Dear All,
It is with great pleasure that I share with you the third interview in the series of “Conversations.” This month, I had the opportunity to delve into the art world with David Nash of the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York City.
On a monthly basis, I will be conducting interviews with art world luminaries, all of whom will provide a deep and nuanced view of the art community. When seen collectively, my hope is that you will possess a more comprehensive and enlightened sense of this dynamic field.
David Nash launched his career in the art world at Sotheby’s London, in 1961, where he joined the new formed Impressionists Painting Department. He, later on, moved to New York City to represent the Sotheby’s US office. Over the span of 35 years at Sotheby’s, Nash became Executive Vice President of the company and a member of the Board of Directors; Nash was also appointed the Director of the International Impressionist and Modern Art Department. Throughout the years, Mr. Nash has sat on the IRS Art Advisory Panel, been a member of the board of the International Foundation for Art research, a member of the Authentication Committee for the Hans Arp Stiftung and performed appraisals for the Federal Indemnity program for a number of museum exhibitions. He is the co-owner- along with wife, Lucy Mitchell-Innes- of Mitchell-Innes & Nash galleries. Both are long-standing members of the Art Dealers Association of America.
“Conversations” with David Nash
What drew you to Sotheby’s and the art world? Talk to us a bit about how you got your start as a porter in London and your transition to the Fine Arts Representative in the New York office; and then later on, as the Head of Impressionist and Modern of Sotheby’s, worldwide.
My start in the art world was more of a stumble than a grand entry. After I left school I had very little idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I did not want to go on to University (a decision which seemed right at the time but which I now regret) and so I took on a number of part-time jobs from the local Labour Exchange where I lived in Surrey. For a few months I was a gravedigger at a local churchyard on the banks of the River Mole; for a few more months I became an electrician’s assistant in the female ward of a lunatic asylum (as these grim hospitals were then called) and I had a few other manual labour jobs which paid very well but led nowhere.
My parents were quite unhappy about my lack of ambition and were seriously worried that the money they had spent on my education at the prestigious Marlborough College was going to waste. After several unsuccessful attempts by my father to interest me in a career in law, accountancy or the business world, he surprisingly suggested looking into the possibility of working at Sotheby’s. A favorite former employee of my father’s had gone on to work in the Jewelry department at Sotheby’s and could provide an introduction. My appointment with Peter Wilson, the chairman at the time, was brief and inconclusive although by a fortunate accident I met an old school friend in Wilson’s disorganized office. His name was Bruce Chatwin and he was very enthusiastic about my coming to work there. At this time Bruce was only 21 but he was already considered the bright young star with a gifted eye for works of art. He was a great influence on me until he left Sotheby’s and went on to become a well-known travel writer.
I was asked by Peter Wilson what area of the art world interested me. As I had very little knowledge of Sotheby’s activities, I suggested that Impressionist Paintings was my favorite subject. I was also asked about my work experience and Peter Wilson was delighted to learn about my stint as a gravedigger and in a mental hospital. With a delighted grin on his face, he said he thought that these two experiences would come in very handy!
Unfortunately, the chairman’s office called me later in the day to say that there were no vacancies in the Impressionist painting department and so I went back to my former part-time job. Then, quite unexpectedly, my father’s friend in the Jewelry department called a few weeks later to say that an opening had become available as the previous occupant had been fired for mistakenly sending a major Matisse to Helsinki and if I wanted to be a porter (a job which is now known as ‘art handler’) I could start on Monday. This was in November 1961.
My job was to look after the stacks of paintings which had been sent in for sale and to pull out the ones that were to be hung for the next week’s exhibition. You can learn a lot, very fast, when you have to handle dozens of paintings a day. It is quite a different kind of education than you would get at, say, the Courtauld! One got to see good paintings, bad paintings, the backs of paintings, fakes, copies etc. Art History students are – or were at that time – learning mainly from books and reproductions and their focus was directed towards the famous and well-known works which are generally in public collections. Quite different from the mixed bag that we dealt with on a daily basis down in the storage vaults under Bond Street!
