Читать книгу The Artist's Estate - Группа авторов - Страница 18
3. Categorizing the Stock of Artworks
Оглавление“Don’t throw things away. Don’t even throw away cans or tubes of paint, they can become very handy down the road—as aids in documentation, in conservation, and even with regard to dealing with questions of authenticity,” advises Jack Flam, President of the Dedalus Foundation, which was created by Robert Motherwell.23 But not every brush and can of paint is worth keeping, even if the reconstruction of the London studio of Francis Bacon in Dublin with more than 7,000 individual items makes one hesitate to make such a statement. Nevertheless, at the beginning, a selection process should take place because not everything that an artist thinks, makes, and leaves behind is art and relevant to his or her work. Distinguishing between areas of an artist’s life is often not clear-cut;
Installation of Dieter Roth: Björn Roth at Hauser & Wirth in New York, 2013 Chocolate casting for Selbstturm, 1994/2013
Every artist has a purely private, unprofessional side with corresponding remnants/legacies—be it a receipt for a restaurant visit or possibly the scribble on the notepad next to the telephone. “There’s always this terrible issue of memorabilia,” as the widow of the Australian artist John Brack refers to it in Katrina Strickland’s book Affairs of the Art, further adding: “Doodles on the telephone pad are nothing to do with the artist’s work whatsoever, but lots of artists think differently, so a scribble before breakfast can be worth $10,000 after breakfast.”24 But it is not only many artists who think so, many art mediators or art-collecting institutions do as well. Everything that might remotely be an expression of artistic work runs the risk of being overvalued, artistically and financially. This is why no one wants to be responsible for the destruction of supposed artworks that might, in a possibly booming art market, also have great financial value.
A selection, or at least some type of sorting of artworks is inevitable for all but a few estates that have the financial resources to actually keep every object. For most estates, it is virtually essential for their survival to limit and focus themselves. And such estates that do have sufficient resources available should also undertake a sorting in order to define where their emphasis will lie. For this reason, the taking stock of the estate that always comes first should be followed by a selection process of what artworks, archival materials, and other potentially existing assets (such as real estate or artworks by other artists) will form the core of the work within the artist’s estate.
At the same time as the sorting process, one is likely to arrive at the first central question of all estate activity: Does the quality of the work suffice for reasonable estate work? The answer to this question has an art historical and an economic dimension, which are connected. The more important the entire oeuvre of an artist is within the context of art history, the greater the probability that individual works will enjoy relevantly high regard long term and also generate correspondingly high sale prices that make financial planning possible. Even if there are isolated cases of posthumous discoveries, it is difficult to act if the cultural asset that has been inherited is not considered relevant or important art historically. This not only limits the possibility of financing the estate, but also puts the motivation of those involved to a tough test. Assessing the artistic work (or having it assessed) is therefore recommended—even though expectations are sometimes disappointed.
In this evaluation process, as many opinions on the art as possible should be obtained from diverse professions, as was done, for instance, by the children of Philippe Vandenberg. For them, it was crucial to know whether their artist father would be able to “keep up” on an international level, and if so how he could be situated. What ultimately concerned them was whether his work was relevant. “We wanted to know if [our father’s art] would hold up in an international context, and if so, where it could be positioned,” as Hélène Vandenberghe notes.25 The response in her case was positive, and it was then that the siblings dedicated themselves to their father’s artwork.
