Individual Careers and the New System

Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.98-99.

It was artists, not  paintings, who  were the  focus  of  the dealer­ critic institutional system.  The new system triumphed in part because it  could and did command a bigger  market than the academic-governmental structure. Equally important, however, it dealt with an artist more in terms of his production over a career and thus provided a rational alternative to the  chaos of  the  academic focus on paintings by themselves.

Dealers and  critics were not selfless in their relations with artists. Rather, their own  interests required them to look at  artists more than  at individual paintings. A current painting as an isolated item in trade is simply too fugitive to focus a publicity system upon. One does not buy a copy of a recognized painting; the next best thing for inspiring the warmth of confidence in the breast of the shrewd but nervous buyer is a younger sibling of the recognized painting. Independent merit of a painting in and of itself was a principle directly hostile to the institutional  imperatives of the dealer-critic system,  and  to the social and financial needs of the artist.

Good prices for individual paintings did not satisfy  a painter if they were realized at erratically spaced  times.  Committed to a middle-class way of life by the whole ethos of the Academic  system, he wanted above  all a predictable income, the  hallmark of the middle-class concept of a career.  This was  the carrot Durand­ Ruel [an art dealer who furthered the career of the Impressionists] wielded with such success that other dealers followed. In the 1600's Hermann Becker in the Netherlands had developed the same scheme of buying the output of  painters -- among them, Rembrandt -- for what  amounted to a  salary. The need was not idiosyncratic to nineteenth-century French artists. From all points of view then it was the career of an artist that had to be the focus of the system.

Speculation became an important ingredient of the  new system. Famous paintings of  past  centuries had  long been recognized a safe investment with growth potential, suitable for international exchange. But changes in value were usually too slow to warrant the term "speculation." In any case, the dealers and buyers for such paintings operated at a higher financial and  social level than most buyers of contemporary paintings. Initial prices for  current Academic favorites were also so high  that they could hardly be looked to for large windfalls.

The new dealer-critic system had  a built-in motive for  encour aging innovative work: tapping  the fever for speculation which possessed much of the  nineteenth-century  French middle  class. The financial speculation in art found its cultural counterpart in the speculation in taste. As critics and dealers were wont  to say to the "discerning buyer": "In twenty years  he  will  be considered a master -- and his painting will  be worth a fortune!"

But speculation is doubly dangerous when  the supply of objects is elastic. Monopoly of an  artist's production was  important in making speculation rational; Durand-Ruel in his first daring coup bought  up  almost the entire  production of  several Barbizon painters. The speculative motive reinforced the concern of the dealer with the total career  of the painter.