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With Wall Street So Close. Flushed and happy, Rorimer announced that "several Trustees and private individuals" had contributed toward making the Met's victory possible. They had not quite raised all of the money, said he, "but our credit is good." He recalled that the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam had once tried to buy the painting, but Mrs. Erickson had said that she wanted to see it in the Met. "I'm a believer in fate," said Rorimer, "and the picture has come to us, even if the hard way." And then he added, in a fine tribute to the relationship between money and culture, "It would have been heartbreaking, with Wall Street so close, to have lost out on it."
The auction was all over in 60 minutes, but those 60 minutes broke most of the major records in the annals of art sales. Parke-Bernet's sale brought in a larger amount of cold cash—$4,679,250—than any other art auction in modern times. The price of the Rembrandt topped the previous record of $1,166,400 set by Andrew Mellon when he bought Raphael's Alba Madonna (see color) from the dollar-short Soviet Union in 1931. Beyond all that, the Erickson sale capped New York's postwar rise to leadership in the art market, challenging London's long sway.
A Mad & Marvelous Market. Whether in Paris, London or New York, it is a mad and marvelous market. The business of getting art from artist to buyer is a combination of wall-to-wall dignity and out-and-out chicanery, of lofty values and low-down tricks, of delightful esthetics and deplorable ethics. It could not be otherwise. For what is sold ranges from the priceless to the worthless, from the irreplaceable (but occasionally fakable) old master to such comic trivia as a smashed and baled automobile purporting to be a sculpture. The dominant trend in the business is that the most sought-after goods, the works of great artists now dead, end up as gifts to museums and are thus removed from the market even as the art-consuming public grows in proportion to the ever-rising affluence of the U.S. and Europe. As the great masters vanish, the buying public turns to more recent art. The result is rising prices all along the line and unwonted riches for the artist.
The fever to own art is spreading everywhere. It has invaded modern office buildings, where directors solemnly gather in board rooms bedecked with gaudy abstractions that would have made many executives—both with and without discrimination—choke a decade ago. New museums need to be filled; old ones must be kept in the running. As reproductions fall increasingly from favor, every wall in every house cries out for an original painting. Dealers' scouts prowl the earth for new treasures, and every auction seems to top the last.
Setting Prices. Most art is sold through dealers, who try to keep their prices secret, and it is the auction house that the public must rely on to get an idea of what is being paid for what. The world's biggest auction house today is Sotheby's in London, and there is no quicker way to see what has been happening in the art world than to check Sotheby's recent sales.