The Print Dealer’s 13 Magic Questions

Here are the Print Dealer’s Magic Questions, and every one of them MUST be answered BEFORE you open your print shop’s doors. The first thing to remember is that when buying, selling or trading prints as collectibles, three factors will determine the price and probability that you will sell them — scarcity, desirability and condition. While scarcity and desirability are important issues, every collectible trader will tell you “CONDITION IS EVERYTHING”, a fact that is important enough to burn it into your brain. Never forget that Condition is the Ruling Factor in determining the market value of any collectible.

1. HOW MUCH IS IT? — You need to determine NOW what price-points you can easily sell in the location, given the clientele, whether you’re working with decorators and designers or total emotional knee-jerk first-time buyers, or with collector agents or print dealers in the same or another sales territory as yours. Anything can work, if you set your goals in advance of the operation. The numbers for Signed Fine Art Multiples runs anywhere between $100 and $3,000,000.00 — that’s right, three million dollars, and I’m hearing rumors of private sales that are higher than that. Prints are sometimes more expensive than original paintings by the same artist, for the simple reason that the painting only comes to market once every 80 years, usually only at the passing of the owner, but a print might be traded more easily from the same collection. Some clients won’t even L@@K at a piece that isn’t priced where they can see it, which means, above their RADAR. A price tag of $35,000 will get some folks’ attention, but others won’t react at anything below a million dollars.
2. ARE YOUR PRINTS DESIRABLE? — Are these the artists’ prints that SELL, or are they the ones you WISH you could sell? To start with, you need to fill your print bins, racks and display systems with art that sells, and sells and sells and keeps on selling, not stuff that comes flying at you from all wholesale sides, that will mount up fast as a growing mound of SALE! items that end up on a “REDUCED” table in the front of your shop. Really desirable prints will literally FLY OFF THE SHELF.
3. DO YOU KNOW YOUR ARTIST? — With every other occupation, you have to know at least a little something about what you’re doing, even if it’s just digging a hole — there are all sorts of potential pitpalls ahead of you there. It’s not that hard to learn about a particular artist, such as Rembrandt, or Miro, or Picasso or Chagall, but there is a lot to learn and you have to be patient with yourself. Memory grows with familiarity and repetition. The more prints you sell, the more you’ll sell.
4. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE THAT PRINT? — The more you know about the techniques that go into a print, the more likely will be the successful sale of the print. You should have at least a moderate grasp of HOW the print was made, the steps involved. Making a print, especially a litho, engraving, etching, woodcut, linocut or monoprint, is a very complex process, although to the untrained eye it seems so simple. It isn’t, and a LOT of things can go wrong in a multi-colored multiple.
5. WILL THAT PRINT IMPRESS FRIENDS AND FAMILY? — If the print does not make instant sense to viewers, it will fail its intended destiny, which is to raise the estimation of those less fortunate. If one can also appear to be a brilliant master of the art collecting world, so much the better. Men buy prints to show off their wealth, not their artistic acumen, which means “how much is this little piece of paper worth?” For women, the HOME is the most important thing, so the FRAME will be slightly more important or very much more important, than the picture, although the theme MUST be romantic and inspirational for the RED STATE households, and WILDLY AVANTE-GARDE for the BLUE STATE bots. Yes, I said bots.
6. NAME BRAND ONLY — Don’t even think of selling a print that isn’t a Name Brand Artist for anything like the price you’d get for a Rembrandt, Renoir or Degas litho, etching or aquatint, and that goes double for Matisse, Miro and Picasso. There are precious few artists whose names are INSTANTLY recognized AS FAMOUS ARTISTS, not just semi-familiar names they think they might have heard. The names of the famous artists number less than a dozen, and if you don’t believe me and you end up buying the other artists, you’ll soon be under a giant economic crunch, because UNKNOWN ARTISTS DON’T SELL FOR MUCH. People can be made to understand that there is a BLUE BOOK MARKET for every FAMOUS ARTIST’S print, but not for unknowns. Price is not based on niceness but on the marketplace, and if enough of the SAME PRINT sells in a single year, there is said to be a “market” for that print.
7. IS THE PRINT IN THE PRINT MARKET AUCTION GUIDE? — If the print doesn’t appear in Gordon’s, for most print dealers, it just doesn’t exist. Gordon’s is the place you go to see a print’s current value in the state and condition in which you have it.
8. IS THE PRINT A GOOD DEAL? — To me, the customer’s satisfaction is the whole point of the transaction, not “to get more money” or “to make a killing in the print market” or any of those short-term cash goals. Repeat customers make it easier and more fun for you, rather than spend your time chasing after new clients. You want to spend your time with your prints and with your clients, not with the phone book and facebook.
9. IS THE PRINT REGARDED BY THE CLIENT AS AN ART ITEM OR AN INVESTMENT? — Many clients try to invest in art, but it’s a total crapshoot which artist survives from century to century, and not all of them go in a straight line to the top. In fact, nobody does that. It’s all a graph, and the growth of each Artist, each “stock”, can be charted just like a common or preferred stock, options, bonds and other investment instruments, none of which should ever be involved in an art transaction, but it always is, so be prepared for that inevitable question, “Is this art trending?”, meaning “will it be worth more tomorrow than it is today”, and more often, “is that item far more valuable NOW, today, than what I’m paying for it?”, meaning: “Can I flip it as soon as I get home?”. Many of my prints CAN be sold at a profit on the same day they were bought. The best of them can’t be sold fast, they have to FIND A BUYER, and that means someone with a lot of money has to fall in love with them, so the more like a chorus girl they are, the more likely they’ll find a home, at least as long as they remain beautiful and attractive, which is the whole point — revenge. Well, maybe not revenge, but certainly ENVY is one of the goals of MOST art collectors, except yourself, of course. The best motive for collecting a work of art is that you want to bring it to your home and live with it as part of your feng-shui.
10. IS THE PRINT ON THE LEVEL OF THE CUSTOMER? — If the client doesn’t understand the print, meaning how it was made, by whom and how large or small is the population of that print in the world, etc., the print will not have generative value, meaning that the customer will probably not pursue a collection. If you can get the client interested in the artist or in the type of print, you have a potential collector.
11. IS YOUR CUSTOMER RETAIL OR WHOLESALE? — Sometimes you can have both, but sooner or later it smooths out to MOSTLY retail or MOSTLY wholesale. Your buying will be determined by the markup you are able to get, plus the desirability of the items you buy for resale.
12. WHAT DOES THE CLIENT KNOW? — Here’s a hard and fast rule of print dealing: The More Your Client Knows, The Easier It Will Be To Sell The Print. It’s a known fact that an ignorant buyer is almost surely going to end up returning the print in fear and panic, while a real collector knows what they’re getting and they’re happy with the acquisition for a collection they know well. If your client can SEE THE STATE of the print and understand the clues for determining that State, and can instantly grok the signature, date issues and condition issues of the print, so much the better. There is no way to educate a buyer in the time you have to work with them — it takes years to acquire the experience, and handling thousands of rare prints helps to build that experience base from which to work.
13.  IS THE CLIENT HAPPY FOREVER WITH THE TRANSACTION? — Always remember that it’s never the ITEM that counts, it’s the INTERACTION. The item is merely a SOUVENIR of the event. You want the client to be happy NEXT YEAR and TEN YEARS FROM NOW, and if the client ever decides to sell the print or grow the collection, hopefully it’s to YOU that they go as a trusted source and friend. Yes, friend. You need to be ON THE SIDE OF YOUR CLIENT, not as an enemy out to take advantage of a momentary weakness, but as a friendly guide, someone who knows the market, knows what’s available, and can read a client’s needs and evaluate that against the current marketplace. In short, you need to become a qualified, competent and effective print expert.

