In the competitive world of the art market, the reputations of artists, both living and dead, are made by a shadowy collaboration of dealers and the most savvy collectors, reputations quickly picked up by museum curators, other galleries and a secondary surge of collectors and art consultants and auction houses. Artists themselves have surprisingly little to do with it all. At the very heart of the art market, in New York, Los Angeles, London, and a number of international exhibitions (Pittsburgh may still be such a venue) things can get very lively...heated even. It can be difficult to tell which is the most dominant of the market forces.

You only get a real sense of that world in Pittsburgh every few years, when The Carnegie International opens, drawing dealers and collectors checking ou tthe local state of the game, and by watching museums like the Warhol Museum and the Mattress Factory. Local high-stakes players are few and far between in the contemporary field, with smaller groups of collectors of Old Master material and Americana. Million dollar paintings are collected in this city, if infrequently. and there are numerous multi-million dollar collections growing quietly here (largely kept in the dark, like crops of mushrooms). But there's no espeical reason why they should be here...they spring up all over America. Money makes it all possible.

Equally interesting, if slightly less glamorous, is the much broader collecting phenomenon in the region, one that doesn't pay very much attention to national and international trends, but focuses instead on what local art is available. There's no such thing as a Pittsburgh School of Painting, but over the past two hundred years Western Pennsylvania has produced remarkable painters, some of national reputation. George Hetzel, David Gilmour Blythe, W.T. Russell Smith, Aaron Gorson, William Coventry Wall, and Alfred F. King were all established artists by the time the Carnegie International put Pittsburgh on the international art map. A few years ago it was possible to pick up decent examples in good condition by most of these painters for a few thousand dollars, although particularly fine examples might normallly sell for high five-figure sums.

Suddenly that seems to be changing. On September 10th two tiny still life paintings by A. F. King turned up at Royal York Auction Gallery. Five by seven inches in size and in lovely condition they sold for $16,400 and $13,200, about double the high estimate (over $400 per square inch). Earlier in the year an early George Hetzel landscape sold at a Concept Art Gallery auction for $62,100 and Constantine and Mayer's sale of the residual art at the University Club saw the remarkable bid of $70,150 (a world record) for a painting by oddball artist Malcolm Parcell.

This is evidence of a strong, conservative taste in collecting. These artists are very, very dead. Later generations of Pittsburgh artists, especially those connected with Carnegie Technical College (now Carnegie Mellon University) adopted modernist ideas readily. Samuel Rosenberg is a case study. Over some fifty years his work moved from social realism to chromatic abstraction. His realist paintings, in keeping with local taste, command the higher prices, but that too is changing. At Royal York's September sale two good and colorful Rosenbergs from the late 1950's sold quickly for high prices. Not spirited bidding, with lots of bidders, but evidence that newer, determined collectors are out there.

Rosenberg is dead too, as are many others of his generation, which include Robert Lepper, Marie Kelly, Henry Koerner, Douglas Pickering, and Clarence Carter. All of them, I think, showed in past Internationals. All fo them are collected with ever-increasing enthusiasm. Koerner is the market leader, although his auction prices are notoriously erratic. This generation of artists is the market to watch in Pittsburgh.

But what about the living? There probably has never been so many artists working and studying in the city. Of these, the older generation has established collectors, and some few of such artists have the rare satisfaction of seeing their exhibitions sell out. The younger ones who have trained here have more uncertain futures and may be obliged to move further afield, as Andy Warhol did over fifty years ago. In the meantime, aspiring collectors should check out their work in the new galleries springing up in Lawrenceville and other parts of the town. Watch closely, for example, a young start-up gallery on Butler Street called Digging Pitt. Following a New York precedent, flat files contain mainly works on paper by local artists, unframed, and at prices that start at below $50 and seldom exceed $300. Some of these same artists are already selling for much higher prices in New York. It means that everybody in Pittsburgh has at least the chance of being caught up in the great art boom. Try it and see.

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