In the case of Richard Serra, Grant sees the attraction of the artist’s earlier work as both aesthetic and practical. “Serra has been making monumental sculpture that requires engaging him in a contract, so it’s not going to get traded in the same way as a David Smith,” he says, noting the secondary-market success of the sculptor’s 1987 slanted-T piece Even Level, which sold last November at Sotheby’s for $1.5 million, breaking his previous auction record. “This was a domestically scaled sculpture, which is highly desirable.” Serra’s even earlier experimental works in rubber, neon and lead, from the late 1960s, when he was in his late 20s, had a lot of visibility in his 2007 retrospective at MoMA. Three Lead Coils, a 1968 piece in which Serra cut the lead, let it curl naturally and hung it as a sculpture, sold at Sotheby’s in May 2000 for $247,750. “If that same piece came up now, I think there would be a lot of interest among collectors,” says Grant, who also anticipates increased collector scrutiny of cityscapes produced by Joan Mitchell (1925–92) from 1945 to 1949, predating her peak years of 1955 to 1961.

For many institutions, early pieces by now-established artists arrived in their collections fresh from the studio. “During the minutes of a meeting in 1955, the joke was made that the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is only interested in bringing in new work that’s dripping wet,” says Louis Grachos, director of the Buffalo, New York, institution, which acquired many breakthrough examples in this manner. These include Painting with Red Letter S, 1957, by a 32-year-old Robert Rauschenberg, which foreshadows the creeping of words into his painting, and Tank Totem IV, 1953, by David Smith (1906–65), which still references the figure but displays a move toward the more abstract use of space realized in his “Cubi” series, from 1961–65.

Grachos notes that when the Albright-Knox acquired key early works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, the general art-loving public may not have perceived them as important  but the museum certainly considered them seminal. “We’ve had a great legacy of curators and directors who have been able to identify shifts in the art world and strategically brought in what I think are turning-point pieces,” says Grachos, who believes that such recent acquisitions as Leo Villareal’s 2005 Light Matrix and Gillian Wearing’s 2004 photo series “Album” may prove over time to be transitional works for these 40-something artists.

“Obviously it’s easier and safer to gravitate only to the signature works of an artist,” he continues. “But I always admire the courage of both curators and private collectors who are really looking at those early stages of an artist’s evolution. It shows sophistication in how you understand art.”

"Young at Art" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.