There are a few more items that might well have been on this list, but they will occur to you in the course of learning how to deal art prints and that can only come from long, hard sometimes painful and expensive experience, but the most important points are covered fairly well in the paragraphs above.

Keep in mind that the power of the print to make money in the marketplace is the fact that it is a multiple, and that means that it’s constantly  in the face of buyers several times a year, in secondary marketplace venues such as auction houses and eBay, and those sales are recorded in Gordon’s.

Trending artists this month are:

• RENOIR — Lithos and etchings are both available from this artist, although posthumous prints abound, so one must be careful to follow STELLA as if it were a Catechism. KNOW YOUR STATES AND VALUES!!! I have TWO totally unique FIRST STATE impressions that will sell upwards of $30,000.00 and they were among stacks of ordinary “Second State” and “Third State” prints, so it pays to know what to look for. Study your Renoir CSI for clues — that’s why I put that book together, for the use of print dealers, not the public. I have a good selection of portraits, nudes and unique one-of-a-kind works on paper by Renoir, in a range between $2,800 and $135,000 for the green Portrait of Claude, Renoir’s son, which is the only known example of this famous print, which exists in the black ink on white paper version commonly, but in this version of the print, does not appear anywhere else, including the major museums. In fact, a museum SHOULD be interested in this singular example of a Renoir print.
• REMBRANDT — Always THE favorite Old Master. There are Old Masters, Dutch Masters, Flemish Masters and more, but among them, the name of Rembrandt will always dominate. I have several IMPORTANT Rembrandts on hand, and only buy and sell important ones. I have a few UNIMPORTANT, very cheap in fact, Rembrandts in my “Back Room”, and they are TERRIBLE examples, but they are in fact REAL Rembrandts, just lousy prints — weakly inked, badly pulled, late state impressions. I did not buy them, I inherited them in a collection that I bought at auction — I was after the good stuff, and this stuff came with it. They would and should sell for less than $1,000, and I’ll make them available for new print dealers who are not yet sure of their ability to sell something for more than they’d get for a CD or a magazine. Eventually, you’ll want your Rembrandt offerings to retail at about $9,500, with your higher end pieces running around $22,000, but don’t forget that the higher price is more risk and less reward than dozens of smaller,far safer, sales. More work, less money makes less risk and less reward. In order to make serious money Selling Rembrandts, you’ll have to go into the $150,000 – $350,000 range, and you’ll still be selling for peanuts, compared to the Big Money Crowd at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, plus the other Auction Houses for the Very Rich which you never heard about and never will, until you enter the world of FINE ART print trades, and then you’ll hear of nothing but high-end private trades that you could never ever be in on, nor would you want to — the game at that level is just too nasty, like the high end of coins, cosmetics or astrology.
• DURER — After Rembrandt and Renoir is the very recognizable name of Durer, whose woodcuts and wood engravings are world-famous and historically important. The condition of the print will make all the difference here, along with the subject matter. Religious subjects are never a good plan, except for a few notable highly desired plates. “Knight, Death & The Devil” is always my target on my want-list for buying, and definitely for selling — it’s an easy sale, because it’s dramatic, finely detailed and totally famous in itself as a print. I have just acquired a large collection of several dozen Durers, many of which are very early plates, which might do better at Sotheby’s or Christie’s than eBay. You won’t find better Durer prints than the ones I can find for you, but the problem is that the customer will not see the difference, unless they’re buying with the intention of reselling, in which case it will very much matter which State and what Condition the print is in, plus subject matter and rarity. Expect a price range upwards of $18,500 from anything I might carry, and think more along the lines of $38,500 – $90,000 for any early rarity, with a few lesser pieces at around $7,500 – $10,000 with little room for profit in the lower end pieces.
• CHAGALL — In order of desirability and likelihood of sales, Chagall stands high in the ranks of selling artists. I can always sell a Chagall, but I can’t tell you WHEN. The Chagall buyer is an emotional buyer, and you can’t predict the sales, but you know that sooner or later, they will all sell, at a good price, and you can buy them pretty cheaply. The secret here is in the framing — that’s where you can make your money from Chagalls. You will often have to pay a high premium, very near retail, for the very very best Chagalls with signature and unimpeachable provenance, meaning a clear trail from publisher and artist to the present owner, and that’s a rarity in itself.
