Thinking ahead about artist market values
- March 25, 2010 14:53
The appreciation and market valuation of an artist's ouevre can sometimes boil down to estate planning.
Lee Krasner, who managed her husband Jackson Pollock's estate until her death in 1984, provided an even flow of works onto the market in order to keep prices high and maintain a scarcity.
The families of painters Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) and Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) helped depress the prices for their paintings, initially, by dumping a large number of them onto the market after their deaths.
Not only heirs but collectors and dealers, too, may flood the market upon the death of an artist, assuming a large jump in prices. In Mark Rothko's case, a gallery infamously made his work scarce during his lifetime by stockpiling it.
