Featured A Good time to collect 20th century prints...?

Before I begin: "Caveat Emptor!" double underlined in crimson marker pen.

I just thought I'd mention that, if you appreciate 20th century printmaking, there seems to be a great deal of terrific stuff coming up at provincial auctions at the moment and, occasionally, for very little money. The big hitters: Picasso, Matisse, Chagall et al. continue to hold their value and are selling as healthily as ever (although you can still get lucky, when regional auction houses miscatalogue valuable works, having failed to recognise their significance). Calder and Sonia Delaunay are enjoying an inexplicable bonanza right now, though I recall a time, not even a decade ago, when you could pick up gorgeous signed lithographs and etchings by those two for the price of a meal for two in a decent restaurant.

Do, please, beware, though; there's an awful lot of counterfeit junk swilling around, too.

Another crucial truism: Only buy stuff you absolutely love.

Artists, of whose work I am especially fond and who seem currently to be selling for very reasonable prices are: Richard Lindner, Stanley William Hayter, Giorgio de Chirico, Jacques Villon, Karel Appel (there's some gorgeous stuff by him knocking around just now for ridiculously low money), surprisingly Georges Braque and if you're looking to spend low four figures (rather amazingly) Miró.

Feel completely at ease asking auction houses for high-resolution images of anything which catches your eye, stipulating that you wish to see close-ups of signatures and numerators.

By all means ask for provenance details.

Request condition reports including very specific demands to know whether the print has been trimmed and/or is laid to any backing or glued to the mount. Framers in the 60s and 70s did terrible things to prints, which rendered them almost commercially valueless.

Specify that you wish to know details of any foxing or paper discolouration. In my reckoning, light foxing and paper yellowing are not necessarily deal-breakers (and a good restorer can often refresh a foxed and/or yellowed sheet to astonishing effect) but the other issues I mention above are irreparable and have me (and I would suggest you) running a mile. Also, please bear in mind that print restoration is not cheap - it can substantially increase the cost of your purchase. Make sure you press the restorer for specific details of what s/he intends doing BEFORE they commence work. Make sure they anticipate that their efforts will generate a genuine improvement and make sure you get an all-inclusive quote up front. While no restorer can give you a 100% guarantee about what might happen to a print which has undergone restoration, get as clear an impression as you can of what will happen to your artwork; you may decide, all things considered, that you are happy with it the way it is - warts and all - and would prefer not to take any chances. I've had a few horrible and irreversible surprises when I received a work back after restoration (usually involving distorted colours). On other occasions I've been thrilled by what appear to be magical transformations. The decision has to be your own.

Final thought: Decide, well in advance, how much you are comfortable spending and don't bid a penny more. It's so easy too get swept along. It's far less upsetting (in my opinion at least) to regret not having bought something, than to regret having bought it!

Just a heads-up in case anyone's interested.

 

Please note, that what follows is received wisdom from Richard, my favourite picture framer and restorer. For my part I am no expert, but here goes: Richard's best advice will be my first; I KNOW this matters: don't store or ship your artworks rolled. It is substantially more expensive to ship works flat, but I have experienced, first hand, what happens to a print when it is shipped in a poster roll (regardless of the diameter of the tube) the sheet never laid flat again. It was an Erté embossed serigraph, which I bought for a song. The usual procedure of damping and applying pressure to the sheet was impractical because of the embossing. Heartbreak! I watched another impression sell, literally days later, for four times what I paid for mine and mine HAD BEEN in pristine condition.

Richard uses Japanese paper hinges in the top corners of the sheet, so he effectively suspends the sheet within the frame. If a mount surrounds the sheet, that will assist considerably in flattening it. Of course if the work is printed to the edges of the sheet or the deckle edges are part of the work's aesthetic, floating the work might be crucial to its full appreciation. In such a case rolling can utterly spoil your beautiful work. Richard isn't a fan of waxing or gluing artworks to backings, however undamaging the fixing medium is professed to be by its manufacturers.

Nowadays all restorers, worth their salt, use acid free materials. You MUST insist on these. If you buy a work with (all too frequent) acid burn from a previous mounting; accept that the work "is what it is" as Richard tirelessly reminds me. You are very unlikely to be able to eliminate matte burn completely and very often the elimination process can compromise the integrity of the inks. Black inks are far more resilient than colours. Discuss the implications of such restoration procedures exhaustively with your restorer, before proceeding: there's no retrospective way back from what happens to your print. Don't forget, ink and crayon signatures are also vulnerable.

Glass or plexiglas? Non-reflective glass is my personal favourite, but it can be risky. Apart from substantially greater cost, Plexiglas has many advantages: I cannot, over emphasise the catastrophic effects of glass damage if a picture falls from its hook or it is shipped framed behind glass, which has broken in transit.

Is that any help? I hope so.

 

In case anyone is interested, this signed Braque after-lithograph/collotype (Still Life with Apples) printed by one of Picasso's favourite lithographers, Guy Spitzer, is so generally, though lightly, foxed that this shortcoming appears at first glance (to me at any rate) to be paper texture and only compromises the border and reverse of the sheet, not the image itself. It did mean, however, that the print cost under £200 + buyer's premium. I must say, I carried out extensive due diligence before I started bidding. Only you can decide whether a work's defects represent a deal breaker. For my part, once it had been skilfully matted and attractively framed, I ultimately decided not to have it restored (the colours are so well preserved and beautifully nuanced, that I feared restoration might compromise them). An impression in "perfect condition" regularly sells for well in excess of £1,000. I once saw an astonishing auction result when it fetched £4,000, but that seems inordinately high for an after-lithograph from such a large edition and appears to have been a freak one-off occurrence. See what you think:

 

In case anyone is interested, here are pictures of the Erté embossed serigraph, which I mentioned in my earlier post, after having been crammed by careless shippers into a poster-roll. The work was deemed by a restorer to be unsalvageable. Fortunately, it was insured, but such a shame to have come to this sad end after having survived in pristine condition for 40 years.



Here are before and after photographs of a disastrously restored Calder lithograph. I wanted to have some minor matte-burn removed. It was removed, but whatever chemical process was used in the operation turned all of Calder's signature cobalt blue, the horrible teal/turquoise colour in the second image. Needless to say, the lithograph was irreversibly ruined. Make sure any restorers you employ have Public Liability Insurance, BEFORE they carry out any work.

Calder before restoration:



And afterwards. Note the disastrously altered blue:



On a happier note, here are before and after images of a 1927 Picasso etching (L'atelier), which cleaned up an absolute treat:

Before cleaning:



And afterwards

The Pros, I trust, speak for themselves.
The Cons:
The restoration was expensive, costing, as it did, almost as much as the picture itself,
The work will never be perfect; some of the deepest creasing remains slightly discernible,
The sheet will always remain slightly cockled and will never again lie completely flat,
Apparently Picasso had the first 20 impressions of all his early etchings printed on chine-collé paper. This achieves the exquisite delicacy of this particular impression, but the delicacy of the china paper renders the recto side of the print very vulnerable to scuffing and skinning. Note, in the top border, the skinning above the easel. This damage is permanent and, as the purchaser, I had to weigh up, whether this irreparable imperfection was something with which I could make my peace. It is so far from the image that I felt I could live with it. 11 years after having bought the work, I'm glad I compromised,
The signature and numerator are very unhelpfully positioned. Matting the sheet proportionally, and in such a way as to cover the imperfections in the border, is impossible if the signature and numerator are to be left visible.

I hope that was of interest.