• DALI — If I had only Signed Original Dali prints and sculptures AND NOTHING ELSE in my gallery, I could make a very good living from them alone. You can sell Dali prints just about as fast as you can get hold of them, which is to say, good legitimate real pencil-signed prints directly from producers like Alex Rosenberg, which is to say, “hardly ever”. I was fortunate enough to number Alex among my personal friends, so I never lacked for great Dali impressions. Real Dali multiples with good signatures, are almost entirely off the marketplace, and collectors tend to hold them rather than sell or trade them. Dali Collectors are a breed unto themselves, and they own the pieces they LIKE and want to keep. I have about 50 Dali prints that are very high-end and very, very marketable, all signed except for the “Maldoror” etchings, which were not signed when issued. Dali signed a number of them in my presence at the Ritz when collectors begged him to do so. He warned them that it would reduce the value of the piece, but they never listened. I have wall sculptures, platinum and gold dimensional wall reliefs and many, many great very large Dali lithos and etchings, from $850 WHOLESALE price to $35,000.00 WHOLESALE PRICE for the extreme rarities such as an original woven fabric wall, and it’s signed in the weaving. My retail prices are a LOT higher, and so should yours be. I sell wholesale at the price I took them in — not interested in a profit, just covering costs, to get someone started in the print business, which is my aim and goal with anyone who wants to help raise money for the Ashram, Camper Van and Studio Projects.
• MATISSE — Matisse produced an enormous body of printed work, artworks on paper, which include lithographs, serigraphs, pochoir, etchings and an enormous output of linocuts, similar to woodcuts but cut into linoleum blocks, which are inked and pressured against paper to produce a print with a very limited number of impressions before the plate fails. Plate failure determines the length of the run. You might find an etched portrait of Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite Dutoit, which will today run you anywhere from $2,800 to $35,000, depending on state and condition, as always. I have a large selection of Matisse originals from which to choose, but they sell quickly and are therefore never on consignment, nor are they likely to show up online, simply because I can sell them faster than I can list them. I have Matisse lithos at less than $3,000 and some incredible linocuts at only $1250 apiece, WHOLESALE PRICE.
• MIRO — Probably the most recognizable modern artist next to Picasso, and certainly almost as easily salable. I have sold Miro lithos that are six feet tall, and many of the Miro lithos I carry are posters — original hand-pulled lithos, but with letters, text, printed over the image or above and below the image. Sounds terrible, but it’s really an art in itself to find the cheap posters of today that will be the collector’s treasure tomorrow, and I can in fact do that, and my Miro Collection reflects those good guesses, but always remember that it IS a horse-race, and that nobody knows which youtube video is going to go viral before it does.
• PICASSO — His name is everywhere, and you can’t find anyone on the planet who doesn’t know the name, although they probably have no idea who he was or what he did, any more than they really know more about Albert Einstein and Johny Depp than their famous names and most trending meme. Hard to find good material in the Picasso oeuvre, although he produced a ton of stuff in his 80+ years as an artist, and decent prints will tend to run well over $1,000 wholesale and sell for just a little more than you pay, so the frame is where you’ll make your money, not the piece, when it comes to Picasso. There are better deals for a dealer, but some clients won’t have anything but a Picasso, because they will not be educated. Never smarten up a chump. Picasso ceramics are very popular and are a typical markup of 10% at the very best, so I don’t tend to deal them. There are a LOT of fakes out there that are much cheaper, if you don’t mind getting screwed.
• WARHOL — Are you kidding? His work is crap, he was a total put-on from the get-go, and he told you so — he warned collectors that he was going to create a mental fiction into an economic fact, and he grew rich doing it, along with Roy Lichtenstein and a few others from the Gemini GEL studio in Los Angeles. I don’t collect any of the Gemini crowd, because it’s pure speculation. If you actually LIKE the stuff, I have a cure for you, called “Art History 101”.

