Who says the art market slows in the summer? Throughout June, July and August, we were busy at our recently added gallery space on 67th Street and Madison Avenue, hanging and researching new inventory, meeting with clients and shipping out sold works to new homes. One of the primary reasons we opened a second gallery was a return after the pandemic of visiting collectors and museum groups to Manhattan. Another was the opportunity to split a gallery space with Cameron Shay of Graham Shay 1857, and the cross-pollination of inventory has introduced each firm to clients previously unknown. One of these interactions resulted in a major institution acquiring one of our Edward Mitchell Bannister paintings.
The current art market has shown diversity and depth in multiple genres including impressionism, social realism, the Park Ave Cubists and surrealism. We have especially taken notice of an uptick of interest in the Ashcan School, especially in works by John Sloan, William Glackens and Robert Henri. We have met many new collectors through online platforms, Madison Avenue art walks and through our persistence in organizing exhibitions with corresponding catalogs. As always, our collectors tend to prefer works that are fresh to market with strong provenance and back stories. A premium also continues to be placed on female and minority artists, and we are pleased to see rare and lesser-known artists championed by curators, scholars and dealers.
A highlight of our profession is finding, contextualizing and touting works by artists who have not yet received their proper due in the market and the American art canon. An example of one of these artists is Sarah Miriam Peale, the first professional female artist in the United States, who fails to be recognized in most books and museum collections. Another example is Virginia Berresford, one of only two female precisionists and an independent gallerist in her own right. We have also been working with the estate of Gerome Kamrowski, a New York and Michigan-based artist integral in the popularization of surrealism, as well as a collaborator with Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes on the very first abstract expressionist painting in the winter of 1939 to 40. The above trio exemplify our program as eclectic artists from the beginnings of American art through the abstract expressionism of the mid-20th-century.
