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As he liked to tell the story, the assemblage artist Ed Kienholz was repairing a rifle back in 1969 when he found he needed a different-size screwdriver to finish the job. Rather optimistically, the California artist painted an abstract watercolor and stamped the words FOR TEN SCREWDRIVERS across it in black. Within a week, a neighbor had spotted the picture at Kienholz’s house and offered to make the exchange. Thus began the artist’s groundbreaking, but to this day critically undervalued, series of watercolor trades.

He continued the series for years, creating paintings stamped with FOR A 4-WHEEL-DRIVE DATSUN JEEP when he needed a car or with FOR 2 GOOD MOUNTAIN HORSES to obtain four-legged transport. He painted for a haircut when he was getting shaggy and for a fur coat to get a shaggy garment, presumably to give away. Each has a colored background and bears the artist’s signature and thumbprint in the corner.

"There were so many trades, it’s hard to remember them all," says his widow, the artist Nancy Kienholz. "He traded these watercolors for a sauna, for a gun, for a mattress and box spring, for ‘a new Nikon for Nancy.’ And he’d trade anything — property, cars. He traded guns with the milkmen to get milk. He loved the game of it. He was the king of bartering."

Kienholz was extreme in systematizing his bartering, but he is far from alone in using his art resourcefully. Artists — who are perhaps resourceful by definition, always making something out of nothing — have bartered their work for as long as art has had value to someone, somewhere.

There’s a well-established tradition of artists trading pieces among themselves, from Picasso and Matisse exchanging early paintings to the current crop of art-school students decorating their studios with one another’s paintings. But probe a little deeper, and you will also find numerous examples of works being bartered for more unusual goods and services. To get a home-video camera, Andy Warhol traded his self-portraits to the consumer-electronics publisher Richard Ekstract; Damien Hirst gave an early medicine cabinet to Dr. Adrian Mullish in exchange for dental services and later, in his speech accepting the 1995 Turner prize, thanked the doctor for "spending more time in my mouth than is healthy."

Today bartering seems to be on the upswing, for obvious reasons. Given the illiquidity in both the art market and the larger economy — which could mean piles of unsold works combined with relatively empty pockets — artists are looking for ways to make the most of what they have.

"Bartering may make a real comeback, which is great. I think it’s such a beautiful thing to do. It’s totally outside the commercial nonsense," says the New York painter Francesca DiMattio, who had a show of her collage-inspired paintings at Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyns Salon 94, on New York’s Upper East Side, earlier this year. "For the past five years it felt like we were in a really fancy, stupid, polished place."

DiMattio is currently finalizing an exchange of a small painting for some jewelry by the New York designer Kara Hamilton. Earlier, her husband, Garth Weiser — who had a show this winter in New York with Casey Kaplan — traded one of his aggressively geometric paintings with Hamilton for DiMattio’s custom wedding ring. Weiser also bartered a good-size abstract painting on paper for a pair of three-piece suits by Adam Kimmel. The menswear designer is known for collecting not just art but artists, having tapped as models for his shoots everyone from the pretty-boy photographer Ryan McGinley and the superflashy Aaron Young to art world lions like John Baldessari and Larry Bell. Bell engaged in his own bartering six years ago, supplying the Best Western Marina Pacific Hotel in Venice, California, with artwork in exchange for an extended residence in his old stomping ground.

For DiMattio, paying retail for Kimmel’s suits at Bergdorf Goodman was not an option, pricewise, and would also not have been as satisfying. "I find it much more exciting and meaningful to deal with people on a human level," she says, adding that bartering can feel empowering — a gesture of ingenuity and independence when gallery sales are down.

The Santa Fe-based artist James Drake, whose richly textured, nearly mural-size works on paper were just exhibited at Haunch of Venison in New York, also finds barter reassuring on a deep psychic level. "People in this economy don’t know how much their money is really worth," he says. "But we know the value of tangible goods. I love that — it goes back to knowing that something is valuable because someone else is willing to offer something of theirs for it."

