Spreading Business

The booming art business has burst the bonds of Manhattan and is expanding right across the country.

A scant decade ago an art collector would have been hard put to find a Matisse bronze, a Degas pastel or a topflight American abstraction west of the Hudson River. Today he can shop with confidence in cities across the land. What is more, there is a whole new class of customers. They are young married couples who are turning away from safe, middle-brow fixtures such as framed reproductions of Picasso's Woman in White to plunge on original paintings by local artists.

No Sheep. Dallas and Houston support between them 25 art galleries: one of them is adding a five-acre "sculpture garden." Another grossed $80,000 in the last month alone. Southwestern dealers report that traditional and modern works divide the market about fifty-fifty.

In the Midwest, Detroit has risen in the same ten-year period from three commercial galleries to six. dealing largely in contemporary U.S. art, of which more than half is locally produced. Not only does Detroit have a group of important collectors (defined by one happy wag as men whose collections are more important than they are), it also has hundreds of the new small buyers in their 20s and 30s. "The main bulk buying," says a Detroit dealer, "is not Sheep Grazing in a Meadow any more, nor is the young woman of today buying art just to match the draperies."

Chicago boasts 20 galleries (v. ten in 1949), offering a broad selection of noted and expensive moderns along with such celebrated local talent as Leon Golub, Joyce Treiman and Richard Florsheim. Says Sally Fairweather, co-proprietor of the Fairweather-Hardin gallery: "I think in this mechanistic world we live in, we are being forced to turn to something that satisfies in a way that television or a new car can't. I think people are turning to art almost in desperation."

No Comparison. On the West Coast, San Francisco has a score of galleries, but the real art center is Los Angeles, where about 25 galleries are doing very well indeed. At least five of them top $100,000 in gross earnings every year, and sales, especially of local painters, are mounting all along the Northwest Coast. Seattle has five galleries; Yakima, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Port Townsend and Spokane, Wash, have at least one, as do Portland. Ore. and Anchorage, Alaska. Much of the buying is installment plan.

In the South and East, the picture is more spotty. In Washington, D.C. art buyers support more than a dozen galleries, more than double the number ten years ago. Farther south, art fades out for a space. Atlanta has only two small galleries; Nashville. Tenn. has just one, a brave new effort in a basement.

But the Boston area, a center of painting since the days of John Smibert, who held America's first recorded art show there in 1730, is showing new vigor. During the past decade, says Boston Dealer Boris Mirski, "interest has boomed to the point where there's no comparison with the past. We're doing damned well around here, and it's the contemporary scene that's really percolating. Just as the country is becoming of age, there's a tremendous awakening of recognition that culture is not something to keep outside of you, but is part of us."

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