problems with portraits

Part Two: How Much is Susan Worth? How Much Marilyn?

“You’re not going to believe this,” my old friend Susan Rossen said on the phone, “that portrait Alice Neel painted of me in 1976 is going to be sold at Christie’s London in the fall. The reserve price is 100,000 pounds, or $150,000.”

                  That seems so unfair. Back in ’76 Alice Neel was herself 76, a painter who had been neglected all her life until the feminist art movement of the 1970s led to an effort to celebrate little-known women artists. Susan was a mover and shaker in those heady days when artists and art historians woke up to the fact that they were under-represented everywhere. Susan was on the board of the Women’s Caucus for Art; she met Alice at a conference in New York and Alice immediately announced that she would like to paint her portrait. Susan sat for it in Alice’s studio in Spanish Harlem and when the painting was finished, Alice announced her price: $2,500. Susan didn’t really like the portrait—she was going through a bad time and her clenched fists and tense expression expressed that. And she didn’t have the money either. As Director of Publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts, hers was a modest income.

                  Alice’s reputation grew rapidly. Everyone enjoyed the fact that this plump, proper-looking white-haired lady in a mink pillbox hat had been an outsider artist all her life, struggling with poverty and depression. She painted some sexually explicit portraits, and could swear like a sailor and spoke bluntly whatever was on her mind. She asked the most personal questions of her sitters and they willingly confessed dark secrets to her, no doubt aiding her understanding of their psyche. She called herself a “collector of souls.” By 1979 she was one of several distinguished women artists who were honored at the White House, with Jimmy Carter presenting them with awards for Lifetime Outstanding Achievement.

In 1981, Alice offered the painting to Susan for $10,000, but insisted on cash, immediately. Susan had just taken a job at the Art Institute of Chicago and bought an apartment, and didn’t have ten grand to spare then either. Over the years, Alice’s reputation continued to grow and then the price of her paintings appreciated dramatically when she died in 1984. Museums had begin to collect her work, hoping to show off their tiny efforts at diversity to balance the overwhelming population of works of art by dead white males on exhibit. Susan’s portrait had been purchased by an English collector of modern art who now, in 2010, decided to sell his collection. Christie’s London had googled and then emailed Susan to ask if she was indeed the sitter.

                  “Dumbest thing I ever did, “ Susan said. “I should have bought it. I wish I had, maybe borrowed the money from my aunt.”

Christie’s had mentioned the reserve and suggested that this would be considered a very fair price.

                  “Unfair,” I said, “Not fair at all. You should have it. Now you don’t even look so tortured.” I remembered her struggles in the mid-70s with her job and especially with romance.

                  “Besides,” Susan said, “I could use the money for the grandchildren’s college.”

                  We both agreed that it would be good if a museum bought it, so that it wouldn’t just disappear into another private collection. “I thought the DIA should have bought it when I left,” she said. “A fitting going-away present.”

                  “You have a lot of friends,” I said, “ all you need is for each of a thousand of us to put up a hundred dollars, and then strike a deal with Christies.”

                  By chance, the next day my old friend Marilyn called to chat. Alice Neel had also painted her portrait in 1981, when she was a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I told her about Susan’s portrait going on the block.

                  “That’s nothing,” Marilyn said, “Mine is still at the Madison Avenue gallery and is priced at $250,000. It isn’t even finished—Alice never painted the background. But it’s only worth that if someone actually buys it. Alice wanted $15,000 cash. My parents said they would be willing to skrimp and save if I really wanted it, but I said no, not worth it.”

 Marilyn had an attack of Bell’s Palsy when she sat for Alice; her face has an unnatural asymmetry as a result. But the artist caught an expression that shows Marilyn’s tentative uncertainty about the proceeding when she wasn’t looking her best, but a sort of half-smile is characteristic of her good manners and eagerness to please.

So here is another problem with portraits: there is no cut on the profit of the picture’s sale and resale for the sitter. Nor, of course, for the artist, dead or alive.