An epoch-making wave of liquidation last week hit the market of one of the nation's lesser known commodities. If the U. S. Government abolished its cotton-loan plan or its ever-normal granary for corn and suddenly undertook liquidation of the 10,800,000 bales of cotton or 490,000,000 bushels of corn now held off the market, the decision would be no more extraordinary than that taken last week in another commodity—art.
For decades the art market had its ever-normal granary and his name was William Randolph Hearst.
It was a melancholy day for art dealers everywhere when Hearst stepped out of their market for keeps in 1937. He had purchased better than a million dollars worth of art treasures a year. He had constituted, they figured, about 25% of the international market for odds & ends.
Hearst, who made more money than any other publisher before or since, stopped buying because he was broke.
The income of his 25 newspapers (now 17) and other properties, the profits of the mines he had inherited from his prospector father, were no longer big enough to pay the interest on their debts and his. By 1939 he was in hock to the banks, and employed as editorial director of his own newspapers at a yearly salary of $100,000. For Mr. Hearst, that was chicken feed.
To get $600,000 for spending money, Hearst had mortgaged San Simeon, his vast California estate. In 1938 it was announced that part of his $50,000,000-or-so accumulation of antiques and art objects would be offered for sale. The bulk of this vast, amorphous agglomeration reposed in warehouses—four of them in California, the fifth, a five-story, block-square structure, in The Bronx. It included collections of 504 different kinds of works of art, any one of which would have made an ordinary collector notable.
At least 20 of Hearst's collections were outstandingly good, and five—armor, English furniture, English silver, Gothic tapestry, Hispano-Moresque pottery—ranked among the finest private collections in the world.
Liquidation of the massive conglomeration, enough to fill two whopping museums, went well enough at first. Auctions and private sales in the U. S. and London brought in about $800,000 cash. But the bottomless market which could give Hearst anything he wanted—at a price—couldn't take it back. Dealers were afraid the market's carefully nurtured price structure would collapse under the weight.
Private collectors were finicky in a wartime world. Another market had to be found.