Young at Art

There’s often a point in a retrospective of a major artist where the first student-type pieces start to yield to that more singular voice that defines his or her style. In the Richard Serra show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, that moment came with One Ton Prop: House of Cards, a sculpture made in 1969, when Serra was 30 years old, composed of four lead plates balanced against one another. Early works such as this aren’t always fully there yet, but they can provide tantalizing hints of what’s to come and reveal crucial links in an artist’s evolution. Such transitional pieces beguile scholars and museumgoers alike, but are they an area of interest, or opportunity, for collectors?

“It’s almost like Google Earth with certain artists, where you can see the progression and can pan in to what’s going to happen,” says Anthony Grant, Sotheby’s senior international specialist for contemporary art, pointing to the American abstract artists Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko, who have active markets for their earlier paintings as well as for their better-known later ones. “Nowadays, because so many classic examples have gotten so expensive and hard to find, earlier examples by artists who have always been collected are really moving up in price.”

A rarely seen group of works that Diebenkorn painted from 1950 to 1952, while he was a graduate student in his late 20s at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and that he himself believed represented a breakthrough have been pulled together in a show organized by the Harwood Museum of Art, in Taos, that travels to the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., next month. Charles Lovell, co-curator of the exhibition, says that the key shift for Diebenkorn—presaging his brilliant “Ocean Park” series, begun in 1967 in Santa Monica—was rooted in his recognition that he had been avoiding any reference to landscape in his earlier Abstract Expressionist works of the late 1940s. “The landscape in New Mexico is so profound, and he was able to see that it caused him to make certain kinds of marks or a horizon line,” says Lovell, who notes the particular influence of the aerial views of the desert Diebenkorn saw when first flying between California and New Mexico. “He didn’t fight it but used it.”

While the earthen tones of these works don’t say “Diebenkorn” the way the vibrant blues, greens and oranges in his subsequent “Berkeley” and later “Ocean Park” series do, Dorsey Waxter, director of Greenberg Van Doren in New York, which represents the artist’s estate, sees continuity in how Diebenkorn’s sense of place impacts his palette. In 2000, the gallery mounted a well-received show of the artist’s abstractions from 1949 to 1955, with the Albuquerque canvases priced at $300,000 and up. “More-seasoned collectors made purchases because people who own his work collect it in depth,” says Waxter, who estimates that those works would sell more in the range of $1.5 million in today’s market—compared with the $6.8 million achieved by a “Berkeley” painting at Christie’s in May 2007 and the $8 million asked for an “Ocean Park” in a recent private offering.

“If I had that show now in this market,” Waxter continues, “I think there would be people who might appear on the scene who were new to collecting. His early works are definitely an opportunity. The later pieces are more and more expensive, there are fewer and fewer of them, and that drives people to look at other areas of the artist’s work.” Grant notes, however, that some of Diebenkorn’s early works are in poor condition. “Sometimes ‘early’ means the artist hasn’t really gotten the whole media down correctly yet,” he says. “A lot of the Albuquerques are paint over paint that was not yet dry, so there’s a cracking issue.”

It’s one thing if the artist himself felt certain works were a breakthrough. But what about early pieces that predate the artist’s own sense of a turning point? Richard Prince, for instance, considers his pivotal year to be 1977, when, at the age of 28, he started rephotographing advertisements rather than clipping and collaging them. “He framed and matted it so it was a completely seamless work of art and not something obviously manipulated or plucked from journalistic sources,” says Guggenheim Museum chief curator Nancy Spector, who opened the recent Prince retrospective there with his first appropriated photographs, of four similarly composed living rooms. For a small concurrent show in the Guggenheim’s education center, Spector carefully selected works from Prince’s own collection that he’d done in 1975 and 1976 and showed connections with later series. For instance, black-and-white photos he shot of trees in New Hampshire, accompanied by humorous typewritten captions, exploit the relationship between image and text. “Clearly he’s rehearsing ideas of fact and fiction, the known and the represented, that will show up later,” says Spector. “It’s fascinating material, but you can’t tell what kind of artist he’s going to be by these early works.”