•ACKNOWLEDGMENTS•

Seeing Slowly was two decades in the making. In 1995, Sandra Joys, the founding director of Christie’s Education in New York, recklessly delivered her students to me for a daylong seminar I called “Trusting Your Eye.” We looked at modern art together and discussed what we saw but deliberately avoided the use of identifiers such as the names of artists and movements. I thank Sandra, and give much gratitude to her dynamic successor, Véronique Chagnon-Burke, who has allowed me to refine and continue these occasional dialogues.

My greatest debt is to the countless curators, collectors, and fellow art dealers who throughout my fifty-plus years in the business brought me to hundreds of thousands of works of art in museums, private collections, and galleries. This ongoing daily pleasure has been, and continues to be, my education.

I am very grateful and fortunate that my wife, the talented contemporary quilt artist Victoria Findlay Wolfe, shares with me the enthusiasms and working insights of her practice. I thank our daughter, Beatrice, for her cameo in Chapter Five, as well as my son, Bob, and granddaughter, Nikita, for the very happy hours we have spent together in museums.

I am indebted to my first reader and editor, Christopher Lyon, who patiently guided me to clarify, shuffle, trim, and discard. John Long admirably managed all my illustrations and Efren Olivares compiled the endnotes. Celine Cunha provided invaluable research assistance, as did my gallery colleagues Emily Crowley, Jean Edmonson, and Maeve Lawler.

Thanks indeed go to Michael Steger, my friend and agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates; the good team at Prestel, including my editor Holly La Due and Stephen Hulburt; copy editor John Son; and designer Mark Melnick.

INTRODUCTION

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.
But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all.

 

HERMAN MELVILLE

Narcissus

Until the camera took over the job in the late nineteenth century, artists were mostly preoccupied by people, places, and things. Modern art has vastly expanded the artist’s mandate, and today virtually any creation, action, or even proposition is accepted as art so long as we encounter it in a context we regard as suitably credentialed, such as a museum or art gallery. Does this mean that “anything goes”? And if so, how are we to judge or understand it? How many lectures must we attend? How many books must we read?

My belief is that great art, ancient or modern, reaches out to us and has the capacity to move us so profoundly that we are, for a moment or a lifetime, changed. This will only happen if we are prepared to engage with it on an emotional level with an active mind. Art is sensational; interacting with it to the fullest requires in the first place the practice of our senses and an open mind. Only if our senses have been fully engaged can we enjoy the secondary benefit that is the education of our intellect.

Jackson Pollock
One: Number 31, 1950, 1950
Oil and enamel paint on canvas
106 ⅛ × 209 in.
(269.5 × 530.8 cm)
Installation view,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sidney and
Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange)

Art is that which enables us to reach for Herman Melville’s “ungraspable phantom of life,” and regardless of what form it takes, or even when it is seemingly formless, we can accept and enjoy it, or find it uninteresting and reject it, to the extent that our feelings are affected by what we experience. For you, it might be the passion of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 (1950). For me, it is Salvador Dalí’s fantastic vision of Narcissus himself.

Salvador Dalí
Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937
Oil on canvas
20 ⅛ × 30 ¾ in.
(51.1 × 78.1 cm)
Tate, London.
Purchased 1979

Some approach modern art asking, “Is it art?” That is beside the point. The question we must ask is, “Does it work for me?” By “work,” I mean “act on your senses and engage your mind,” not “test your knowledge of art history.”

Aided by the media, ever ready to exploit the celebrity of a small group of artists and sensationalize high prices, modern art provides hooks on which those with the means to collect can attach their social identities to wealth and prestige. In my book The Value of Art, I examine three motives for collecting art: investment potential, social reward, and what I call the “essential” value—art for its own sake. This book is about how we can engage that “essential” value for our own sake, leaving the investment potential and social rewards safely in the hands of the great art world lions and their attendant lionizers.

You and I are interested in art, and so when we encounter it, we do not turn away but look at it, right? But do we really see it? For me, there is a difference between “looking” and “seeing,” which is that the former is passive.

If my eyes are open, I look where I am going, but most of the time I am simply navigating. I am not seeing what is all around me, whether it is the people on the Lexington Avenue 6 train in New York or the leaves on the Japanese maple tree in my garden. This book is about seeing with all your senses and with an open and inquiring mind. Such seeing does not require any knowledge of facts about works of art. Sufficiently moved by a work of art that you are truly seeing, you will inevitably become curious about those facts, which is when your intellect comes into play.

