Expert's Eye: Gordon Cooke at the IFPDA Print Fair

Expert's Eye: Gordon Cooke at the IFPDA Print Fair

Photo courtesy Mary Ryan Gallery

Donald Judd, "Untitled" (1991-94). At the Mary Ryan Gallery booth

Mary Ryan's booth featuring works by Donald Judd

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He is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century British prints and is chairman of the London Original Print Fair.

Cooke is well known and well liked in the print world, but we were able to tempt him to risk straining one or two of his professional relationships by casting his expert eye over the International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair, running from Nov. 2-Nov. 5 at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Following are his assessments of the fair.
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The Best Print in the Fair: The most beautiful works I’ve seen since coming to New York this week actually aren’t in the fair. And strictly speaking they’re not prints, they’re monotypes. They’re by Degas, and they’re in an exhibition that has been put up by a private dealer named Nick Stogdon at the C.G. Boerner gallery. Even though they’re not strictly part of the fair, I can’t help thinking they are the most beautiful and memorable images I’ve seen in New York this week.

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The Fair’s Biggest Surprise: I was really struck by the work of Donald Judd, which I saw on two stands, the Mary Ryan Gallery and the Susan Sheehan Gallery. Of course the prints are quite old now, but they still have real impact and they still look so fresh. It was a surprise to see that Judd still cuts it after all these years.

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The Fair’s Best Booth: It’s very difficult to select a best booth because there are so many that have a lot of interesting material, and you can’t know everything in equal depth (I don’t know quite so much about Old Master prints for example.)

But I thought the booth that Charles Young has put together [with work by Dieter Roth, Lorna Simpson, William Kentridge and Ellen Gallagher among others, plus a classic Kurt Schwitters collage, and two Jackson Pollocks] shows a lot of personal taste and commitment to the [art] that he likes.

I like the way he has mixed the scale of things and put a really bold work in the middle of his booth [Koo Kyung Sook and Ian Harvey’s giant-scaled Figure 3 (2006), shellac and graphite on paper, $18,000]. He has really thought out how to put the booth together. This is the one that impresses me most of all.

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The Fair’s Best Bargain: It’s very difficult to decide, but I saw something that was very beautiful, and when I looked at the price and saw it was $3,700, it seemed rather good value. It’s a work at the Dolan/Maxwell booth by a Modernist named Morris Blackburn who was born in 1902 and who did this Still Life (Bass Ale) woodcut in 1939.

If you had something like $4,000 to spend, this seemed to me very, very good value. It’s also a rather unusual piece. Maybe there are cheaper things here, but this struck me as something that was well worth the money. And on the subject of beer, I don’t know what it says about me, but …

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The Print That I’d Take Home With Me If I Could: Jasper Johns’ Ale Cans, a 1964 lithograph, which is something I’ve always loved, and it has always been more than I could afford. There’s an impression on view at Simon Theobold’s stand, at $220,000. It is a truly wonderful piece.