Origin of the contemporary art market

So far we have said that the origins of the market are very ancient, but in truth to speak of a free market , the one based on the system of private galleries, which corresponds to the current structure of the contemporary art market, we have to go back to the 19th century. It is therefore necessary to take a step back and examine the circumstances of its birth and development, which were built on the foundations of a new and radical transformation and revolution in the conceptions of art at the end of the 19th century. We are therefore referring again to the mid-seventeenth century, a period that saw the birth of a monopoly even more restrictive and rigidly structured, if you will, than the previous ones: that of the art academies . Founded with the aim of officially legitimizing the validity of artistic production, these institutions effectively controlled it until the second half of the nineteenth century. Let's examine the French model in particular. 1648 was the year in which the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture was founded in Paris, the most influential body of institutional recognition. It organized annual exhibitions, the Salons , whose participation or exclusion determined the artists' entire careers, their chances of affirmation, and their commercial success. The judging panel consisted of academics, teachers from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the director of the French Academy in Rome (the capital of ancient and classical art). Acceptance of works by this panel depended on their conformity to classical aesthetic theory, which the institution aimed to defend and preserve. Artists aligned with academic canons received prizes at the Salons and commissions to create public works, and their works were proposed to public institutions and museums for purchase. If we also keep in mind that the Academy's statute forbade official artists from directly marketing their own works, we realize the total control it exercised both over the content of the works and over their marketing. The market, therefore, which had incredibly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, as mentioned earlier, was not a free market, but rather heavily constrained by these institutions, which, moreover, combined with the conformist approach of criticism and the dominant taste of the upper-middle-class public, left no room for the emergence of innovative artistic production. An officially regulated, regulated, and limited artistic production was inextricably linked to an equally regulated and consequently limited official market. This situation began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century , with the emergence of Romantic ideals over Classicist ones. And it was precisely France that was at the forefront of this transformation, which saw the birth and development of independent exhibitions organized by the artists themselves, on the one hand, and a new type of private gallery, on the other. Starting with exhibitions, let's briefly recall that 1855 was the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris, which included works by artists from twenty-eight countries, as well as paintings rejected by the Salon jury. Meanwhile, 1863 saw the Salon des Réfusés, the first (and only) exhibition entirely dedicated to artists excluded from the official Salon. It should be kept in mind that among the innovative artists of the latest generation, mistreated and excluded from the official circuits, there were names like Cézanne (who tried every year to send his works to the Salon without ever being accepted!) and like the Impressionists, who were among the first to demand and pursue their independence from the academic supremacy, and thus constituted themselves as a revolutionary reaction movement to the dominant situation (just think that the term "impression" was used for the first time in 1874 [1] with an ironic and negative meaning to describe their works). After these first initiatives, more or less successful, a true alternative salon was born in 1884: the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which provided for neither prizes nor a jury. The Salon d'Atomne, founded in 1903, was this time equipped with a jury, with the specific aim of shaping the tastes of the public and collectors by directing them toward innovative trends in contemporary art. This particularly successful event hosted exhibitions of historic importance, such as those of the Fauves and Cubists, as well as a Cézanne retrospective. But let us return to the Impressionists , to underline how crucial their movement is, because it inaugurates the creation of an avant-garde art , that is, of modernism , an aesthetic revolution in pictorial language, but also the creation of an alternative market , made up of private galleries, which through new commercial and promotional strategies, had to invent a new market that corresponded to the new art. The partnership with Paul Durand Ruel (1870), marks the appearance of the first truly modern dealer, an innovator both in terms of artistic choices and in terms of commercial and critical strategies. Ruel's new commercial system, which would later become the model of the new international avant-garde market, consists of:

• in the valorization of a new art not yet requested by the market;

