Passion Investments: Art
Desire Writ Large
Daniel DelRe
06/01/2005

Monumental sculpture is literally larger than life. So too is the spirit of the collectors who love it. Sydney Besthoff, 77, a Louisiana businessman who once owned the chain of K&B drugstores, reserves 10 weeks each year to visit New York and meet with museum curators, attend auctions and visit galleries and studios. Besthoff became hooked on monumental sculpture in the 1970s, after he hosted an exhibit of George Rickey’s pieces in the plaza outside his New Orleans office. Following the exhibit, Besthoff traveled to Rickey’s studio in Chatham, N.Y., and commissioned a 39-foot-high, stainless steel abstract with parts that sway in the wind. When it was finished, Besthoff shipped the work in pieces to New Orleans on a flatbed truck, and had Rickey and a crew assemble it outside his office.

SCULPTOR HENRY Moore conceived Large Interior Form in 1951, and cast it in 1981 in an edition of six.(Photograph courtesy of Sotheby's.)
After nearly three decades, Besthoff and his wife, Walda, are still avid collectors, having recently traveled to Paris to purchase a piece by French sculptor Aristide Maillol. The 5-foot female figure will go directly to the New Orleans Museum of Art, which houses a separate section and sculpture garden to exhibit the works donated by the Besthoffs. Their home remains a veritable museum itself, with pieces situated inside and in outdoor gardens.

Collectors typically display monumental sculpture in a garden or on a lawn on their property. These bold pieces awe guests and arouse emotion. “There’s something spiritual, exciting and sensuous about these works,” says Nancy Berman, the daughter of prominent art collectors and curator emeritus for the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. “They make a very dramatic statement about the artist, as well as the collector.”

When hosting visitors, monumental sculpture aficionados enjoy showing off their latest acquisitions while discussing a piece’s provenance and the history of its creator. Berman’s parents, Philip and Muriel Berman, often hosted gala events at their home in Allentown, Pa., entertaining presidents and foreign dignitaries, in addition to the artists whose pieces they purchased. In quieter moments, their sculptures assumed an altarlike appeal, offering Berman and her siblings a place for solitary meditation. “They became a focal point for reflection and contemplation, something to learn from, to ponder and interpret,” she says. Today, Berman admits that she has never considered herself a monumental art collector. “I just don’t have the bug,” she says.

TOP: SEATED Woman by Fernando Botero was cast in 2004. Bottom: Two Forms (Divided Circle) by Barbara Hepworth, is inscribed with the sculptor’s signature, dated 1969 and numbered 316. (Photography courtesy of Sotheby's.)
Philip Berman began collecting art with the fortune he amassed leasing trucks and warehouse space to Bethlehem Steel and other northeastern businesses in the 1940s and ’50s. Decades later, he bought Hess’s Department Store and expanded the chain from a single outpost in Allentown to several locations in Pennsylvania and New York. In 1989, he assumed the chair of the board of trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. During his tenure, he facilitated the museum’s acquisition of numerous important pieces, including 43,000 prints acquired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art that otherwise would have been sold at auction. “The Bermans were true collectors in that they acquired what they loved, they lived with it and they shared it with others,” says Lisa Tremper Hanover, director of the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. In the 1980s, the Bermans donated much of their collection to Ursinus, where Philip Berman studied for one year. (He dropped out, but the school later awarded him an honorary degree.)

The topics of valuation and appreciation for monumental art are inevitable. At a recent auction in Paris, Besthoff purchased a piece by Maillol for a price “in the upper six figures.” Beyond the purchase price, collectors face daunting insurance and transportation expenses for such grandiose works. The insurance appraisal process alone can extend for days, at a cost of several hundred dollars per hour. Moreover, monumental sculpture is particularly susceptible to abuse. On several occasions, vandals have spray painted the sculpture in front of Besthoff’s office.

Big Risks
Naturally, a piece’s value will vary according to fashion trends. For
artwork dating to the 18th century or earlier, such as the Baroque-era sculptures of Bernini, public tastes are generally stable. Contemporary pieces, however, succumb much more easily to popular whims, posing a threat for buyers. Besthoff would never recommend art as an investment. “It’s just not profitable.” People’s tastes, he argues, are simply too capricious. The demand for modern sculpture is hot and prices are soaring, leading some to wonder if today’s buyers may be entering the market at its peak.

The epicenter of today’s highly charged market is not necessarily the Paris auction houses, nor New York’s galleries, but an area in central Florida known mainly for Disneyworld and Universal Studios. For the past two years, Sotheby’s has conducted a private sale of monumental sculpture at Orlando’s Isleworth golf community, an area with enough open space to accommodate dozens of works. In 2004, the New York–based auction house’s director of private sales, Stephane Connery (Sean’s stepson), debuted the concept with 11 pieces from eight masters such as Auguste Rodin, Salvador Dali and Fernando Botero.

VALUE JUDGMENT
Demand for monumental artwork—large-scale sculpture intended for outdoor display—is soaring, fueling record sales figures. While collectors jostle one another to acquire the best works, aficionados and experts alike caution that popular whims can quickly change art values, particularly in a niche as volatile as modern sculpture.
Sotheby’s chose an outdoor sale to demonstrate how monumental sculpture adorns a landscape. “Setting is very much part of what the sale is all about,” Connery says. The golf course adorns the finely manicured, 600-acre gated compound where the average price of a new home is $3.5 million. Isleworth’s owner, Joseph Lewis, has drawn from his private collection of monumental sculpture to bedeck the golf course. Two pieces by Henry Moore and one by Philip Jackson comprise the course’s permanent collection. According to Lisa Richardson, the community’s real estate manager, “The golf course itself is practically a museum.”

