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It’s been a long, event-filled art-selling season, and I’ve seen a lot of art in the last three months. But no matter how much you see, there are always some shows you can’t get to, so I tried to partly remedy that with a gallery tour late last week. My first stop was Jack Shainman Gallery, where I saw the inaugural show of the groundbreaking artist Faith Ringgold’s estate. Then I caught an uptown 6 train to Gagosian’s flagship at 980 Madison Avenue, where I finally got to see the Richard Diebenkorn show, also an inaugural of his estate. (Yes, the gallery is still showing art long after it was supposed to have vacated the building.) After that, I stopped in at Mnuchin Gallery, which is holding a show of Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings stretching back to the 1980s.

The only throughline to these shows was that the works on display were all historical—the latest evidence of a well-noted pendulum swing in the market. Naturally, selling historical works requires more than just hanging the paintings and expressing excitement. But one of the advantages of offering them is that the artists’ careers have already taken shape, which allows you to answer some central and perennial concerns of buyers—namely, what the art will look like in their homes in five or 10 years, and how it will reflect on its owner. Collectors want to be seen as thoughtful and enlightened, not as fad-chasers falling for the “it” artist or movement of the moment.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Though there are some similarities between representing an artist and an artist’s estate, there are also differences. Knowledge that an artist’s output is finite changes the calculus of value. Selling works to museums becomes even more important, to enhance and maintain the artist’s stature, as well as to maximize the value of future sales. Reputations are fragile in the art world, and an artist doesn’t have to be tarnished to suffer from fading interest.

That said, Shainman is hardly starting from scratch. He has the great benefit conferred by Ringgold’s late-in-life recognition from important institutions. You’ll probably remember the 2019 relaunch of MoMA, when the museum inaugurated its planned ever-rotating permanent exhibition by juxtaposing Pablo Picasso’s earth-shattering Demoiselles d’Avignon, from 1907, with Ringgold’s equally (or maybe more) upsetting American People Series #20: Die, from 1967. The move accomplished two things: It showed MoMA was seriously committed to a broader definition of contemporary art, and it elevated Ringgold to a stratospheric position.

Three years later, the New Museum followed that provocation with a sustained argument for Ringgold’s importance as a tentpole artist. Her African American identity is essential to her art, but the retrospective that focused on the storytelling in her work also showed her great range of innovative materials and the syncretic influences that helped create her unique mix of textiles and painting. Here, Shainman is picking up the baton.

The current show tries to be comprehensive, but is constrained by what the estate owns. While the New Museum could borrow from collectors who were prescient enough to see Ringgold’s importance, the estate owns a substantial number of certain works but lacks others—as is typical for the estates of many artists whose work is only fully appreciated in retrospect. Nevertheless, we get a good overview of Ringgold as a painter in the 1960s, when she drew on different traditions but maintained a distinctive style. In the early 1970s, after the artist discovered Tibetan Thangkas in the Rijksmuseum, we see a newly liberated Ringgold combining painting with textiles in a wide range of forms and styles.

Thankfully, the art world’s lingering prejudice against works that are based on textiles is rapidly dissipating. Shainman is asking mid-to-high-six-figure prices for many of these pieces, and the prices look more realistic the more you see the work. In a generation, in fact, these works may seem to have been wildly cheap.