Market Report

What we’re hearing from galleries and auction houses across the country.

Thomas B. Parker
Director Hirschl & Adler Galleries

A combination of lingering Covid concerns, an uncertain economic forecast and the ongoing dominance of contemporary art over the secondary market has resulted in some headwinds for historical American art. Still, as has always been true, top quality, correctly priced works of art, invariably find a buyer. Crucially, this market enjoys support not just from private collectors, but from institutional buyers as well. They tend to be buyers whose motives transcend speculative interest and resist fleeting trends in the marketplace. They are attracted by established artists, proven quality and stable values—things we used to assume were a given, but not necessarily in recent years.

We have seen a notable uptick of interest in works from the 1930s and early 1940s, an era in American cultural history with parallels to our own. Tumultuous times are often the crucible for powerful visual expression. For instance, social realist paintings seem to resonate with today’s political tensions, general angst and sense of change. In particular, magic realism, a close cousin of surrealism, is enjoying renewed interest from collectors. Well-known artists George Tooker, Louis Guglielmi and Paul Cadmus are actively sought-after as well as lesser-knowns James Guy, Jules Kirschenbaum and Clarence Carter. Even more exciting are the women associated with this movement like Honoré Sharrer, Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning and others.

We are particularly excited about a German American artist named Winold Reiss (1886-1953), a “jack-of-all-trades” who brought a distinctively modern sophistication to American painting, interior design, commercial illustration, furniture design and public murals. He’s perhaps best known for his innovative portraiture, particularly his acclaimed Native American portraits from the 1920s. But he also played an outsized role in the Harlem Renaissance movement, led art schools in both New York and Woodstock, and imbued numerous restaurants, train stations and other public spaces with his refined and highly stylized form of art deco. He was recently the subject of a major exhibition at the New York Historical Society in the fall of 2022 which introduced Reiss to an ever-widening audience.

Hirschl & Adler Galleries
41 East 57th Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10022
www.hirschlandadler.com