Although Prince cooperated with Spector, he refused to participate with an exhibition last year at the Neuberger Museum, in Purchase, New York, called “Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince, 1974–77.” The pictures shown were pulled from private collections, and Prince would not give permission to reprint them in the show’s accompanying catalogue (the exhibition curator, Michael Lobel, published the catalogue with empty white boxes where the images should have been). Prince gave the show a hostile review last summer in Art+Auction’s sister publication Modern Painters, calling the pictures on view “student work” and “extended adolescence.” Matthew Barney, in contrast, deliberately revisited the drawings he did as a student at Yale, displaying them in vitrines as part of his 2005 installation Drawing Restraint 9 at San Francisco MoMA.

“All artists have earlier work, regardless of what they choose to do with it or what art historians choose to do with it,” says Spector, noting that the Metropolitan Museum had acquired an early collage work as part of a larger package of Prince photographs but that this material is generally not on the market. “The Neuberger show really brought into focus some of these issues, which are ethical in a way—whether you respect an artist’s wishes about the drawings under the bed. How relevant are they?”

Bonnie Clearwater, the former curator of the Rothko Foundation and now the director of MoCA North Miami, devotes a huge chunk of her 2006 publication, The Rothko Book, to the three decades it took the artist to evolve from figuration to the diaphanous bands of color that were his signature style from 1950 on. She finds the period starting in 1940, when Rothko was 37, to be extremely rich; this is when, in his quest for a greater sense of universality, the artist began to fuse multiple mythological figures into a single bundle that filled most of the picture plane. As the decade progressed, he abstracted his forms further, making more biomorphic figures and, in the late 1940s, his so-called multiforms, involving completely nonreferential blobs of color. “Symmetry and stacking were the compositional leap he then needed to take to reach his goal of unifying these isolated fragments in a momentary stasis,” says Clearwater.

The idea that the conglomerations of figures in Rothko’s mythic paintings are somehow embedded in the nebulous forms hovering in his classic pictures is eye-opening, but Rothko refused to have the former pieces included in his 1961 retrospective at New York’s MoMA. “He thought people would jump to the conclusion that all he did was take the figure away and leave the bands behind, whereas he still saw himself as putting objects on a surface,” says Clearwater, who notes that Rothko nonetheless kept all these works. When she had to decide what to do with the foundation’s vast collection of his pictures after his death, in 1970, she felt strongly that the bulk of the early works should stay together for the benefit of scholarship. The foundation gave some 300 paintings and works on paper, in addition to hundreds of drawings, to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

With Rothko’s mature paintings commanding $35 million and up, some collectors are moving down the pecking order. “People used to look at early Rothkos and shrug their shoulders, and now suddenly you can see his multiforms selling for millions of dollars,” says Amy Cappellazzo, the international cohead of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. A 1948 multiform, for instance, sold at Christie’s in November 2006 for $1.7 million. Still, Cappellazzo would not recommend early works in general as a collecting area. “If you can’t buy a signature Rothko, I’d say find another artist where you can still get a major example. Early works of artists before they hit their stride usually are interesting to people who are already collectors of that artist’s work, and generally these examples would have more limited appreciation.”

Both Cappellazzo and Grant agree, for instance, that Lucian Freud’s paintings from the 1940s and ’50s appeal primarily to people who collect his work in depth. “For what you have to pay for early work in this market, I’m not sure it’s going to be someone’s stand-alone Freud,” says Grant. In 2005, Sotheby’s sold the 1943 canvas Man with a Feather, painted before Freud turned 21, for $6.76 million. While that may look like a bargain compared with his later signature nudes, which might sell for $15 million to $20 million, it’s still a hefty sum.