This book is for everyone willing to join me on a journey to unlock the full power of that essential value of modern art. This book is for those of us who think we cannot possibly comprehend any of the exciting movements in modern art that have taken place in the last hundred years or so without lessons, lectures, and audio guides.

I am going to ask you to ignore a lot of what you may already know and everything you may think you need to learn. I will introduce concepts like mindfulness and intimacy that are possibly more apt for a self-help book than an introduction to seeing art, but a self-help book is exactly what you are holding in your hands. Together we will aim, at the very least, to achieve a moment or two of genuine engagement with works of modern art—of your choice, not mine.

While the possibilities of total enthrallment may stop short of the sudden enlightenment that Zen adepts call satori, we will have stepped off the information highway and allowed ourselves to enjoy a wide variety of authentic responses to modern art. The “Aha!” moments that await may include, but are by no means limited to, a peaceful moment, a fleeting smile, a taste of mellow sadness, even a frisson of shock and agitation.

Modern art comes in many mediums and sizes, among them painting, sculpture, drawing, print, video, and installation art. Engaging with it requires neither reading nor listening, whether before, during, or after we see a work. We can find out who made it and when it was made so that we may refer to it, and we can enjoy agreeing or disagreeing with what other people may say or write about it, but reading about the artist’s sex life in a popular biography or what a critic, or what someone with a doctorate in art history thinks the work of art means, is not as important as your experience of the work; in fact, the less you know about the work, the easier it may be for you to really enjoy it.

I will lose my stripes and be drummed out of the art world for saying this, but modern art is not about secret ingredients or puzzle solving. There are no codes to crack. This book is for people who enjoy music and novels and theater and movies. Those require no inside information or special training, and neither does modern art.

To get to the starting line, we may have to remove layers of misinformation. These will be replaced by what you bring to the table, not what I say. Famous or obscure, the work of art that you allow to grab your attention will deliver stronger sensation and greater pleasure than the work of art you are directed to by your audio-guided tour. It may be the smallest painting in the room or the biggest or the darkest or even (apparently) the ugliest. Let your eyes choose.

Great artists take great risks, and risk is a key ingredient of modern art. From Paul Cézanne to Barnett Newman to Andy Warhol, artists who are now heralded as pioneers broke the rules. We must do the same. If the rules of engaging with modern art today consist of knowing how art critics (or curators or dealers) label art, what they say about it, or, God forbid, what a work is worth in dollars, then I am asking you to break those rules and take the risk of seeing only the art, and making up your own mind.

Our destination is an encounter with a specific work of art, a very real painting or sculpture or installation, or even a performance event, in which all our senses are operational and we are fully engaged, offering the promise of an emotional response that can make that object part of your life. The goal of this process is restoring the integrity of the object, an integrity increasingly eroded by our culture, in which an artwork often becomes a mere prop, standing in for anything and everything, from investment asset to high fashion accessory.

The journey I urge you to take in this book has been and continues to be the voyage of my life as an art lover, one full of wonders and surprises. For most of us this costs little more than museum admission (art galleries are free), so let’s get to the starting line.

MICHAEL FINDLAY, an internationally renowned art dealer, is a Director of Acquavella Galleries in New York, known for major exhibitions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Lucian Freud, and Wayne Thiebaud. Born in Scotland, Findlay began his career in New York in 1964, where he was a pioneer of SoHo’s legendary gallery scene and presented important solo exhibitions of then-unknown artists such as John Baldessari, Stephen Mueller, Sean Scully, and Hannah Wilke. In 1984 he joined Christie’s as its Head of Impressionist and Modern Paintings and later was named International Director of Fine Arts while serving on the Board of Directors until 2000. His first book, The Value of Art, was published by Prestel in 2012. Findlay is married with two children.

•FURTHER READING•

Throughout this book, I have railed against reading about art, but in the end, I’ve shared my thoughts with you in a book. I would hope it might be the last book about modern art you ever read, the only one you need to read, but I recognize that might not be the case. I cannot stop you (or myself, for that matter) from reading in the mainstream media when modern art becomes news, typically when connected to money, forgery, and theft, or when a movie star sleeps in a glass box in a museum. That kind of reading is fundamentally harmless.

Art journalism and criticism are another matter. Modern art is so varied and provides the basis for so much interpretation that for decades it has generated a vast industry of academic inquiry both inside and outside the great seats of learning. Different approaches use the English language in different ways, and I would encourage you to dive in only if you have studied postmodern philosophy at the graduate level. My advice is, if there are more than two eight-syllable words in the first sentence, stop reading.