This year, Connery assembled 27 pieces by 13 artists for the four-month sales exhibition, which began in January. “We’re trying to keep the bar high in terms of the caliber of art,” he says. Sotheby’s displayed many pieces from the era of Rickey and Maillol. “With the exception of a few notables like Brancusi, Sotheby’s collection included the biggest names of 20th-century sculpture,” says Timothy Baum, an independent art dealer based in New York. Established collectors of modern sculpture, including museum curators, rubbed elbows with first-time buyers during the sale, which saw eight of the 11 pieces change hands and grossed almost $10 million.

PAINTER AND sculptor Joan Miró conceived and cast Conque in 1969 in an edition of six. The piece is composed of bronze, black and green patina.
Nine pieces at Isleworth hailed from the private collection of the elder Bermans. Of those, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure: Arched Leg attracted the highest price, selling for $5.1 million. Still another Berman piece, Lynn Chadwick’s Pair of Walking Figures, two striking black forms cast in bronze with capes appearing to billow in a breeze, sold for approximately $500,000.

Maillol’s La Méditerranée, a classic female figure that matches the piece he chose to adorn his grave, is a 4-foot figure based on the form of his favorite muse, Dina Vierny. Cast in 1975, La Méditerranée sold for approximately $1.5 million at Isleworth. Hare on Bell on Portland, a playful bronze sculpture by Barry Flanagan, depicts a rabbit frozen in midair as it leaps across a plain. Its fur appears smoothed by the wind and its ears are stretched backward, furthering the impression of motion. This piece fetched about $500,000.

Many of the Isleworth artists established themselves as prominent surrealist painters as well as abstract sculptors. Max Ernst signed the inaugural edition of La Révolution Surréaliste, the Paris-based periodical launched in 1924 to popularize this genre. His piece, Le Grand Assistant, a birdlike figure standing 5-feet high and priced at approximately $600,000, had not yet sold as Worth went to press. Joan Miró’s 42-inch Conque, an egg-shaped bronze abstract with a green and black exterior, sold for about $500,000. Benediction, a 56-inch figure by Jacques Lipchitz, commemorating France’s suffering during the Second World War, sold for $610,000.

American artists were conspicuous by their absence from the 2004 Isleworth sale. Sotheby’s amended this in 2005 by adding two pieces by American pop artist Robert Indiana. The first, a 6-foot sculpture in the form of a blue number five, depicting the artist’s obsession with numbers, was priced at $185,000. Sotheby’s also proffered Indiana’s Love, an 8-foot sculpture formed by stacking the letters L and O atop V and E, priced at $480,000. Neither of these had sold by press time.

Last November, Sotheby’s auctioned off a 14-foot sculpture by Henry Moore for $8.4 million, far above the $6 million estimate. At the same auction, a piece by the British abstract sculptor Barbara Hepworth fetched $1.13 million, more than double Sotheby’s anticipated price of $500,000.

Given the risks and rewards of buying
art, collectors and dealers advise their clients to look for pieces that reflect their tastes.
The Crucial Context
At events such as Isleworth, experienced buyers hope to avoid being distracted by the sublime landscape, and instead examine hard criteria to evaluate the sculpture on display. Trained eyes focus on the quality of a piece’s surface, or patina, and its condition. Fastidious collectors may also balk at pieces cast after an artist’s death, such as Maillol’s La Méditerranée. This tends to decrease a piece’s value.

The extent to which an artist has been commercialized can be another drag on a work’s value. Last July, art critic Martha Schwendener commented that Indiana’s Love sculpture has been “co-opted by everyone from poster, keychain and candle makers to the United States Postal Service, who reportedly paid the artist a thousand dollars for what became one of their most popular stamps.” Botero’s works are equally omnipresent in souvenir shops and gift stores around the world.

LE MEDITERRANEE by Aristide Maillol was conceived in 1902 and cast in 1975. The sculptor based this 4-foot piece on his favorite muse, Dina Vierny.
Given the risks and rewards of buying art, collectors and dealers advise their clients to look for pieces that reflect their tastes and mesh with their personality. When it comes to monumental sculpture, however, the paramount criterion is whether the piece fits into its surroundings. A sculpture out of synch with its environment becomes an eyesore rather than a testament to the taste and sophistication of its owner. For this reason, Connery and Sotheby’s have devised a method for buyers to “test-drive” monumental sculpture before settling on a piece and its final location.

At the 2004 Isleworth exhibition, a European buyer considered purchasing Rodin’s 9-foot, 8-inch, rendering of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Awed by its size, the buyer hesitated, wondering if the piece would work well within his garden. To help him make up his mind, Sotheby’s staff took photos of the statue from all four sides and enlarged them to life-size. Then they pasted the photos onto a lightweight rectangular box that could easily be moved from the golf course to the owner’s premises. Once there, they maneuvered and manipulated the model until they found the right spot for the real thing. In the end, Sotheby’s clinched the sale.

Daniel DelRe is an intern with Worth. danield@worth.com