Like many artists, Drake made his most memorable exchanges early in his career, during a period of tight money and a less-developed art market. In the late 1960s, for instance, when Drake was in his early 20s and living in Texas, a budding collector who worked for TWA fell for a piece the artist describes as "a charcoal on canvas with Brancusi-like shapes." Not having much money, the collector instead offered Drake a free round-trip ticket from El Paso to Amsterdam. Drake accepted the ticket and took off to Europe for the first time, on a journey that lasted the summer and changed the course of his career. "I was a painter before that," says Drake, who is now best known for his charcoal drawings. "But I saw The Raft of the Medusa at the Louvre and realized the world didn’t need another painter."

Drake has since traded other works, a print here for a small book collection there. He is now in the market for a car for his wife — "maybe an Audi wagon" — if anyone is interested. For a while he also had a deal with an accountant: Each year, in exchange for a work on paper, she prepared his taxes.

And, yes, the CPA reported the bartering on Drake’s tax forms. According to the IRS, each party to a deal must record as income the fair market value of the goods or services received. While some artists and collectors report this income from trades, others do not. And several declined to be interviewed for this article for that reason.

The artists who did talk about their bartering were careful not to provide too much information on colleagues’ trades they have witnessed. DiMattio mentioned a friend who exchanged a work with a personal trainer for a year of private sessions. Her favorite example, however, is one she heard of secondhand, involving a New York artist who bartered a piece for a lifetime supply of oysters from New York’s most famous fish market. Nancy Kienholz claims to know many artists who trade for dental or medical services. "I think it’s very common," she says, without naming names.

Indeed the art lovers who benefit the most from bartering appear to be dentists, optometrists, dermatologists, plastic surgeons and, to a lesser degree, other doctors. The Bay Area collector Robert Shimshak, a radiologist, has an explanation. "Most people have health insurance, even artists, but they don’t have dental insurance," says Shimshak, who does not barter in his own practice, although he once did an ankle X-ray gratis for Richard Misrach and later received a photo as a gift. "And so much elective work, like plastic surgery, is not covered at all." Plus, dentists and dermatologists are more likely to be sole proprietors and thus have some flexibility in arranging payments; many other doctors operate within hospitals or medical groups, where the payment process is highly automated and regulated.

After medical services, one of the most common categories artists trade for is professional services — handing over artwork to pay, say, lawyers’ or accountants’ fees. There’s also a rich history of trading art for food. Although some tales of Picasso scribbling drawings on cocktail napkins and of Pollock exchanging pictures for bags of groceries are hard to confirm, it’s a safe bet that many restaurants with sizable paintings on their walls also have sizable tabs open for the works’ creators. Meanwhile, the private caterers hired for art world fetes have plenty of opportunities for bartering.

The Los Angeles-based caterer and photography aficionado Kai Loebach sees bartering as a way of turning back the clock to a society less ruled by money. He says it reminds him of stories he heard from his grandparents, who exchanged goods for food in Düsseldorf during World War II. "I have this thing about wanting to meet every artist that I collect," adds Loebach, who owns work by Shannon Ebner, Katie Grinnan and Stephen Shore, among others. "By bartering with artists, you come one step closer to having that intimate relationship."

He is willing to do similar deals with galleries, catering an opening-night party, say, in exchange for an artwork on exhibit. To make sure the trade feels fair to everyone — the trickiest part of the transaction, he says — he starts by estimating the value of his own services.

Beyond the risk that both sides will not receive goods of equal value, there is one other obvious drawback to bartering: the fact that artwork cannot, at least in today’s banking system, pay the mortgage. Neither can beautiful three-piece suits or eye-opening trips to Europe or, for that matter, a set of screwdrivers. Kienholz realized this fairly early on. While he never abandoned bartering as a form of commerce, he supplemented it by creating another series of watercolors on which, instead of words, he stamped dollar amounts, from $1 to $25 to $75 and up to $1,000.

Like his watercolors FOR A HAIRCUT and FOR A FUR COAT, these works were to be sold at their face value. But unlike the former, this series recognized the inimitable value of U.S. currency. As it turned out, even the king of bartering occasionally needed some cold, hard cash.

"Tales of the Trade" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.