Daniel Grant, in the Maine Antique Digest, discusses the ways dealers and museums trade works to meet each other’s needs. Grant talks to Paula Cooper and Lucy Mitchell-Innes among other dealers:
Then there are swaps: you give me that painting from the collection, and I’ll give you this one that I own. Swaps don’t happen often, but they do take place. One swap that took place within the past year involved the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, which acquired an assemblage/painting by folk artist William Hawkins (All About Eve, circa 1989) through part gift, part purchase (“five figures,” according to David Brenneman, the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions), and part trade with New York City gallery owners Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco.
The Ricco-Maresca Gallery represents the Hawkins estate. All About Eve (84″ x 48″ x 12″) is “one of Hawkins’s major pieces,” Frank Maresca said, and would have been priced at $100,000, if selling the work had been uppermost in the dealers’ minds. “We very much wanted this painting to end up at a major museum, and the High was high on our list.” Because of the painting’s cost and the fact that “budgets are tight at museums these days,” Maresca noted, the gallery “figured out a way to make it happen. We made a sizable chunk of it a gift and got paid in part with a smaller Hawkins in the museum’s collection.”
The Art of Trade (Maine Antique Digest)
