The markets for deceased artists can oscillate wildly. They depend on trends in art collecting, changing tastes, and the influence of foundations or galleries. But trends and taste are fickle, galleries can fail, and foundations are only as effective as whoever is managing them.
A savvy collector, then, might be wary about buying into a market that is described as ascendant. No one wants to buy at the top. But how, then, do you account for the vast, much-hyped trove work of Josef Albers, a modernist painter who died almost 40 years ago?
There are two reliable barometers to gauge the popularity of a dead artist’s work: museum shows and auction results. Starting in May 2016, the market for Albers got both.
That was when mega gallery David Zwirner announced it was representing the estate of Albers, who died in 1976, as well as his wife Anni, also a noted artist who died in 1994. Around the same time, MoMA in New York and the Yale University Art Museum announced upcoming shows of Albers’ work. Meanwhile, the exhibition Josef Albers in Mexico was scheduled to open at the Guggenheim on Nov. 3.
Several auction records soon followed, including one in which a painting, Red Wall, bought a year earlier for $400,000, sold for $800,000 at Sotheby’s in New York.
Albers, in other words, was having a moment. But this season’s museum shows and last season’s auction results aren’t enough to justify (for most people, at least), spending more than a million dollars on a square piece of canvas. Most people would need to feel secure that Albers’ market can be, and will be, sustained.
Staying Power
The staying power of an artist’s prices, particularly when that artist is dead, is often best predicted by looking at inefficiencies in his or her market. It’s within these inefficiencies that savvy collectors can find room for growth and, by extension, market longevity. Buyers don’t have to worry that they are “buying at the top” if there is another peak that can be reached—whether in the form of an under-appreciated series, time period, or medium by the artist that everyone, until now, has overlooked.
For Albers’ market, a case can be made that inefficiency lies in the valuation structure of his most famous body of work—his 26 year-long project, “Homage to the Square,” a series of squares painted within slightly different-colored, or contrasting, squares.
“When most people think of Albers, they think of his Homage to the Square series,” says David Leiber, a partner at David Zwirner who focuses on the Albers estate. “The market favors size and color.” In total, there are more than 3,000 unique paintings by Albers in existence, according to his foundation; roughly two-thirds of those, Leiber says, are works from the Homage series.
The series comes in a range of sizes, which run from 16 inches by 16 inches to 48 inches by 48 inches. They come in a range of color palettes, but the most prominent are red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. In general, the larger paintings are more expensive.