In the United States, good, clear writing about modern art is still to be found in a few general-circulation publications like the New Yorker (Peter Schjeldahl) and the New Republic (Jed Perl). I recommend the following highly readable biographies of modern artists such as de Kooning—An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan; John Richardson’s monumental and endlessly fascinating four-volume A Life of Picasso; and Salvador Dalí by Meryle Secrest. You might also look at Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up by Bob Colacello; Hilary Spurling’s two-volume biography of Matisse; Mark Rothko: A Biography by James E. B. Breslin; and Chuck Close: Life by Christopher Finch. One of the few outstanding autobiographies by a modern artist is Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist.

Tempering my admonition not to believe everything artists say about their own work, I recommend The Language of Sculpture by William Tucker; you might also dip into The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley—Collected Writings 1965–2009; and be amused by Not Nothing, the selected writings by Ray Johnson. I enjoy good novels about art and artists, particularly To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey; The Vivisector by Patrick White; and The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary.

•NOTES•

CHAPTER ONE

PEELING THE ONION

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

WALTER PATER

For most journeys in life, internal or external, we must learn things. Learned information is often equated with wisdom, but sadly, wisdom and information are not the same. Information is valuable only if tempered by wisdom, and wisdom comes from experience, not learning.

Our systems of education stress the accumulation of information, often at the expense of experience. You may believe that you know a lot, some, or a little, about modern art, but our journey begins with jettisoning what you think you know. This is what I mean by peeling the onion. If you know nothing at all, you may have nothing to peel. This is unlikely because most of us approach adulthood with set attitudes and opinions about art, mostly not based on experience.

On this journey I will ask you to discard all manner of theories, learned behaviors, preconceptions, and props, which manifest themselves as ways to access, understand, and enjoy art, but which instead serve the opposite end, increasing our repertoire of ideas and language while decreasing our engagement with art. Part of what we are going to do is examine those attitudes and opinions and remove them, layer by layer, until we reach a place of clarity, receptivity, and honest judgment. Only in that place can true connoisseurship be practiced; only in that place can judgments of quality have meaning.

I am speaking from my experiences as an art dealer. I cannot make a client like a work of art, let alone fall in love with it. All I can do is display the painting, drawing, or sculpture and create the optimum conditions for my client to experience it. Because my living depends on some people liking a work of art well enough to buy it, I need to be able to answer questions about its authorship, history, physical condition, and commercial value. The client’s decision about whether or not to buy a work may be influenced by my answers, but a positive or negative response to the work of art can only be decided by his or her engagement with the piece itself.

I could tell her why I like it or tell him what other people have said or written about it—but would that make them like it? Surely you have experienced being told by a knowledgeable friend about a book or a movie that you simply must read or see. Everyone is raving about it! And then you read the book or see the movie and say to yourself, “What? I didn’t think much of that!”

There is nothing wrong with listening to advice so long as, diplomacy aside, your conclusive opinion is genuinely your own.

Others may lead us to new cultural experiences. Sometimes a client will ask me to locate a work of art by an artist whose work is perhaps not my favorite. I do find a piece by him, and when I show it to them, their excitement and enthusiasm may be so palpable that, even without much conversation, I begin seeing it more clearly than I would have otherwise. This is not so much being influenced by their opinion as being impressed by their level of engagement.

This book encourages you to see a broad array of works of modern art and be receptive to those that reach into the core of your being. There is no reason why you should not be able to see a work of art as if you were its first viewer, in the artist’s studio, the day it was finished.

I am asking you to abandon the multitude of distractions, which our culture places between us and the objects of our experience, and engage works of art with a naked eye and mind. Only then can we meet the art on its own terms, and only after that has happened can we trust our taste, have confidence in our judgments, and, if we wish, add information to our insights.

I am a baby boomer. We are fast approaching our past-due dates. When young, some of us engaged in a search for spiritual enlightenment or transformation, and I am perplexed by the extent to which many of us now approach old age seemingly afraid of spiritual elevation. I am not talking about pleasure or happiness but about experiences that shift our soul slightly upward, for a minute or two, or sometimes even for life.

If we spent so much effort in the 1960s getting high, why are we so earthbound now (we and the generations that followed us)? Outside of spiritual communities, society seems to consider discussion of transcendence as impolite as the mention of money used to be among the English upper classes. Why are we afraid of opening ourselves up to the possibility of experiencing the spiritual and emotional elevation that can happen, easily and harmlessly (and inexpensively), if we know how to see art?

