Money in Pictures

The largest commercial art gallery in the world put on a show last week. The show's opening reception, in a huge duplex suite on uptown Fifth Avenue, drew 5,800 art lovers. But bigger news than the show was the commercial success of the Associated American Artists' Galleries. The attraction at the opening was an exhibition of recent paintings by Thomas Hart Benton. The splash that it made was a demonstration of the fact that able mechanizing methods have, for one group of artists, made art for art's sake a paying business for the first time in U.S. history.

Tom Benton's pictures have been the A.A.A.'s mainstay ever since its humble opening, six and a half years ago. It was then that a perky ex-publicity agent named Reeves Lewenthal opened a small office on Manhattan's noisy 42nd Street, started selling prints to department stores at $5 apiece. Most proudly pushed of his stock of prints was a figure of a Negro and a mule entitled Plowing, by Tom Benton, who, with 25 other U.S. artists, had agreed to use Lewenthal as an agent. The A.A.A.'s rise from a one-desk agency to a $500,000-a-year business drove many a frock-coated Manhattan gallery director furiously to think. Behind that rocketing rise lay one of the ablest promotion and distribution jobs the U.S. art world has seen.

When stocky, baldescent Reeves Lewenthal went to Manhattan in-1932, he had been a newsboy, reporter, magazine publisher, hotel publicist and small businessman in Chicago and Detroit. The one job he hated was being a publicity man. In spite of himself, Reeves Lewenthal went on writing publicity. His clients: the late Cass Gilbert and other members of the National Academy of Design, plus some 35 organizations devoted to contemporary U.S. art.

But the more publicity Reeves Lewenthal wrote, the more he was convinced that what the art world needed was not publicity but modern business distribution. "The gallery system," he argued, "is doomed. The rich collector class is dying out. There is no use in the galleries just sitting around complaining and waiting for the few old collectors who are left to come in and buy an occasional picture. American art ought to be handled like any other American business."

So Reeves Lewenthal borrowed $1,500, rounded up 26 U.S. artists, every one of whom was bounced from his former gallery for agreeing to cut the market price of prints to Lewenthal's figure: $5. While competitors raged about print inflation (prints are usually run off in strictly limited editions of 100 or less), Lewenthal began making them in lots of 250. The prints sold at first like hot cakes, then slumped when the novelty wore off. Reeves Lewenthal thereupon took to the mails, and business began to boom. To his 26 artists Lewenthal paid a flat rate of $200 for each print plate; those who sold more carried those who sold less. Since Lewenthal owned the plates outright, there was no limit to the number of prints he could make from each plate. When the issues from ten of an artist's plates sold out, his fee was raised to $300; when he had doubled this output, it was raised to $400. Meanwhile Impresario Lewenthal scouted around, getting his artists extra jobs in magazine, illustration and display work. His strangest piece of extracurricular job finding came last year, when Cinema Producer Walter Wanger hired nine of Lewenthal's best artists to go to Hollywood and paint scenes from the picture-in-progress, The Long Voyage Home (TIME Aug. 26).

Today Reeves Lewenthal's Associated American Artists' Galleries has a roster of 43 U.S. artists, including such top-flighters as Thomas Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Georges Schreiber, Max Weber, Adolf Dehn, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanch, Raphael Soyer, sells everything from $2 Christmas cards to $12,000 paintings. Its staff of 43 clerical workers sends out some 3,000,000 pieces of mail a year, helps handle the throng of artists (as many as 80 a week) who want a place on Lewenthal's roster.

In the past year the Associated American Artists' Galleries' business has nearly doubled. To his artists, accustomed to the hit-or-miss sales common in most of the art world, Reeves Lewenthal's regular, dependable fees seem like manna from heaven.

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