Rembrandt van Rijn, The Entombment (detail), 1654. Etching and drypoint; plate: 8 5/16 x 6 3/8 in. (21.1 x 16.2 cm.), sheet (cut nearly to platemark): 8 7/16 x 6 1/2 in. (21.5 x 16.5 cm.), framed: 20 3/8 x 15 3/8 in. (51.8 x 39.1 cm.). Courtesy St. Louis Art Museum, public-domain contentThis story begins where most would end. On April 16, 1828, Spanish artist Francisco de Goya died at the age of 82. It is often said that an artist’s work becomes more valuable in death than in life, as it dawns on prospective buyers that scarcity is now a factor with no more artworks being created. Buyers of Goya prints needn’t have worried, however, because far more of his etchings have been produced after his death than before. All of the artist’s printing plates became the property of Madrid’s Prado Museum not long after his death, and the museum has regularly leased them to various publishers to bring in funds.
These are posthumously created artworks—they are Goyas, certainly, but not ones that the artist ever saw or approved for sale. These works fall into a gray zone of the art trade, and it isn’t just works by Goya. Graphic art prints, photographic prints and cast sculptures are all produced using plates, negatives and molds that can be reused any number of times.
“Posthumous editions of both Diane Arbus‘s and Peter Hujar‘s work arose to satisfy exhibition demands,” Christian Whitworth, director of San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, told Observer, noting that “private collectors and institutions alike collect both lifetime and posthumous works.” Indeed, most Arbus works in institutional collections are posthumous prints, as she ended her own life without concern about the future interests of the market. Whitworth confirmed that buyers pay more for lifetime prints, sometimes called “vintage” prints, though the price gap between work created when an artist was alive and after their passing varies considerably. “Arbus’s lifetime prints are typically priced about 10 times higher than her posthumous prints;” the price difference between lifetime and posthumous Hujar prints is not nearly that large.
Goya had a much longer life than Arbus, but he oversaw the creation of only one edition of his 80-work set of etchings known as Caprichos in 1799. The second edition was produced posthumously in 1855. By 1937, when the definitive study of his graphic work was published, there were 12 editions. (There is no record of how many other editions were created in the almost 90 years since.) His most famous set of images, the 82-work Disasters of War, was first published in 1863. By 1937, seven editions had been published.
In 2013, New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery presented an exhibition of newly created metal sculptures by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) produced from molds found in the artist’s studio. Kasmin represented the Brancusi estate and was involved in the decision to create posthumous pieces, which were priced up to $4.5 million. There was some debate at the time about how true to the artist’s intentions these posthumous works were, since Brancusi tended to work over each cast piece—polishing here, roughing the surface there—to make every one unique, while these newer sculptures were all shiny and smooth. Hybrids? Knock-offs? Posthumous is the only word that adequately describes them.
There are other examples. The United States pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale featured an untitled sculpture by Félix González-Torres, who had died 11 years earlier and had left only rough sketches of what he envisioned the final artwork would look like. Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector organized the creation of the work based on those sketches for the international exhibition. No one faults Spector, but what visitors encountered was essentially her best guess.
There is no expiration date for producing posthumous works. “There are a number of artists in whose market you will find posthumous prints, specifically in Old Master Prints,” Monica Brown, managing director of fine art and head of the department of prints and multiples at Freeman’s Auctions, told Observer. “For instance, because Rembrandt’s copper plates are still extant, you will find a number of posthumous impressions over the many centuries since he passed.” Life is short, but art goes on and on.
With Arbus, Hujar, Brancusi, Goya and Rembrandt, nothing illegal is taking place, and lower-priced but otherwise identical versions of lifetime artworks allow buyers with less money to acquire artworks with famous names attached. (More copies also allow more people to see these artworks in person.) Collectors at every tier should learn enough about the market for posthumously created artworks to know whether a piece is appropriately priced. Or to put it another way, to know whether something is an investable artwork or a Goya-esque souvenir.
A gray area in the art market
As noted, posthumously produced artworks are generally less valuable than those made during an artist’s lifetime. Christine Berlane, who is in charge of prints and multiples sales at Eldred’s auction house in East Dennis, Massachusetts, told Observer about the sale of a print by Isabel Bishop titled 14th Street Oriental. “We had miscatalogued it as a proof printed before the edition, which meant that it had been printed on her own press in small numbers and was rare and desirable. Cataloged as this, it sold for $1000. Upon examination of the work out of the frame by the buyer, he saw the double S embossed chop mark of Steven Sholinsky, who was a printer hired by AAA in the 1980’s to print editions of Bishop’s prints.” Given that information, the auctioneer is reoffering the print with a much lower estimate of $200-300.