One of the clichés of our culture is that men suppress their feelings while women more freely accept them. In fact, men may talk less about their feelings, but both genders have the same capacity for experiencing states of emotion. Since I am advocating seeing art, not gushing about it, however, my male readers may still keep upper lips stiff and jaws clenched when they are in public museums and galleries.

In the final chapter, I detail three transformative encounters I have had with art objects. These occurred decades apart (the first when I was twenty-two, the most recent when I was sixty-two), but the impact of each created within me the same sense of breathtaking awe, combined with the piercing sensation of being in a state of extra-reality. Whatever your spiritual beliefs and practices (or lack of them), I assure you that if you follow my path you will experience similar moments.

The Uses of Art

The impulse to make marks as a basic declaration of existence predates virtually every other known aspect of human culture. In 2008, tools and ochre pigment, dating from between one hundred thousand and seventy thousand years before the present, were found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa. A number of pieces of ochre are incised with seemingly abstract patterns. These predate comparable objects found in Europe by at least thirty thousand years. After the need for food and shelter, making forms is a basic instinct, and many believe it emerged long before spoken language, although for obvious reasons it is unlikely the birthday of the latter will ever be determined.

In my previous book, The Value of Art, I argued that today art possesses three values: potentially maintaining or increasing its commercial value; enhancing social interaction, for example, in the company of fellow art lovers; and providing the opportunity for private contemplation of, and engagement with, the object. The value of art seventy thousand years ago was unlikely to have been monetary, but it was most certainly social, though possibly never entirely private. Susan Sontag aptly described prehistoric art as “incantatory, magical . . . an instrument of ritual.”¹

Great art may be inspired by divinities, but all art is made, used, and abused by imperfect humans. The history of art, from the beginning of recorded history to today’s screaming headlines, is replete with tales of squalor, theft, forgery, fraud, and riches beyond imagining. The cast includes evil potentates, acquisitive prelates, robber barons, and hedge-fund billionaires, and it is salted liberally with mad starving geniuses. Every age has put art to a great variety of both good and bad uses.

American culture, which is despised and emulated (often simultaneously) in many other countries, is highly goal oriented. Regardless of how many generations of immigrants have brought with them diverse beliefs, the Protestant ethic still rules. The purpose of our children’s education is to get a job, build a career, and move on up the ladder of success. To enjoy this success we have to stay alive. To stay alive as long as possible we have to eat right and get plenty of exercise.

But to attain what goal are fifty million people per year visiting American museums, hunting for visual excitement? Many are tourists, domestic or international; others are supporting their local institutions. One way or another, they may simply enjoy art—and some might admit it makes them feel better.

The real issue is that because we are a profoundly goal-oriented society, most of us need practical reasons for studying art: to teach (recycling information), to get a job (as artist or art businessperson), to collect (invest?), or even to further the eternal quest for self-improvement (be more socially desirable).

This “outcome orientation,” as Harvard University professor of psychology Ellen Langer has called it (more about her further on), is one of our most fundamental mind-sets. Among the difficulties generated by this pervasive goal orientation is an inability to engage in a process of seeing art for its own sake; the child thinks he or she must learn something, must have an “answer.”

Art is no panacea. It cannot cure disease, feed the hungry, or eliminate war. In every culture, however, there is a reverence for images and objects, which seem to have no purpose except to be experienced, and which can take us to a better place or make us aware of the better part of the place where we exist.

Sadly, when fine art is part of the discussion in our culture (public or private), its function as a spiritual elevator plays second fiddle to its roles as:

Financial Instrument (Wealth)

Iconic Object (Entertainment)

Social Identifier (Prestige)

Information Provider (Education)

It is important to see how ubiquitous these roles are and how they skew our thinking and cloud our vision.

Art as Money

Among the things we pay the most for, art does the least for us in terms of sustaining our lives. The price of an artwork, as I point out in The Value of Art, is based on collective intentionality, a consensus among artists, dealers, and collectors. Since most art is portable, and depending on the time and place, can be sold or exchanged at an agreed upon value, it has been used through the ages for investment and the transfer of assets. In some countries, its import or export is taxed, in others (the United States, for example), it can be given to public institutions in lieu of taxes and is subject to no tariffs other than sales tax.

During most of the twentieth century, the commercial value of art was of small concern except to collectors, museums that bought (and sold) art, and the dealers who helped them do so. Art was discussed on high-, middle-, and low-brow levels in popular magazines, newspapers, and journals, including ones devoted solely to art, with virtually no mention of what the works of art being discussed might be worth. The Impressionists were admired and the modernists mocked with no need of dollar signs.

