On Collecting Art

By Ken Elliott

Pierre Bonnard Le Bain, lithograph

I read a blog post this week about Starting an Art Collection by Invaluable, and it got me thinking about my own approach.

One of my earliest memories was a reproduction of a snow scene oil in my grandmothers living room when I was 3 years old.

I still remember two large, framed prints that my mother bought for my childhood home, one being a Corot.

In what was surely fated, years later I began working at a series of very good frame shops and became acquainted with very good works of art. Later I got into the gallery business with two other young guys, fully immersing me into the art business.

I began to buy art when I was working in the frame shops. The feeling I got from acquiring an appealing work of art was more rewarding than furniture or clothing purchases. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but the artworks were adding something to the room and my well-being.

Budget was a big factor in my apartment days but art comes in a lot of forms and being resourceful, I stretched a printed fabric onto a 4’ square frame. It was the biggest work of ‘art’ on the wall at that point and it just made the room, all for $35.

Later I purchased my first oil painting. It was about 18 x 12, a vertical of delicate, tall grass. I was struck by how it was painted and just had to have it. The price was right - $85.

I recall my dad coming by and remarking on it. He asked what I paid for it and when I told him, he was pretty surprised at how expensive it was. I felt proud to have done something beyond the norm that day. Years later he asked me about the price of a large oil by a very well-known painter. I told him he really didn’t want to know and we had a good laugh about it.

Once I got into the gallery business in Houston with two colleagues, my collecting became more serious. I began to study prints by early masters and 20th century Americans. As young gallery dealers, we needed to be better informed about the works we were exhibiting so we could better inform and create knoweldegable collectors. We studied, purchased books for our clients and followed the auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. It was glamorous and fun as our research and collecting expanded, helping others do the same.

Years earlier, a marvelous collector began mentoring me and gave me an important piece of wisdom. He said there two kinds of art: decorative and historical.

It provided me a roadmap, a basis for collecting a variety of things. I also learned along the way to just buy what you like.

Having that historical / decorative reference has been very helpful to me throughout the years. I'm less likely to spend a lot of money on something that just catches the eye or appeals to me in a decorative way. I'll save serious money for something that really thrills me or for an important artwork.

When collected objects are gathered in a room or home, they naturally fit together because they reflect the collector’s interests while stimulating the mind and creating comfort. I also like that each piece has a story and place in time. Many times the acquisition is every bit as interesting as the artwork: how it was obtained or tied to a special event or place.

As an artist, I keep some of my own works along the way. These works have a value to me because they represent important breakthroughs. It represents the best I could do at the time and I like having those creative landmarks as a reference - they keep the bar high. I’m always aspiring to do better and these works urge me forward.

Acquiring the works of others also brings something new and precious into the home. Extraordinary objects amaze and thrill the collector as well as the viewers.

Pleasure comes not from the price but from the experience of something new, the acquisition of mystery, beauty or even outrage for your space. You can capture the moment of creation itself.

Living with works of art is enriching on many levels, one of my favorites being when the artwork reveals a secret of its creation. What a marvelous gift from the artist, a timeless joy for the viewer.

Art lasts. We know Degas, but not the Mayor of Paris at the time.
Gather a bit of creation, something timeless and bring it home with you.

Ken Elliott is an artist and writer living in Colorado.
Fine Art Website
His award winning book Manifesting 123 and you don't need #3 website

Museum Exhibit: Degas and Cassatt at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Opens May 11, 2014

A May exhibit at the National Gallery of Art will explore the relationship between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, as new evidence suggests a bond of mutual admiration and influence, rather than teacher and student.

Image right:
Edgar Degas. “Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery,” 1885; pastel over softground etching, drypoint, aquatint, and etching on tan paper; plate: 30.5 x 12.7 cm. (12 x 5 in.); sheet: 31.3 x 13.7 cm. (12 5/16 x 5 3/8 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago

 View Photo Gallery — ‘Degas/Cassatt’ exhibit plumbs artists’ affinities and influences: The influence that Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt had on each other can be seen in their paintings. 

Almost microscopic exhibit ‘Degas/Cassatt’ plumbs artists’ affinities and influences.

From the Washington Post By Philip Kennicott,, April 29

Full article

In 1879, Edgar Degas made a charcoal and pastel image of two female figures, one standing with a book in her hands, the other seen from behind, leaning slightly on the staff of her closed umbrella. These are likely two visions of the artist Mary Cassatt, a friend, colleague and co-conspirator with Degas in Parisian impressionist circles.

The drawing is one of some 70 works by Degas and Cassatt in the National Gallery of Art’s “Degas/Cassatt show,” which opens May 11. It is also one of the most concentrated and evocative in an exhibition that aims to explore the relationship between the two artists and remedy many of the popular misconceptions about their alliance. It was not, according to Kimberly A. Jones, associate curator for French paintings, a romantic relationship, nor a pedagogical one, but a relationship of equals to the extent possible between a younger American woman and an older, established and often acerbic French man.

Video  http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/entertainment/degascassatt-their-mutual-influence/2014/01/31/dba7f496-8aa4-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_video.html

“I think they had a wonderful platonic relationship, a tremendous professional relationship, and they admired one another tremendously,” Jones said in an interview earlier this year. The problem for anyone teasing out that relationship, however, is the lack of written evidence. Degas didn’t keep Cassatt’s letters, and Cassatt apparently destroyed his. The testimony of mutual acquaintances offers some data, and the pictures themselves, when explored with consideration to chronology, are another avenue for speculation.