Well, there you have it — the range is limited to a few RECOGNIZABLE artists, names you don’t have to repeat or explain, and the only variation is in the rarity and therefore the price.

Price does NOT determine profit. Profit should be calculated by percentage, not dollar amount, and the rule goes something like this:

• The higher the price, the smaller the percentage that you will make.
• The smaller the price, the more you have to sell to make the same money.

You would think that Murphy the Lawmaker — the God of Irony — might have written those two rules, and you’d be right. He’s only a God because something that could go wrong did.

What about all the other artists?

They’ll sell, if the story and price are right. Good story pieces are rare, historical pieces bring in the crowds, and blockbuster crowd pleasing shows are indicated to get the high traffic you’ll need to justify opening an art gallery in these troubled times.

Remember that the general public can’t and won’t buy art in bad times, but the very rich will — they know that there’s precious few places to put their money for safety, and there’s no telling what will have value in a future governed by 3-D printers and DNA manipulation.

I have about 50,000 works on paper, plus hundreds of oils on canvas, from several hundreds of relatively famous California, Hudson River and other Regional artists, plus thousands of rare antique prints that are below the caliber of the Masters, but are still very desirable and easily salable at fairs and in the gallery and studio — you can sell lots of prints if you can put your studio on the local studio tour. If there is no local studio tour, organize one and put yourself in the middle of the tour!!!

The unknown artists are not unknowns by any means — they’re by and large unknown to the public. Unless people are paid to know something, they tend to remain ignorant and prefer to pay others to know those things for them. The hundreds of lesser known artists are interesting and have produced incredible art, some a lot better than the more widely known name brand artists.

If you sell to a decorator, you have no problem. If you have the misfortune to sell directly to the public, you’re dealing with ignorance and ego. They want to prove their art knowledge and are not likely to listen to anything you have to say on the subject, so might as well shut up and listen to what they want and try to match that blurry vision quest.

If you can convince someone to hang a “lesser artist”, it will be about money. Those who can afford the name brands get the name brands, because you can’t argue with a swarming mob.

I have rare fine art prints from the WPA, Work Progress Administration, which helped artists survive the Great Depression back in the 1930s, and incredible dark, brooding abstract expressionist and fauvist prints from Germany during the Cabaret Life Era, also in the 1920s and 1930s.

I have collections of hundreds of European artists who were part of the stable of then-famous artists published by Maeght, Mourlot, Vollard and other brave souls — it’s the publishers who take the risk in the marketplace on behalf of the producing artists, and few artists ever make the grade.

Names like Corot, Calder, Motherwell and Rauschenberg are likely to be overlooked in favor of the quick knee-jerk response you get to the name “Rembrandt”. The only real problem is getting the client to know the difference between an “original” and an offset or computer print, and that’s not going to be easy, so I have a demo prepared for the print dealer who needs to demo the difference.

Once a client understands what an original print is and how the marketplace works — good luck on this one — your job is relatively easy. Merely discover their artistic tastes, find an appropriate period of art, and locate some choice pieces, sell them to your client, work up an acid-free frame environment and you’re on your way to success as a rare print dealer!

Of course, it may take a few decades of experience before you understand what you’re doing and how it all works. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

See You At The Top!!!

gorby