The opposite is true today. It is difficult indeed to find discussions of artworks in the popular media that fail to mention their commercial value. When and how did this come about? In most parts of the world, the concept of fine art is intertwined with the ideas of monetary value and its corollary, investment potential. One of the things even children learn about art is that it costs money, sometimes at amounts that beggar the imagination. This “value” may be what they want to “see” when taken to a museum and shown a painting by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, or Andy Warhol.

While there are some who think all art should be free and that artists should be supported by the state, as an art dealer I know that it is healthy for collectors to be driven to some degree by the possibility that what they are buying will rise in value. This is one of the principles of patronage.

I said “to some degree” because we are now in a culture so monetized in every respect that in judgments of everything from Old Master paintings to the products of Yale University MFA students, the only criteria seem to have become, how much today and how much tomorrow?

The auction houses work overtime to make sure the public does not lose sight of the money factor, although their targets are really the handful of individuals who might consign to their next auction. In 2012 Sotheby’s snagged a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and scream their press office did when it sold for just under $120 million.

Three years later it was Christie’s turn to own a screaming headline in the New York Times celebrating not a work of art but a sum of money: “Christie’s Has Art World’s First $1 Billion Week.” With paintings by Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol selling for more than $70 million combined, one would imagine the sale was noisy and suspenseful, but it was in fact a dull, matter-of-fact affair despite the simultaneously unctuous and patronizing exhortations of the auctioneer.

At the end of one sales marathon, New York Times art reviewer Roberta Smith weighed in with an article headlined “Art Is Hard to See through the Clutter of Dollar Signs,” in which, with no apparent irony, she wrote: “These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore [my italics] and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.” Not to be outdone, another New York Times reviewer filed a lengthy cri de coeur, “Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex,” a two-thousand-word blast at the power of money in the art world. It has shades of Captain Renault in the film Casablanca claiming, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

The average evening auction of the kind of art that receives front-page attention is attended by about 750 people, of which perhaps thirty-five actually bid. Possibly another thirty-five people may be bidding by phone. With around sixty lots in the auction, the number of sellers is likely to be about forty, since some will be selling more than one item. Auction staff directly involved in the sale perhaps number twenty, so in reality the auction is ninety minutes of brokered transactions involving, at most, a total of 150 people (sellers, buyers, and staff). This commercial event, covered exhaustively by the press, takes place twice a year in both London and New York, before a ticketed audience, in exactly the same ritualistic fashion. Although the art sold is usually (not always) different, the participants rarely change. The magic ingredient is the avalanche of auction house marketing, the constant emphasis in breathless emails and press releases on “the market” persuading the media that this whole semiannual circus actually matters to you, the reader, or you, the art lover. Money is so much easier to write about than art because everyone knows the meaning of a dollar.

The media discusses art when one or more of the following factors, all having to do with money, can be “reported” to suggest newsworthiness: commercial value, investment history and potential, theft, forgery, or celebrity ownership. When news breaks that there has been a theft from a museum or a suspected forgery, the first calls I get the next morning are from reporters asking my opinion of the value of what has been stolen or faked. I am never asked about the works themselves. On September 12, 2001, still in shock from having watched the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and losing a close friend, I was appalled to get a call from a reporter asking me for the value of the works of art in the buildings. How would I know? Why would anyone care?

Most sales of works of art at every level occur as private transactions in galleries around the world. Far higher prices for better paintings are paid privately than at auction and escape the news cycle simply because they are not public transactions—no more than the last time you bought a new pair of socks.

Tethered as our culture still seems to be to the Protestant work ethic, and determined as it is to make capitalism work for everyone, America celebrates the cost of everything and anything above and beyond other values. Financial considerations may be most appropriate when it comes to agriculture, manufacturing, import and export, even international aid, but money also has become the primary means of evaluating literature (top selling), film (top grossing), theater (longest running), and art (highest price for a living/dead/American/Pop/Impressionist artist).

Like it or not, in a museum we gravitate toward the works of those artists who we know have had their reputations burnished by high prices, and it is not easy, standing in front of those works, to ignore this. Just remember, the market is not history, the market is not a judge of quality. The market reflects fashion, trends, and current availability. While I agree absolutely that great art deserves to command high prices, I dispute that just because two people compete to pay millions of dollars for a work of art it must be great.