by:
Feigen, Richard

Publisher:
Knopf
Published:June 20, 2000
ISBN:039457169X
Format:Hardcover
Pages:320

Description: Amazon.com
In Tales from the Art Crypt, Richard Feigen, a veteran of nearly 50 years as an art dealer, offers not a conventional memoir but rather a series of highly polished anecdotes adding up to an illuminating dissection of art-world practice and politics. The opening chapter, aptly titled "Detective Stories," makes attributing an old master painting or unearthing a forgotten portrait of Thomas Jefferson as exciting as a murder mystery. Feigen's acid comments on the provincialism of his hometown, Chicago, explain his relocation to New York in the mid-1960s. His depictions of fellow dealers like Leo Castelli and Sam Salz are amusingly candid without seeming mean-spirited; affectionate portrayals of collectors such as Morton and Rose Neumann are equally vivid. Also memorable is a juicy account of his stint on the board of the Barnes Foundation, whose decision to deaccession works and permit a traveling exhibit of fragile paintings he deplores. Feigen, who has studied and sold everything from surrealist works and pop art to 17th-century Italian paintings, displays an infectious zest for art as both aesthetic pursuit and business. His comments on the conflicts between museum directors and their newly revenue-conscious boards of trustees explain much about the increasing commercialization of once scholarly institutions. His delightful book fulfills the mission museums once took for granted: to entertain and educate. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
Veteran art dealer Feigen offers up some salty tales from his decades of wheeling and dealing in the vicious and malicious world of the international art market. Feigen represented a number of artists, notably Francis Bacon, before they were considered salable, let alone successful, and was present during some heavy-duty deals in recent decades. His short chapters read like occasional essays, presented without any special order or continuity and containing accounts of meetings with artists from... read more

Book Description
From one of today's most influential art collectors and dealers: a lively, revealing, sometimes blasphemous, always knowing look into the world of art.

Richard Feigen's fifty years in the art world have given him a unique perspective on its inhabitants and habits. He writes about the painters he has known and represented (among them James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Jean Dubuffet, and Joseph Cornell), and about others whose work he has collected. He writes about his galleries in Chicago and New York City, and about his fellow dealers, including Julien Levy and Leo Castelli.

He talks about the "eye" that allows a dealer to recognize a fine painting. He discusses the great art-owning families, art historians, scholars, and conservators. He recounts the story of the debacle at the Barnes Foundation that resulted in the undoing of Albert Barnes's vision for his museum, and reveals the fate of the artworks that belonged to Gertrude Stein. He dissects the art boom of the 1980s and its effects, and takes on the commercialism plaguing American museums today: blockbuster exhibitions and the replacement of great directors with "professional administrators."

Feigen has given us an intimate, engrossing portrait of the great art game as it has been played in the twentieth century.