Fresh-to-the-Market Art Splendors in a Funky Bohemian Ballroom

T he American Art Fair is my favorite dealer show. It’s intimate, about 20 booths, and, hey, I’m a sentimental guy. The dealers are in the business of selling, but they’re connoisseurs, heritage builders, and the best of the best. I’m an American art scholar and know all of them as professional colleagues. The art is almost all before 1945, which is the line that art historians and critics draw between historical and contemporary American art. It’s not the most relevant or tightest boundary, but, more or less, 1945 marks the advent of both Abstract Expressionism and the hegemony of New York City as the center of the art world.

Alexandre Gallery devoted its booth to Loren MacIver (1909–1998), whose name I knew but, shame on me, whose work I didn’t. She was the first woman to have a painting in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. I’d call her a Surrealist, but she’s really her own thing. Ashe Street Blooms, from 1940, is from the same period as her MoMA painting. MacIver worked off and on in Key West, where she painted it. It’s $65,000, which is a good deal. Phil Alexandre specializes in American Modernism, though he represents living artists, too. Pat Adams, Lois Dodd, and John Walker — three artists he represents — have idiosyncratic styles but go from strength to strength. He’s got a very good Arthur Dove exhibition now at his gallery.

I’ve never written about Boston’s Vose Galleries, but that’s entirely my oversight. It’s the oldest family-owned art gallery in the country, opening in 1841 to cater to Boston Brahmins at a time when Boston was America’s culture capital. It specializes in American realist painting and works on paper from Copley to the present. Vose is offering Andrew Wyeth’s Winter Morning, a watercolor, from 1946. At 25 by 38 inches, it’s a big watercolor, which makes the subject more startling. It’s not for vegans, to say the least.

I’m not a big Wyeth fan. His work is too mercenary for me, and there’s always one hokey touch too many. A couple of picturesque birds, one quaint bit of farm equipment too many, and a picture gets too close to kitsch. Winter Morning, though, is lean and mean. During hunting season in Vermont, hung up, dead deer aren’t uncommon, but the sight’s still poignant and shocking. It’s $395,000 and has never been on the market. One family has owned it since the ’40s. Old Boston families, and there’s a lot of them still, tend to keep things. When family manses are emptied, the best art tends to go to Vose.

I was happy to see Jim Keny, who owns Keny Galleries in Columbus. It’s only the second time his place has taken a booth at the fair. Columbus is a great town for American Modernism, stimulated by good collectors, of course, and by hometown boy George Bellows, viewed locally with reverence. Keny has sold many works by Bellows over the years.

I loved Tumble of Waters, one of Bellows’s Monhegan pictures from 1913. Bellows spent a chunk of time on this wild island twelve miles off the coast of Maine, first in 1911, when he painted small, densely textured pictures, and again in 1913, when his format is bigger and both freer and more resolved. Bellows wasn’t a follower of Winslow Homer but certainly an acolyte.

I’ve been to Monhegan after storms. Bellows, I can write from experience, shows us a roiled sea. He magnifies waves but crops them, too. It’s far more abstract than Homer ever got. Bellows painted about 100 Monhegan scenes, so they’re not exactly rare. Private collectors, though, tend to love them. This one has been in a collection since 1973. It sold the day after the fair opened, so I don’t know the price. I’ve seen them for $250,000, more or less, depending on the picture.

Questroyal’s Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, a 12-by-23-inch jewel by Sanford Gifford, has to be one of the stars of the fair. Painted in 1860, it’s peak Luminist, a movement based on pronounced horizontals, minimal elements, and crystalline light. It’s serene. Gifford is the most iridescent of the Hudson River painters. The painting was in a family collection from 1861 to 2021, when it sold at Christie’s for $662,000. How to price a painting when everyone knows the verdict of the auction market? Lake Sunapee is a “price on request” painting, which means it’s not for publication.

It’s probably $995,000. When a dealer buys at auction, he’s taking a risk reflected in the markup. Gifford painted a lot of pictures. The American historic-art market cratered in the ’90s. It has strengthened over the past few years, but it’s still iffy. Buying from a dealer means a shopper can take it on approval, hang it over the fireplace, settee, bar, or favorite bowling lane for a week, and, once bought, take it back, for a good reason, not because the kid’s allergic. The auction hammer can be the guillotine’s drop.

Samuel Hallett, who bought Lake Sunapee from Gifford, was a magnate involved in the construction of the Union Pacific railroad. An aggrieved engineer, believing that Hallett was pushing shoddy construction standards, shot him as dead as Wyeth’s deer in Wyandotte, Kan., in 1864. A celebrity murder always adds cachet and a few thousand.

I love the work of John Koch (1909–1978), who I think is America’s Vermeer. His enigmatic interiors have the most sublime light. He’s a realist, so contra trends in the ’50s and ’60s. Kraushaar Galleries represented him for years. Like most of the dealers at the art fair, Kraushaar is an anchor in the history of American art. It opened in 1885 and is best known for stewarding the careers of American Modernists such as John Sloan and Gifford Beal.

Its calling card is quality but also long relationships with clients and artists like Koch. Koch’s The Balcony, from 1953, is a rare thing. It’s a French picture. Koch’s best known for scenes of everyday life among Upper West Siders in an age when middle-class people living in Manhattan had panache. People dressed more formally, entertained, and prized good manners. Koch lived at the El Dorado on Central Park West, buying an apartment there when the neighborhood was actually affordable. Many of his paintings are set there but The Balcony, painted in Paris, is his tip of the hat to Caillebotte. Kraushaar sold it in 1954, but it just came back. Everything about it — the flowers, the wrought iron, the sky, the draperies — is perfect. It’s $75,000. People tend to keep their Koch paintings. I don’t see them on the market often.

Thomas Colville is offering a bewitching, small watercolor by George Inness — In the Pasture, from around 1884. Inness (1825–1894) didn’t paint many watercolors. He probably saw them as experiments, which is what I’d call In the Pasture. Inness’s painting style gets very gauzy and feathery in the 1880s, and this picture points the way. Every form seems to have the same materiality as the clouds. It’s only $25,000. It’s been in the family of Inness’s daughter and never on the market.

Colville is also offering Country Church in June, by Charles Burchfield, for $165,000. Painted in 1918, it’s early, but it has lots of the artist’s best bells and whistles. Burchfield (1893–1967) did cryptic, hallucinatory watercolors, almost all landscapes. I don’t think he knew much, if anything, about Edvard Munch, but Country Church makes me think about The Scream. Every window, and they’re big voids, oozes dread. Gravestones seem alive. I can hear organ music. Like Wyeth’s Winter Morning, it’s for serious collectors.

The fair’s short, less than a week, at the funky Bohemian Hall on East 73rd Street in Manhattan. It’s a Renaissance Revival pile built in 1895 as a social club for Manhattan’s Czech and Slovak community. The fair’s in the ballroom and the balcony above it. It’s grand but still intimate. And, unlike most art fairs, it has free admission.