Tales of the Trade

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Constantin Brancusi Edward and Nancy Kienholz Henri Matisse Jackson Pollock James Drake

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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 Rohatyn’s 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.