The first Johns “Flag,” 1954-55, collection of the Museum of Modern Art
© 2010 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
When we last discussed the Michael Crichton sale at Christie’s, we had the NY Times‘ Carol Vogel fingering Bryn Mawr dealer Richard Rossello as the buyer of the record-breaking $28.6-million
Jasper Johns “Flag” (not the one shown above) and everybody else saying it was New York private dealer Michael Altman. Both putative buyers were better known for buying and selling traditional American art, not later classics from the Pop era.
Everyone stood his story: No one ran a correction.
It turns out there’s a good reason for that, as I learned in a recent interview with Rossello, whom I reached by phone at his Avery Galleries. At the end of the interview, he discusses why he was surprised that the price didn’t soar beyond his reach. I close this post by suggesting one reason why that might have been.
Here’s what Rossello told me. (I’m the “Q.” He’s the “A.”):
Q: Different journalists reported that you or that Michael Altman was the buyer of the Johns “Flag.” Who really bought it?
A: It’s very simple. Michael and I collaborate occasionally with different clients. I was the buyer of record. We were there together and I let Michael do the bidding.
Q: You both deal in non-contemporary American art for the most part, right?
A: For the most part. I do some Postwar but rarely do I venture into Pop.
Q: My guess is that your client is someone who normally buys the kind of art that you two specialize in, but in this instance decided to stretch for something more contemporary—an iconic American flag image that perhaps is something that someone interested in earlier American art can also relate to. Can you tell me if there’s any truth to that?
A: I can’t really. We have a couple of different clients at a very high level. One of them is almost exclusively Postwar. I can’t comment on who’s doing what, but this picture is going to be a very good fit in the collection that it’s going to. The collection is broadly based and representative of a lot of different pictures.
Q: Does it include Pop Art and contemporary art?
A: At the moment we’re not doing things like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. We’re not doing truly contemporary. But I don’t consider paintings from the ’50s to ’70s to be contemporary.
Q: Will the Johns have a public life as well as being displayed in a private collection?
A: I certainly hope that it does and anticipate that we might be able to get it into a public forum in the not too distant future. Most of the collectors we work with have been very generous with their willingness to lend work and sometimes it amazes me because sometimes these works travel all over the world and they’re gone for a year. And these are works that the people who buy them love. It’s been rare for us to turn down a reasonable request with reasonable notice.
Q: And has there already been a request?
A: I can tell you that we have had requests.
Q: From museums?
A: Yes.
Q: When it’s loaned, will the collector be identified?
A: I don’t know.
Q: You said on your Twitter page [scroll to May 12] that you were surprised you got it. Did you think it would go for more?
A: I really did, and it’s not because the price was unfairly low. I think the price was fair. But I actually thought that because of the image, someone would be willing spend more money than I would be able to justify. I was surprised that sanity prevailed. I would not have been surprised to see the picture go for $40 million to $50 million. I really thought it could go there—that was the gossip on the street—but it’s easier to say numbers like that than to write checks for them.
Q: Why do you think it didn’t go that high?
A: I think that in general, if you look at the market and the way the sales were conducted, the craziness and frothiness of the market a couple of years ago has been replaced with a much more orderly, much more thoughtful buying crowd and buying taste, and the pictures that sold [recently] at very high numbers were worth it. They sold at prices that were high, but not crazy. It’s a more orderly market, and I think that’s great. There was a rational market and a rational sale. And I think that this is emblematic of what else is going on in the market. The crazy, frothy money-doesn’t-matter, any-price-is-fine attitude is passé. It’s gone. It’s been replaced by savvy, smart people, making good decisions. And that’s welcome.
Maybe one of the reasons the Johns didn’t go for more had to do with its not being quite as “seminal” as Carol Vogel had described it in the first sentence of her report on the auction. The Museum of Modern Art recently made a subtle point about seminal-ity by tweeting (scroll to May 15) a “Happy 80th
Birthday” to Johns, and linking from that to a chronological
slideshow
of some 233 of its holdings by the octogenarian, leading off with with the very first “Flag,” from 1954-55.
The
MoMA version, 42 1/4 x 60 5/8″ (compared to the 17 1/2 x 26 3/4″
Christie’s lot) was given to the museum by Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H.
Barr, Jr. It truly WAS seminal, unlike the ex-Crichton iteration, executed in 1960-66.