From Midnight Casts to Authorized Editions: Understanding the Market for Posthumously Produced Art |
Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews
Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews
Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews
Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR
About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints
From Midnight Casts to Authorized Editions: Understanding the Market for Posthumously Produced Art
Posthumous editions of works by Goya, Diane Arbus, Constantin Brancusi and others are always beautiful, usually legal and frequently misunderstood.
This story begins where most would end. On April 16, 1828, Spanish artist Francisco de Goya died at the age of 82. It is often said that an artist’s work becomes more valuable in death than in life, as it dawns on prospective buyers that scarcity is now a factor with no more artworks being created. Buyers of Goya prints needn’t have worried, however, because far more of his etchings have been produced after his death than before. All of the artist’s printing plates became the property of Madrid’s Prado Museum not long after his death, and the museum has regularly leased them to various publishers to bring in funds.
Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
These are posthumously created artworks—they are Goyas, certainly, but not ones that the artist ever saw or approved for sale. These works fall into a gray zone of the art trade, and it isn’t just works by Goya. Graphic art prints, photographic prints and cast sculptures are all produced using plates, negatives and molds that can be reused any number of times.
“Posthumous editions of both Diane Arbus‘s and Peter Hujar‘s work arose to satisfy exhibition demands,” Christian Whitworth, director of San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, told Observer, noting that “private collectors and institutions alike collect both lifetime and posthumous works.” Indeed, most Arbus works in institutional collections are posthumous prints, as she ended her own life without concern about the future interests of the market. Whitworth confirmed that buyers pay more for lifetime prints, sometimes called “vintage” prints, though the price gap between work created when an artist was alive and after their passing varies considerably. “Arbus’s lifetime prints are typically priced about 10 times higher than her posthumous prints;” the price difference between lifetime and posthumous Hujar prints is not nearly that large.
Goya had a much longer life than Arbus, but he oversaw the creation of only one edition of his 80-work set of etchings known as Caprichos in 1799. The second edition was produced posthumously in 1855. By 1937, when the definitive study of his graphic work was published, there were 12 editions. (There is no record of how many other editions were created in the almost 90 years since.) His most famous set of images, the 82-work Disasters of War, was first published in 1863. By 1937, seven editions had been........