The 1879 pastel reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of this approach. If this is indeed an image of Cassatt, we see two very different interpretations of her. The pastel is listed in the exhibition catalog as “Two Studies of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre,” and it is one of several related drawings, prints and paintings that show Cassatt, or a woman who resembles her, at the Louvre, or similar museum or gallery.

Degas’s obsession in these images seems to have something to do with the difference between an authentic and a mediated relationship to art.

The Cassatt figure who faces the viewer holds her book high, as if she is glancing back and forth between an image on the page and a painting on the wall. The posture suggests a studious amateur, dutifully mastering her art history. The other Cassatt, who stands with her back to the viewer, leaning slightly on her umbrella, is by contrast a woman utterly at home in the art gallery, confronting the past as an equal, engaging art as a participant. She is jaunty, aware of her beauty and completely unintimidated by her surroundings. Degas made several iterations of this image, and in some of them the contrast is even more heightened: The reading woman is sitting, looking perhaps enviously at the standing figure, who is leaning even more provocatively on her umbrella. We can’t see her face, but her self-assurance has taken on cinematic proportions, as if the next shot in this scene will frame her like Garbo, and she’ll deliver a one-liner that establishes her femme fatale bona fides.

The pictures complicate our understanding of the generic misogyny of 19th-century Frenchmen such as Degas, as well as his own particular and prickly misogyny, manifested in his famous assertion that women artists couldn’t understand style. Degas is best remembered for his ballet dancers, his actresses and prostitutes, women spied upon, seen in various states of undress, bathing, primping and readying themselves for consumption by the male gaze. But with Cassatt, who served him as a model on multiple occasions, he discovers a woman who both physically embodies style and mastered it on the artistic level. She engages with the same art that engaged him with perfect ease, and in a basic, literal way, she leaves him behind: She turns her back on the artist, to concentrate entirely on the art that surrounds her.

The spectator and the stage

These images also demonstrate the challenge the curators face when trying to place Degas and Cassatt on equal terms. Cassatt isn’t just a fellow artist and colleague of Degas, she was also a subject for his art, in a way that Degas wasn’t for Cassatt. And while they inhabited the same social milieu and maintained a complex friendship, they were not equally privy to the full spectrum of French society. Both Degas and Cassatt could paint women of society and the fashionable bourgeois, but Degas could also paint women backstage at the opera, in theater dressing rooms, in the grimy boudoirs of a brothel — spaces Cassatt could never visit.

“Cassatt really did have a strong sense of propriety, and she was very conscious of her reputation,” Jones said. “Already being an artist, she was breaking a lot of rules, but she did not want to be seen as someone who was not serious and not respectful.” The exhibition attempts to demonstrate these restrictions by contrasting the two artist’s subtly different relationships to public space.

“You can see she does wonderful theater scenes, but always from the loge,” Jones said. “She’s never down backstage like Degas could be, and that is certainly one of the reasons why so much of her work is focused on interior, domestic scenes, because that was a world in which she did not have to worry about access.”

And so curious quirks emerge. Both Cassatt and Degas paint people at the opera, but Cassatt never shows us the stage. Cassatt’s women, often beautiful but with vacant faces, are looking and being looked at the same time; by omitting the theatrical stage, where the ballerinas are dancing and sopranos singing, Cassatt reminds us that “proper” women are as scrutinized in public as actresses are before the footlights.

Degas, by contrast, often conflates the stage with the viewer. In one 1878-80 image, “At the Theatre: Woman with a Fan,” a woman in the audience is linked to the performers by striking similarities in the rendering of their hair; the fan in the title makes for an ironically flimsy barrier between stage and spectator.

Challenges to custom

Any exhibition that presents Cassatt and Degas together inevitably becomes an exhibition about Cassatt, because she is a problematic artist, strange, unpredictable, sometimes not quite in control of her idiosyncrasies. Jones said that this exhibition will help push audiences past their usual sense of Cassatt as a painter of women and babies, fleshy toddlers and buxom maternal figures.

“I think Cassatt is going to be the big surprise for most people,” Jones said. “We’re accustomed to knowing that Degas was avant-garde and edgy, but people don’t think of Cassatt that way. People think of her as the painter of mothers and children, and they’re very beautiful, but in fact, except for works in the very last section . . . there are no mothers and children. It’s other subjects.”

That includes a couple of small nudes, in which Cassatt’s engagement with Degas seems at its most direct. But there will be other challenges, too, the ones that always dog Cassatt’s reputation. Are her people really, fully people? Is the little girl on the motor car just bored, or is her face poorly rendered? Are the father and son in a sumptuous 1884 painting intently looking at something outside the picture frame, or are their faces somewhat ineptly rendered? Is that a touch of treacle and sentiment that creeps into the later images, from the 1890s, of women in gardens, plucking fruit or holding children?

“Degas/Cassatt” draws on the gallery’s ample holdings of both artists and includes material borrowed from other museums. It features two of the biggest name draws in the museum world but is in fact intended to be a focused, almost microscopic exhibition about details, affinities and possible borrowings and influence. Visitors who simply want to revel in the color of Cassatt and the salacious delights of Degas won’t be disappointed. Among other things, it includes a newly restored Cassatt canvas, “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.” Seen earlier this year in the gallery’s conservation lab, the painting is stunning, and will likely be the star of the show. But the intention is to dig deeper than that, and the more one tends to dig into Cassatt’s oeuvre, the stranger it seems.

“Degas/Cassatt” will be on view at the National Gallery of Art through Oct. 5. 

For more information, visit www.nga.gov