Buying Pictures

“Le Pecheur” by Paul Desire Trouillebert

We had been talking about buying pictures for a long time. The same way that people talk about buying yachts, retiring in Tuscany, or becoming an astronaut. At some point Gri shared a solid argument in favor of chosing fine art as an investment option. He said that you can invest in real estate, bonds, stock, or even jewelry. And the object will just sit there, appreciating, meanwhile giving you no joy. However, if you invest in paintings, they will hang on your walls and make you happy. When the time comes, you will sell them and buy new ones, and be happy again.

Ofcourse he did not use those exact terms. He said “you will derive aesthetic pleasure.”

For him it was and will always be about the artistic idea. When, taken to its logical conclusion, the idea pinned him against the metaphorical wall, he confirmed without batting an eye: yes, he would rather buy a beautiful painting by an unknown artist at a garage sale then win an ugly Picasso on Christie’s.

For me, the allure has been multifasceted. Yes, it would be nice if the painting touched you personally, resonating with an inner vibration of your soul. But a piece of art is an object, with its own history, entourage, name. Some think that every house should have a pizza-cutter; others believe a dog is essencial. I think a home should have objects which embed it into the ebb and flow of history. Imagine – a painting created 250 years ago in a small town in Holland: made by commission and sold to an aristocrat, or kept within the family. Think of the journey it’s taken through the rise of industrialization, through wars and cease fires, through regime consuming regime. Hidden in attics, forgotten under beds, the painting lived its secret life, waiting to be rediscovered. The varnish cracked and sometime in the harsh winter of 1929 it was almost burned for firewood. Then, languishing in a county museum, it was dropped by an intern and a bit of the gilded frame chipped off.

I would want to be a part of that journey. As it sleeps some more in an auction backlot in the 2070’s, I want it to remember the many years (a brief time, by its standards) that it hung on my wall, proudly illuminated and peered over. I want it to remember the children’s crazy shouts and squeals, the salmon smells wafting from the kitchen, the oohs and aahs of infrequent guests.

The painting knows who painted it, but often, we do not. At best, it is just a name, forgotten but for those five centimeters of immortality on the canvas. But we would pose conjectures, and through them, that artist would live. Or, if it is a know painter, we would become a part of that story – no longer isolated from the great movements of civilization. We could have been a speck of driftwood, thousands of miles away from any life, isolated in life and in death. But now we would be in the thick of life, swimming along with whales and other proverbial giants, catching the historical current, surrounded by living organisms.

Such were my thoughts, and in my head they would have remained. Except this happened: I chanced upon a website that serves as a marketplace for large fine art auction houses all over the world. Suddenly I was looking at hundreds of paintings a day, many hours spent pouring over descriptions, prices, researching names, dates, shipping rates. Walking outside, my vision began to play tricks on me – the green of the trees smudged in its pastel variations. The cars on the roadways mutated to horse-drawn buggies, and I swear I saw a Danish Red cow with a couple of peasants in that field behind our house. The monochromy of the lake I pass every day variagated into a thousand airy brush strokes of blues, greens and canary yellows, the sky too danced and strutted in all of its impressionistic glory. Yesterday I had a dream that a squarish, jagged-edged spy was following me as I made my escape in a Mondrianesque labyrinthe.

Fortunately, these altered states of consciousness did not impede me from making a few very good bids. And I must confess, as we speak, several paintings from the far corners of the world are making their way towards me. And I am waiting.

I have been waiting…