· in the monopoly on artistic production, in order to control prices; · in the promotion of artists through the organization of personal exhibitions (including abroad to give them an international dimension) and through the founding of magazines for the dissemination of information. Finally, let's mention two more celebrated dealers who embraced Ruel's teachings and continued his legacy: Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Kahnweiler. One was the principal dealer of Gauguin and Cézanne, but also of Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, and the other was a Cubist dealer, credited with investing heavily in the critical appreciation of his artists through collaborations with renowned writers and poets (such as Apollinaire and Max Jacob), and generally expanding contacts between collectors, critics, and dealers. With these developments, we arrive at the 1910s, and the history of the Parisian market continues, reaching full maturity in the 1920s, and growing further in the 1930s and 1940s. These same years saw the formation and transformation of various market centers throughout Europe, such as London, Berlin, and Brussels. If we dwell on the history of the Parisian market , it is because it played a particularly significant role, first in breaking down certain frontiers and then in leading the world market. Paris at this stage was the home of art, the capital of modernism (most modern artists, as is well known, lived and worked in Paris: from Picasso to Matisse, from Braque to Léger, from Gris to Derain, etc.). So let's take a step back and point out that 1914 in particular marked a turning point in France: the resounding success of the auction of an avant-garde art collection testified to the interest of a vast, high-society audience (and no longer just a narrow circle of amateurs). Bourgeois society identified the value of avant-garde art with the dynamic spirit of modern times, which contrasted with what was past, outdated, and no longer relevant. The new social fact was that the ruling class recognized the values ​​represented by the new art, and appropriated them. But at this point, history repeats itself, because the incredible social and market success of contemporary art triggered a new reaction from the new generation of postwar avant-garde artists: the Dadaists and the Surrealists . Their movements were characterized by a revolutionary political stance, a radical critique of the values ​​of bourgeois society, and opposition to the commodification of art. It was precisely this need to revive the avant-garde spirit that drove them to seek an even more alternative, self-managed and self-promoted market. But, ironically, they themselves became successful artists in an even larger, more international market. Indeed, during the Second World War, due to their political stances, they were forced to flee, almost en masse, to the United States, where they were welcomed with great enthusiasm both by the gallery owners who made their fortune (especially Peggy Guggenheim) and by the younger generations of American artists who were profoundly influenced by them (and we're talking about artists like Pollock, Rothko, and their circle). We've discussed France so far for the reasons mentioned above, but we can't help but briefly touch on the German situation, which was particularly important in the context of European modernism. (We'll leave the analysis of the Italian side until later, because, being the one that concerns us most closely, it deserves a separate discussion to delve into it in more detail.) In Germany, avant-garde art developed, beginning in the 1910s, with its own characteristics and was essentially represented by the German Expressionism of artists such as Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Macke, and Marc, and by the abstract art of Kandinsky and Klee, and by the Bauhaus. It was a vibrant scene until the rise of Nazism, which began to persecute avant-garde art, which it labeled "degenerate," and its creators. A emblematic example was the organization of a negative propaganda exhibition, which toured a dozen German cities from 1937 to 1941, presenting approximately six hundred works requisitioned by the Nazis. After the Second World War, New York (which until then had been essentially limited to reselling European art, having not yet developed an original indigenous art form) began to become the world center of contemporary art, replacing Paris as the world's leading art form. The gallery system developed alongside the emergence of avant-garde trends, marking the transition from modernism to contemporary art proper, such as Abstract Expressionism (1940s and 1950s), Minimalism, Pop Art (1960s), which achieved international success with the awarding of the Rauschenberg Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and later Process and Conceptual art, in their various forms. The European avant-gardes of the 1950s at the centre of the Parisian market were essentially Informalism and Nouveaux Réalisme, which were also very important artistic phenomena but which, however, seem not to have held up to comparison with contemporary American trends, supported by a market that had become much more vital and supported by the government itself (!), which strategically used the new art to assert a cultural, as well as economic and military, supremacy over Europe. From the post-World War II era onward, the American art movement never stopped. To understand the scale of the phenomenon, consider that in the 1970s, there were more than two hundred galleries concentrated in just one New York neighborhood, Soho, and over seventy magazines dedicated to contemporary art! The 1980s and 1990s then witnessed the incredible phenomenon of the instant historicization of new stars, which saw young artists achieve immediate success and sky-high prices. Today, prices for living American artists reach dizzying figures, unattainable for European artists. The most important centers of the market worldwide: New York is currently the center of the contemporary art system, and the artists supported by the galleries of this market are the most valued. The second largest market is the English market, centered in London. The German market is also very strong in Europe. But it is fundamentally along the New York-London axis that the reference models impose themselves with a greater capacity for cultural and economic penetration. [1] Louis Leroy in Le Charivari , 25 April 1874