That said, the price a work of art demands doesn’t always depend on whether the artist was alive when it was made. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has authorized the creation of editions of the artist’s (1946-89) images, generally at larger sizes (49×60 inches or 60×60 inches) than those created during Mapplethorpe’s life, which range in price “from the low to the mid six-figures,” according to the foundation’s managing director, Joree Adilman, who told Observer that the average price for a lifetime print by the artist—most sized at 16×20 inches or 20×24 inches—is $25,000-30,000. On the other hand, Davi Weston, owner of the Weston Gallery at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, said that “rare and iconic works” by her grandfather Edward Weston have sold for well over $1 million, while those printed by the photographer’s youngest son Cole from Edward Weston’s original negatives after the artist’s death in 1958 command $10,000-15,000 “in today’s market.” Cole’s older brother Brett Weston also made prints of his father’s work under his father’s direction when he could no longer make his own prints due to Parkinson’s disease, and they sell for prices closer to those made by Edward Weston himself, though not for quite as much.
Somewhat more anomalous, one can purchase a “wall drawing” by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), which would be executed by the specially trained assistants in charge of his estate, at a price no lower than when the artist was still alive. In fact, LeWitt never actually executed any of his wall drawings himself while he lived, always leaving the task to assistants.
In some cases, the market is flooded with prints and sculpture castings produced years after artists’ deaths, resulting in works of questionable quality that cause confusion among buyers. Painter and printmaker William Hogarth died in 1764, but editions of his engravings continued to be produced until 1850 by his widow and later her cousin, and then by a series of publishers who purchased the printing plates from whoever owned them.
The worst instance of posthumously produced artwork is generally acknowledged to be the bronze sculpture of Frederic Remington (1861-1909). Alice Duncan, director of Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City, referred to some Remington castings as “a whole can of worms.” After the artist died in 1909, editions were cast under the auspices of his estate and widow, Eva. After her death in 1918, editions were produced without any authorization at all, which Duncan called “midnight casts.”
“One assumes they are either cast from other bronzes”—referred to in the sculpture field as surmoulage—”or from molds that were unseen at the foundry when the estate lawyers requested all molds to be destroyed,” she said. Editions continued to be made and are produced to this day, for instance, by the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, which earns a third of its annual revenues through replicas. You might also call them souvenirs or décor, but certainly not investment works. “In our gallery, we call them boat anchors or doorstops,” Duncan said, adding that one often sees ‘Remingtons’ of this type on eBay. Gerald Peters Gallery will only take on consignment Remington sculptures that can be proven to have been produced during the artist’s lifetime or that were produced by authority of his widow.
An ounce of prevention
Buyers looking at posthumously created artworks should do their own sleuthing or hire an advisor—preferably a dealer familiar with this material—to determine when and by whom a particular work was produced. One of the first sources experts consult is the catalogue raisonné (the published annotated listing of all known artworks by an artist), such as Tomas Harris’ Goya’s Prints or Michael D. Greenbaum’s Icons of the West: Frederic Remington’s Sculpture. These provide illustrations that can be checked against an artwork one is looking to buy, noting when certain editions were produced, the number of copies made (if that information is available), which print publisher or foundry made the edition, changes made to the images and the quality of the impressions. Greenbaum went so far as to test the metals used in different editions, finding that an estate edition of Remington’s 1905 The Rattlesnake, produced on May 31, 1918, contained more tin and lead than those produced in a posthumous 1920 casting. (A metal test is not an uncommon tool in sculpture authentication.)
Joe Stanfield, director of fine art at Wright Auctions, recommends that prospective buyers ask for a printed copy of an artwork’s provenance—its history of ownership—which ideally will reveal an unbroken chain of custody, as well as where and when an artwork was first purchased. That information may be less available for much older works, such as a Rembrandt, than for a Remington, but it may still be intact for a Hogarth or a Goya. But, he added, it pays to work with an expert. “I might not be able to tell when a work was created, but there are scholars who know what to look for, and they can save you a lot of money and heartbreak,” he said.
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