In this new, young Impressionist painting department we were joined by Michel Strauss, the grandson of a famous French collector named Jules Strauss. Michel, who went on to become the head of the department which he ran for more than 30 years, was the only one of us who had received any scholastic training. He had been at Yale University and had recently graduated from the Courtauld. The combination of – and competition between – the instinctive judgments of Bruce Chatwin and the art historical approach of Michel Strauss was surprisingly successful and quite stimulating.
In those first few months in the department, I learned much about the auction business and quite a lot about myself. I realized that I possessed a very good visual memory and had a keen interest in learning as much as I could about the world of Impressionist and Modern paintings. Although I was simply an apprentice in this department, I was fascinated by the sophisticated world to which I was becoming exposed. Meeting the French ‘experts’ and the rich Greek and American collectors; the powerful Bond Street dealers in their pin-striped suits; showing a Rembrandt of Saint Bartholomew to Paul Getty in my first month on the job (this meant knowing where it was stored and putting it on a velvet easel without dropping it, so that Peter Wilson could ‘sell’ it to Mr. Getty – who actually bought it in the auction the following week!). It was a very exciting and cosmopolitan new world and I was determined to become an expert in the art that was at its center.
After 18 months apprenticeship in the Impressionist department, I was asked by Peter Wilson if I would be willing to go and work in New York. At this time Sotheby’s had a small representative office in New York which was headed by a man named Peregrine Pollen together with a couple of English ladies who were having an “American Sojourn”. The function of Sotheby’s office was to promote the auction sales which took place in London and to gather valuable works to be shipped to London for sale at a more competitive rate than prevailed at the only competition auction house in the USA, Parke-Bernet Galleries. In the 1960s and 1970s London was considered the center of the world’s art market but America was the great buying power. When the president of Parke-Bernet Galleries, an Englishman named Leslie Hyam died in 1963, Peter Wilson and Peregrine Pollen made a very aggressive and visionary move to enter the American market by buying Parke-Bernet. Once this was accomplished, Peregrine asked me to head up the Impressionist and Modern department and we held our first sale in New York in April 1965.
You’ve clearly seen a lot of artwork over the last 60 years, do you find that intensity of exposure to works of art and developing your eye the most critical element in your success?
Actually, it is only 55 years but – yes, I have seen (and sold) a huge number of works of art in my lifetime. There is absolutely no doubt that the more you see, the better your eye becomes. One of my greatest pleasures is to go to museums and exhibitions in commercial galleries and the public salesrooms all around the world. You always learn something and looking at works of art of all kinds is a passion for me I seem to have a bit of a talent for spotting fakes which is not always foolproof but saves one from possible disaster both in the auction business and in private dealing.
You started off at Sotheby’s London in the 60’s and are now the founder and director of one of the most esteemed galleries worldwide. What are the biggest differences between those early days and present times in the art world?
This is an interesting question and a huge topic which I will try to answer briefly. When I started in the art business in the 1960s, the market was very much controlled by the dealers and specialists. The ultimate buyers were mostly museums and private collectors who bought in an area that interested them and they generally held on to their paintings until they died. Then the collections would be dispersed – usually at auction – or donated to museums. Paul Mellon, David Rockefeller, Robert Meyerhoff, Baron Heinrich von Thyssen and Stavros Niarchos would be classic examples of the typical collector from this period. They seldom sold anything except to acquire something better. Nowadays buyers of art, particularly contemporary art, are frequently also traders and works of art have become, in many cases, an asset with all the necessary attendant care, protection and profit potential. Art has also become an asset against which you can borrow money from a bank or an auction house.
