Hello,
I’ve sitting on this draft for awhile, and it’s long overdue for someone to give it a read.
In 2020, I bought a painting by an artist that I care deeply for, his story and work resonating on many levels. The resonance was so intense, in fact, that once the artwork was in my apartment, I envisioned myself dying with the painting.
Against all expectations, I recently sold this painting.
The artwork measured roughly 12 x 16 inches, ethereally depicting a boy lying on his side, from mid-shoulder through the top of his head. He’s modestly buried by the grass in which he lies, his eyes shut, asleep or resting, with a hand propping up his boyish face. The artist’s signature, reading B. Perlin, finds its place at the top right of the canvas.
I bought the work at auction in 2020. A friend living nearby shipped the painting to New York; it was just as exceptional in person. The canvas was stretched across a badly worn stretcher, crumbling after its providing more than five decades of support. An afternoon of calling certified conservators from a list of New York-based conservationists led to my meeting Paul Himmelstein at his Upper West Side studio. Himmelstein’s inspection, with a blacklight examination, revealed that while the surface of the painting had been untampered with since it left Perlin’s studio, the work required a new, mechanical stretcher. This restoration was done, and the work was floated in a walnut frame.
Bernard Perlin’s most defining qualities were his queerness, energy and emphaticism. In the mid 1940s, he was an artist-correspondent for Life and Fortune magazines, painting scenes of liberation across Europe, traveling alongside a battalion on a government grant through Greece and Poland.
Painted in the year following his mother’s death, the work is likely a self-portrait. His most famous picture is Orthodox Boys, in the permanent collection of the Tate Museum. His work can also be found in the collections of MoMA (New York), the Whitney, Princeton Art Museum, Smithsonian, etc. His archives belong to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
My decision to sell was made especially difficult by my kind and generous relationship with the executor of the artists estate, Michael Schreiber. Schreiber met Perlin in the last decade of the artist’s life, and published a phenomenal narrative account of his life, One-man Show. There is no more impassioned and committed individual to do this kind of work than Schreiber.
As a person who has cared deeply about art for many years, my thought was that working in the fine art business was a way to be close with the good stuff all the time. In the art world, emphasis is put on stewardship. The great collectors are great stewards. They are advocates for the artists they collect.
Despite this, the art world I have worked in oftentimes feels all about money. Buy this, sell that, buy this, sell that. And do it on such seemingly arbitrary (i.e. monetary) terms. Everything has a price. It is difficult to imagine many of these collectors having such an intimate attachment to what they own or why they own it. If anything, the attachment often seems to be to the role of owner or idea of ownership itself. It also seems that the only time art is exposed to the broader public, is when a new auction result of an abstract amount of money is reached.
In the Financial Times, Larry Gagosian, an art dealer whose success might be his most defining characteristic, was quoted saying that the real poor people are the ones who can’t afford to keep their art.
I think my point is more obvious to most than it was to me. You don’t have to own, nor live with, something to love it. But it is certainly a different kind of relationship. There is a care and responsibility enabled by ownership. You can wakeup next to an artwork, look at it however and whenever you want, you can even touch your art (shhh). What Kazuo Shiraga collector can help themselves from occasionally running their fingers over a goopy canvas? Certainly, nobody that I’d want to associate with.
It was a very trying decision to sell an object which I adored, which connected me to a man (the artist) I adored, to a history which I felt I shared parts of. Perlin’s parents were tailors, while mine sold menswear. My grandfather left Germany in 1938, the same year Perlin was painting across Poland. Perlin, too, was Jewish and seemed to evade characterization his entire life, living on his own terms. He cared for art but had a resonant distaste for the art world and its vanity so intertwined with the New York social scene.
To sell a painting is a dumb first world problem, but also, I’d imagine, a distinctly human problem. It seems intrinsic to being a sentimental, attached-to-the-world human being that there are some things in life that could never be sold. And this painting was damn close to whatever that category of things is.
My friend Teddy, a couple years earlier, worked on research with an art historian who doesn’t “collect” art. She simply doesn’t believe in it. Maybe this is liberating, a way to protect yourself from a kind of corruption.
Every couple of weeks I think about selling all the NFTs I own. This is not by design, just something that comes to mind. I imagine this would be a purifying ritual. There is something gnarly and unsettling about being attached to stagnant objects. There is something securing about it as well. I think that objects give us place; and can give us place in the absence of place. Think an immigrant traveling from one country to another, carrying only the clothes on their back and a picture, watch, or other token.
It’s rewarding to buy and collect art. It’s also rewarding to learn about and care for art.
The painting’s sale allows me to acquire more artwork in the near future, and I’m excited to share with you what I find next!
Thanks for reading.
Gabe