Justinian partly restores Western Roman Empire (a.d.
533–a.d. 562); Iconoclasm Controversy (a.d. 726–a.d. 843); Birth of Islam (a.d. 610) and Muslim Conquests (a.d. 632–a.d. 732) |
Middle Ages (500–1400)
|
Celtic art, Carolingian Renaissance, Romanesque, Gothic
|
St. Sernin, Durham Cathedral, Notre Dame, Chartres, Cimabue,
Duccio, Giotto |
Viking Raids (793–1066); Battle of Hastings (1066);
Crusades I–IV (1095–1204); Black Death (1347–1351); Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) |
Early and High Renaissance (1400–1550)
|
Rebirth of classical culture
|
Ghiberti’s Doors, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael |
Gutenberg invents movable type (1447); Turks conquer
Constantinople (1453); Columbus lands in New World (1492); Martin Luther starts Reformation (1517) |
Venetian and Northern Renaissance (1430–1550)
|
The Renaissance spreads north- ward to France, the Low
Countries, Poland, Germany, and England |
Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Dürer, Bruegel, Bosch, Jan van
Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden |
Council of Trent and Counter-Reformation (1545–1563);
Copernicus proves the Earth revolves around the Sun (1543 |
Mannerism (1527–1580)
|
Art that breaks the rules; artifice over nature
|
Tintoretto, El Greco, Pontormo, Bronzino, Cellini
|
Magellan circumnavigates the globe (1520–1522)
|
Baroque (1600–1750)
|
Splendor and flourish for God; art as a weapon in the religious
wars |
Reubens, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Palace of Versailles
|
Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants
(1618–1648) |
Neoclassical (1750–1850)
|
Art that recaptures Greco-Roman grace and grandeur
|
David, Ingres, Greuze, Canova
|
Enlightenment (18th century); Industrial Revolution
(1760–1850) |
Romanticism (1780–1850)
|
The triumph of imagination and individuality
|
Caspar Friedrich, Gericault, Delacroix, Turner, Benjamin
West |
American Revolution (1775–1783); French Revolution
(1789–1799); Napoleon crowned emperor of France (1803) |
Realism (1848–1900)
|
Celebrating working class and peasants; en plein air
rustic painting |
Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Millet
|
European democratic revolutions of 1848
|
Impressionism (1865–1885)
|
Capturing fleeting effects of natural light
|
Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cassatt, Morisot, Degas
|
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871); Unification of Germany
(1871) |
Post-Impressionism (1885–1910)
|
A soft revolt against Impressionism
|
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat
|
Belle Époque (late-19th-century Golden Age); Japan
defeats Russia (1905) |
Fauvism and Expressionism (1900–1935)
|
Harsh colors and flat surfaces (Fauvism); emotion distorting
form |
Matisse, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Marc
|
Boxer Rebellion in China (1900); World War
(1914–1918) |
Cubism, Futurism, Supremativism, Constructivism, De Stijl
(1905–1920) |
Pre– and Post–World War 1 art experiments: new
forms to express modern life |
Picasso, Braque, Leger, Boccioni, Severini, Malevich
|
Russian Revolution (1917); American women franchised
(1920) |
Dada and Surrealism(1917–1950)
|
Ridiculous art; painting dreams and
exploring the
unconscious |
Duchamp, DalÃ, Ernst, Magritte, de Chirico,
Kahlo
|
Disillusionment after World War I; The Great Depression
(1929–1938); World War II (1939–1945) and Nazi horrors; atomic bombs dropped on Japan (1945) |
Abstract Expressionism (1940s–1950s) and Pop Art
(1960s) |
Post–World War II: pure abstraction and expression
without form; popular art absorbs consumerism |
Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Warhol, Lichtenstein
|
Cold War and Vietnam War (U.S. enters 1965); U.S.S.R.
suppresses Hungarian revolt (1956) Czechoslovakian revolt (1968) |
Postmodernism and Deconstructivism (1970– )
|
Art without a center and reworking and mixing past styles
|
Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Gehry,
Zaha Hadid |
Nuclear freeze movement; Cold War fizzles; Communism collapses
in Eastern Europe and U.S.S.R. (1989–1991) |
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