One other huge change is the enormous increase in interest in Contemporary art. Before the 1970s, Old Master paintings commanded the highest prices and the most attention. Impressionist and Modern paintings took over this position for the next 20 years and by the beginning of the 1990s Post-War and Contemporary art took the lead. After the turn of the 21st century works by quite young or recently dead artists were commanding enormous prices and today this area constitutes the largest share of the auction market. It is interesting to note that up until about 1975 work by living artists had very little resale value. It was like buying a new car which dropped in value the moment you took delivery! The dealer from whom you bought, say, a Rauschenberg or a Francis Bacon had little interest in taking it back as he had other new works by the same artist which he needed to sell first!
In terms of the art market, it seems that there is a cyclicality to buyers collecting modern and contemporary pieces from the Western world— Japanese buying, Russians buying and now the Chinese appear to be a major force— throughout all this, what do think the drivers of this demand are? How do you navigate these fluctuations?
One of the big changes to the market for 19th and 20th Century art over the last 25 years has been its global acceptance. In the 1960s and 70s, this market was typically dominated by Americans and to a much lesser extent by Europeans. The Japanese first made their presence known in the early 1970s but the Arab oil embargo and subsequent economic crises caused them to withdraw entirely until the beginning of the 1980s. For the next decade Japanese buyers were responsible for a huge segment of the purchases in the field of Impressionist and Modern art and in the second half of this decade their interest expanded to include Post-War and Contemporary art. This all came to a grinding halt in 1990-91 following the burst of the Japanese real estate “bubble”. I remember trying to put together a sale for Sotheby’s for the spring of 1991 – it was hardscrabble time – and eventually, by combining two or three departments together, I was able to organize an auction that brought about 1/10th of the value of the equivalent sale a year ago! In addition to this setback, we were all bracing ourselves for the flood of overpriced Impressionist and Modern paintings coming back from Japan to flood the market like a tsunami. Fortunately, this never happened. Quite a few works came back on to the market but the Japanese financial and accounting system enable much of the work to stay in the country. The next decade saw Americans, once again, absorb most of the sales but new countries like Qatar and Russia were making their appearance in the field. The drop in the price of oil has recently slowed down the economies of these two states and their ongoing acquisition of paintings and works of art has also diminished considerable. Coinciding with this drop, China and some other countries in the Far East have emerged as the “new” buyers. It is interesting to observe that the major auction galleries and some of the leading and largest private galleries have all opened new branches in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan etc.
Having spent much of your career in the auction world as a Worldwide Fine Arts Director for Sotheby’s and now as a senior gallery director, what are the striking difference between the gallery world and the auction world? What are the pros and cons for a collector to work with either?
I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed 35 years in the auction world and now just 21 years as a private dealer and gallery owner. The common denominator fro auctioneers and dealers is the thrill of working with art of all kinds. The enjoyment of looking at paintings and sculptures every day of your life, the satisfaction of learning something new throughout one’s career. In most other respects, however, these two sides of the art market are markedly different. When I began working at Sotheby’s in 1961, the auction galleries were essentially in the service business. They provided a valuable outlet for “distressed” sales – estates, bankruptcies, and divorce. The emphasis was on performing a service for sellers, particularly those with fiduciary responsibilities. Expertise and connoisseurship were valued assets, the buyers, for the most part, were paintings dealers or members of the antique trade. Very little effort was made to publicize the forthcoming sales other than the catalog itself. Even the catalog descriptions were so arcane that only professionals could interpret them! There was not sense of reaching out to the general public at all and it was quite a closed world. Buyers understood that there was no guarantee of authenticity: they had to make their own decisions and there was no recourse if they were wrong. The catalogs did not print estimates and many of the lesser lots were not even illustrated. To be an auction buyer, you had to be there, visit the “rooms” frequently and attend the sales. The sellers paid the selling commission (usually about 10%) and the buyers, who were not getting any particular service anyway, paid no premium. This was the auction world that I joined over 50 years ago and it had not changed much in the previous 200 years.
