A history of the development of the art market spanning the 17th
century to contemporary art today.In modern times the profession of
the dealer had its start in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth
centuries and was essentially due to the revolution brought about
by the invention of the printing press. Prints could be offered as
readymade images to a widespread market. Durer said he made more
money out of his prints, more easily than he did from his
commissioned paintings. His mother was his dealer, offering them in
the marketplace at Nuremberg.With the rise and expansion of
mercantile capitalism the sale of readymade works, supplied by
third parties, not directly commissioned from the artist himself
nor directly specified by the ultimate client, became a more and
more common form of trading in art. This was particularly the
pattern in the Low Countries and it also helped to sustain the
increasingly large community of foreign artists, Netherlandish and
German, who made their way to Italy, where they had no immediate
social connections and needed intermediaries in order to make a
livelihood. These intermediaries undoubtedly encouraged artists to
tackle subject matter they believed would sell.By the early 18th
century the profession of art dealer was well-established, in
opposition to the official academies. Watteau's painting L'Enseigne
de Gersaint portrays an upmarket Parisian establishment of this
type. It is perhaps no accident that it shows a portrait of the
reigning French monarch, Louis XV, being unceremoniously packed
away in a box. Emblems of power now counted for less that symbols
of luxury. A large mirror propped up on the right suggests that
little distinction needed to be made, in this context, between
paintings and looking glasses. Both were furnishings, the essential
trappings of a civilized life-style, and both served to display not
only their possessors' taste, but also their wealth. The big
mirror, in fact, may have been more valuable than any of the
paintings crowding the walls.The French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars that followed it saw a radical redistribution of
art works. Naturally dealers played a large part in this - also in
defining what was prestigious, therefore saleable, and what was
not. In the Victorian period in London, as attention swung towards
then contemporary creations, dealers such as the still surviving
Fine Art Society (founded in 1877) played a major role in shaping
taste. The history of this gallery in Bond Street and that of the
late 19th century Aesthetic Movement are closely intertwined.In
late 19th century, dealers such as Durand-Ruel (in this case
through his support of the Impressionists) were increasingly
important in changing the currents of taste. In Durand-Ruel's case,
his influence became international. This went hand in hand with a
different kind of international influence, exercised by the great
British dealer Lord Duveen, In alliance with the art historian
Bernard Berenson, Duveen devised a way of selling Old Master
paintings, often of religious or esoteric mythological subjects, to
a clientele who had little natural liking for that kind of
subject-matter, by emphasizing the formal qualities of these works,
rather than what they portrayed. This was a first step towards the
acceptance of abstraction in art.As the Modern Movement progressed
dealers such as Vollard and Paul Guilluame had a greater and
greater say in defining what was important in contemporary art and
what was not. This influence continued as the centre of avant-garde
activity moved from Paris to New York. Galleries such as that of
Pierre Matisse and Peggy Gugenheim's Art of This Century Gallery
pioneered the way to the acceptance of new forms of artistic
expression. Later, Leo Castelli, an immigrant from the cosmopolitan
Italian city of Trieste, was instrumental in establishing the
reputations of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Castelli's 1962
solo show for Lichtenstein was a major step in the worldwide
success of Pop art.This pattern continues today, on an even more
ambitious and global scale. Galleries such as Gagosian (with
multiple international sites) and White Cube here in London play a
major part in creating contemporary perceptions about what is and
is not important in art.
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