But how should one proceed with such a categorizing of the holdings of an estate? What is crucial here is the artist’s own understanding of his or her work and tools, and in particular whether and in what form he or she wanted to bequeath them to posterity. Artists themselves are in the best position to decide what part of their oeuvre should be handed down to future generations or what should remain in the hands of relatives. Artists should also make up their own mind regarding artworks to which they no longer attribute any value, or at least leave instructions as to which works should only be kept within the family due to their (perhaps lack of) quality. This decision process may also involve works that are no longer the property of the artist, something that often comes to light when publishing a catalogue raisonné, as will be explained later using the example of Gerhard Richter.26 If the artist neglected to make such a selection and left no instructions, the process has to be effected by the heirs through remembrance and assessment. The artworks being transferred to the estate can then be classified according to their importance and market value: Which are principle works, which works are rather unimportant, which are preliminary studies not intended for the market, which multiples exist in what editions, et cetera. Useful aids in this process are often notes and statements by the artist. Exceedingly few estates will, however, be able to draw on the meticulousness and self-perception that Paul Klee displayed in this regard. The catalogue by Marie Kakinuma, Wolfgang Kersten, and Osamu Okuda for the exhibition Paul Klee—Special Class, Not for Sale impressively reports on the artist’s efforts to categorize his own oeuvre based on quality and significance and price them correspondingly. Klee used the term “special class” for the group of works that he declared not for sale. He withdrew these works from the market and thus defined the presumed core holdings of his estate and laid the foundations for a first, self-conceptualized retrospective. If one would like to follow this example and keep a core collection of five to ten percent of the artworks bequeathed, including key works, completely in the estate, one should definitely do so to benefit the estate. Conversely, this complicates the ability to finance the estate since—with great likelihood—these works will be the most coveted works from a market perspective.
As Uwe Degreif, a curator with many years of museum experience, recommends, one can group works in the categories A to D independent of whether one introduces an inalienable special class that stands above all others or not. “A-works are such works that the artist did not sell during his or her lifetime, that he or she always wanted to have around, that he or she lent for exhibitions and envisioned for catalogue illustrations, they date back to various creative periods and generally always from the beginning of each such period,”27 as he has noted. Works from the A-group are therefore comparable to those that Klee proactively defined as not for sale. Depending on what plans will be pursued mid and long term, targeted placement in museums or also sale to very good private collections can make sense. The works from the B-group represent the body of works that is most interesting for estate development. In Degreif’s interpretation, these are good works from the main creative period. “This group is numerically larger than the A-group, but, in my experience, comprises a smaller period of time,” according to the conservator.28 The C-group, which is on the whole the most extensive, in contrast, includes all works that might be considered to be of lesser quality, such as variations, drafts, the incomplete, and the reworked: “They do not add anything of importance to the information of the A- and B-groups.”29 From a museum perspective, besides the A-group, the final D-group, to which the files with documents, photos, personal mementoes, certificates, exhibition discussions, correspondence, et cetera belong, is the most interesting, since it provides information about the artist’s relationships to diverse individuals and his or her way of life.
11 Carl von Clausewitz, cited according to Hans H. Hinterhuber,“1. Exkurs: Die Entwicklung des strategischen Denkens,” in Wettbewerbsstrategie (Berlin, 1990), p. 26.
12 Quoted after: Pac Pobric,“Museums and galleries turn to the work of Gordon Parks,” in: The Art Newspaper, Nr. 278, April 2016.
13 Philippe Vandenberg had his name changed and wrote it from then on without the letters “he” at the end. His children continue to use the original name.
14 See the interview with Hélène Vandenberghe in this volume.
15 This list is based on the approach recommended by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, published as: The Artist’s Legacy: Estate Planning in the Visual Arts, Emma Warren-Thomas and Linda Schofield (eds.), London 2013.
16 http://www.lightmachine.agency/ (accessed March 19, 2016).
17 http://www.trenz.ag/ (accessed March 19, 2016).
18 http://www.zetcom.com/de/produkte/ (accessed March 19, 2016).
19 http://www.artsystems.com/solutions/artist-studio-software/; https://www.artworkarchive.com/ (accessed March 19, 2016).
21 https://www.i2mstandards.org/i2m-solution/ (accessed March 19, 2016).
22 www.tagsmart.com.
23 See the interview with Jack Flam in this volume.
24 Strickland, Affairs of the Art (2013) (see note 1).
25 Hélène Vandenberghe in conversation with the author.
26 On catalogue raisonnés, see Chapter 5.
27 http://www.artexperts.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Publikationen/Artikel_Interview_UweDegreif.pdf (accessed March 19, 2016).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