There was not much direct competition between Sotheby’s and Christie’s as sellers were generally loyal to one house or the other. Christie’s was considered the more aristocratic firm and had strong connections with many of the members of the House of Lord who owned the great country houses and their contents, many of which had to be sold to pay death duties. Sotheby’s was always viewed as the house with the better international connections, particularly with the United States. This contrasting profile led some wit to note that Sotheby’s was a firm of auctioneers who were trying to become gentlemen and Christie’s was a firm of gentlemen who were trying to become auctioneers!
Art dealers at this time pursued their traditional business as it had existed for many years – buying inventory for resale, cultivating collectors, promoting new artists, brokering sale of very high-value works, putting on exhibitions, exposing the artists of the avant-garde. The larger part of the trade in valuable Impressionist and Modern paintings went through the hands of private dealers. Not until the late 80s and early 90s did the balance shift as auction galleries competed with each other to make huge investments in marketing and publicity in an effort to reach a much wider retail audience. This involved printing larger and larger catalogues, spending huge fortunes on advertising and promotion campaigns, opening offices and salerooms in numerous cities around the world, sending important works coming up for future sales on tours in major collecting cities and hiring dozens of well-connected men and women to assist in the retailing and consignment of works of art. Naturally, this caused the cost of running these businesses to surge almost without control. The increased ferocity of the competition between Sotheby’s and Christie’s seriously eroded the commission structure of the two houses. The effect on their profits has been (and presumably will continue to be) seriously detrimental. The profit margins are very slim.
Increasingly, art fairs have become a vehicle by which collectors see a breadth of works of art. Why do you think art fairs have become so important? What are the benefits for the collectors and the dealers that are represented?
The art market has become increasingly event driven, art fairs have proliferated and attract huge numbers of visitors and (one hopes) buyers. We do 5 or 6 art fairs a year and for many dealers, a third to one-half of their annual business is conducted at these events.
Do you think that artists are losing their voice and right for expression through the increasing commoditization of art fairs, and further, the industry? Are we losing appreciation for the entire point of art? In your opinion, how can artists be better represented and have more of a voice?
No, actually, I think the opposite is true. The huge expansion of interest in the world of contemporary art has given artists many more opportunities to show their work than before. Most artists are dependent on selling their work to earn a living. I think that there is now much more money available to be spent on this field which must be good for the artists. The downside of this situation is that this rising market invites cold speculation and market manipulation without any real connection to the merit of the works of art.
Given all this, where do you see the future of the art market and collecting evolving over the course of the next several years? The next several decades? What influences do you foresee changing the industry and future of it?
This is an impossible question to answer! It has changed rapidly in the last ten years and I presume it will change even more rapidly in the future. The internet offers huge opportunities for both buyers and sellers and, just as it has changed the retail business throughout the world, it will probably change the art world also.
What is good art to you? What do you collect these days?
Personally, my wife and I have a very wide range of interests in our private collecting. Lucy is very focused on young artists, some of whom we represent. We have an interest in ancient art from Egypt, Greece and Rome, Indian art, African and Oceanic sculptures and in our 19th Century farmhouse upstate we hang mostly English paintings of the 18th/19th Century depicting scenes of rural life.
How do you stay current with the art world, particularly in light of how hugely international the contemporary and modern art world has become?
Art fairs, exhibitions, advice from artist friends, talking to curators and critics but mainly just looking and listening.
What cities fascinate you for the arts? And what institutions?
Obviously New York, but also Los Angeles and London. As my personal expertise is grounded in European painting and sculpture of the period 1880 – 1960, particularly Cézanne, France, Germany and Switzerland are of vital interest.
What and who inspires you?
Great art; visiting museums is one of my greatest passions.
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I hope you enjoyed this conversation, if you have any questions about “Conversations” or would like to see any personalities in the art world interviewed here, please let me know. As always if you need advice regarding any aspect of Collecting Fine Art, please feel free to contact me.
Warm Regards,
Bill Cottingham
