New Wine from Sour Grapes:
What Should I Do with My Gailey?
by
David Olson, for Fine Art Registry®
"I have a beautiful seascape by H. Gailey, an original oil on canvas, with Collier Art Corporation Certificate #123456. What is it worth? Can you tell me about the artist?" How many times have we seen those plaintive messages on Internet forums? Perhaps one of them is yours. And how often is the answer a figurative shrug of the shoulders and a suggestion that you, the poor sap with the question, just don’t understand that what you have is not 'real' art?
As a matter of fact, I have that H. Gailey seascape. It matches the sofa, or it did until the décor changed. Now, after thirty years or so, I want to do something with the painting besides throw it in the trash, as some - even some experts - have suggested. I went through the pain of that Internet search, and in the process discovered that there are a couple dozen equally curious owners of H. Gailey Meisterwerke.
If you are the original owner of one of these paintings, you may have bought your painting late last century at a charity art auction, where the works of Gailey, Cafieri, Farr, and Roselli were sold alongside more familiar names, such as Dali, Chagall, and Miro. You may not have known much about art at that point, especially after the cocktail hour, but you were willing to be taught, and the auctioneer was ready to teach you.
You intended to do three things at that auction:
- Buy something you liked that was inexpensive, yet impressive enough to hang over the avocado sofa without making the hanging white capiz shell lamp look out of place;
- Donate a portion of the sale to the charity that sponsored the event; and
- Despite the auctioneer's urging to "buy it because you like it; don't buy it as an investment," you buoyed yourself with the hope that you could eventually sell it for more than you paid for it. And now that time has come.
If you are the second owner of an H. Gailey painting, you probably got a much sweeter deal. There is a better-than-even chance that you negotiated a good price at a garage sale or a thrift store, rather than a Sotheby's or Christie's auction. Your Gailey may even have been perched at curbside, just waiting for you to pick it up. And now you're wondering why.
Okay, I got one. So what's it worth?
If you examine your Gailey with a critical eye, you'll see happy trees and waves that look like they could have been done by Bob Ross in a half-hour episode of "The Joy of Painting." Would it surprise you to know that Bob Ross's technique is not held in consistently high regard in the rarified atmosphere of art museums?
Most Gailey paintings will fall into the category I'll call decorator art. Briefly, this category encompasses a wide variety of intentionally low-cost work, made available in large quantities for use by interior decorators. It is the comfort food of the art world, something you can enjoy without having to worry whether the cost of losing it is greater than the pleasure of having it. No self-respecting art thief will steal a Gailey.
But who is H. Gailey? Surely somewhere in the annals of art there must be a fleeting reference to this painter who has brought comfort and enjoyment to so many admirers of his work. The research department at the esteemed J. Paul Getty Museum came up with nothing, even though they researched a dozen respected books about artists, and another dozen online sources, including the Getty's own Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), a database currently containing around 293,000 names.
Gailey owner Joe Holstine, whose inquiry prompted that Getty search, put it this way: "I Googled, Alta Vista'd and Asked Jeeves, and found several people asking about H. Gailey, his/her art, many mentions on EBay, and ...assertions that Gailey was English, or perhaps Australian, or the items in the Orient originated elsewhere."1
We could add to Joe's list of spurious information that Gailey's first name was Helina. Or maybe Helena. And French. Or from the Nineteenth Century.
It seems the only reliable source for acquiring a new Gailey painting is The Asia Company (HK) in Hong Kong. Established in 1954, the company claims on their website to be the "leading company in oil painting industry in Hong Kong. We provide decoration art on canvas by talent [sic] local artists like BARTON, FRANK LEAN, H. GAILEY, I. Cafieri, KEITH, K. Wallis, to reproduction of masterpiece from Van Gogh and Monet."
There you have it. Gailey is a local Hong Kong artist. A telephone call to Asia Company owner Patrick Wong would confirm that, right? Not so fast, my hopeful collector.
What that phone call did confirm was the same thing San Francisco artist Charles Lantz had explained on a Fine Art Registry® forum: Oil paintings and water colors can be duplicated in mass quantities. Lantz should know; he used to produce large numbers of paintings for some of the better known auction houses of the last century: Collier, Royal, Patrician, Sills and others.
Wong in Hong Kong explained that his company works with more than a thousand artists. Some of these artists produce H. Gailey paintings, complete with signature. The work used to be done right there in Hong Kong, but more recently his entire inventory has been supplied by workshops elsewhere in mainland China. Wong is proud that they can produce over 10,000 paintings a month for his "royal customer."2 Is it any wonder that Gailey paintings are everywhere?
If the museum door is closed to the owner-collector of decorator art, there’s no reason to stay out in the cold. Learned opinions about status and value notwithstanding, there are people in this world who collect bricks (see http://www.brickcollecting.com), so why not collect decorator art? Dr. H. F. Hicks in Baltimore collects light bulbs; he has thousands of them in his Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting. So why not collect decorator art? Beer drinkers are spending $12 a bottle for specially brewed "craft beers," treating the beverage as though it were a fine wine. So why not collect decorator art?
The collecting begins, of course, with some sort of anchor for the provenance of the pieces, such as the simple step of registering each piece with Fine Art Registry. Apply the tags, take a couple of photos, and provide descriptive information.
Then define your collection. Is your goal to continue the search for the elusive biography of a particular artist?
As we have seen, biographical information on the artist could be especially difficult to find, given that the signature on a decorator painting could be bona fide, or a forgery, or completely made up. It could be a pseudonym for either a real person (à la Mark Twain) or an entire company (à la Victor Appleton, "author" of the Tom Swift books).
Even the fact that a particular artist does not seem to exist, however, should not deter the determined collector of decorator art, since the adjudged quality of the painting may be only ancillary to the purpose of the collection.
Perhaps you'd like to find out when each piece was created. A certificate of authenticity (COA), combined with research into when a particular auction house provided which type of COA and who signed it, could lead to determining the time of the original sale. Or perhaps you'd like to acquire a COA from each auction house, or to collect as many exemplars of the same signature as possible.
Keep in mind all the while that you bought the painting - or you're keeping it - primarily because you like it.
Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Delaware, speaks on the topic of craft beers, which are currently pulling noticeable market share from the major premium breweries3: "It's a kind of a blue-collar connoisseurship. Anybody can afford to buy the world's best beers. But if you wanted to buy a bottle of the world's best wine, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars."
If you want to buy the world's best paintings, you'd have to spend...a lot. Anybody can afford to buy the world's best Gaileys.
- Joe Holstine, 6/28/2008 6:27 PM
- http://www.theasiaco.com
- Jeff Barnard, "Brew: Intricately crafted beers are grabbing more fans," The Associated Press, as seen in The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 26, 2008.
— by David Olson
| October 1, 2008 |
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