George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "How to Buy Warhol, Degas and Renoir on the Cheap" @wsj by Ellen Gamerman
A piece by Joan Miró sold for $4,250 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York last year. In the last five years, demand has swelled for pieces under $10,000 by names like Miró, Marc Chagall and Edgar Degas. © Successió Miró/ARS, NY/ADAGP, Paris/Swann Auction Galleries
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Last year, a Florida couple successfully bid on their first work of art—a postage-stamp sized sketch by Renoir—for $6,250, according to Heritage Auctions, which offered the work in a wide-ranging sale featuring the artist's letters and personal effects. Heritage Auctions
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A Picasso earthenware plate featuring a bull will be included in an upcoming sale at Christie's, priced to sell for at least $5,000. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/ARS, NY/Christie's Images Ltd.
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A sketch of a Campbell's Soup can signed by Andy Warhol sold for more than $4,600 in 2012 at Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, N.J.—more than double its high estimate of $2,000. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Rago Auctions, NJ
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An etching of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre by Edgar Degas sold for $4,750 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York last year. Swann Auction Galleries
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A Los Angeles collector paid more than $4,000 for a map to the hardware store that top-selling contemporary artist Christopher Wool once dashed off for an assistant. © Christopher Wool/Wright Auction House
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An earthenware plate by Picasso in an upcoming sale at Christie's, priced to sell for at least $4,000. Picasso ceramics have been selling out at the auction house. © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ARS, NY/Christie's Images Ltd.
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A photo of New York's Central Park by Andy Warhol sold for $10,625 at Christie's earlier this year. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Christie's Images Ltd.
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Roy Lichtenstein's market is "vastly underrated," said Alexander Hayter of Bloomsbury Auctions in London. Here, a silkscreen that sold for $7,250 at Christie's this year. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/Christie's Images Ltd.
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Modest examples of Rembrandt's etchings thought to date to the Old Master's lifetime can go for less than $10,000 at auction, said Todd Weyman of Swann Auction Galleries. Here, an etching of the artist's father by Rembrandt, which sold for $6,500 last year. Swann Auction Galleries
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Demand is on the rise for lower-priced works from the art world's biggest names, from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Pablo Picasso. A color etching by Joan Miró, pictured, sold for $4,250 last year. Swann Auction Galleries
David Tom, a 58-year-old retinal surgeon from Weston, Conn., says his friends are often shocked when they hear that he owns dozens of Rembrandts. Some of the Old Master's paintings have sold for more than $25 million at auction.
No matter that Mr. Tom paid as little as $4,800 for a Rembrandt etching of Christ on the cross—and it's not a very scarce print. "One of the world's most celebrated artists may have actually held this sheet of paper. That is awesome," Mr. Tom said.
As prices for blue-chip artists often climb into the tens of millions of dollars, the art world is offering up works that just a few years ago may not have been deemed worthy for sale. Small items—overlooked gems, dashed-off scribbles, even scraps artists may have assumed were headed for the garbage—are increasingly being auctioned off to an eager and growing audience.
Cheaper, minor artworks by major blue-chip artists have opened up a new market for first-time collectors. An inside look at the Andy Warhol small-works sale underway at Christie's Auction House.
In the last year, a Florida couple successfully bid on their first work of art—a postage-stamp sized sketch by Pierre-Auguste Renoir—for $6,250. At another auction, a signed napkin Andy Warhol covered with squiggly lines fetched $1,395. For less than $4,000 each, collectors nabbed a Pablo Picasso ceramic bowl emblazoned with a bullfighter and letters Henri Matisse adorned with fanciful doodles.
The sales defy a maxim of the art market: Buy the best works possible, not lesser pieces by bigger stars. But for many people, the bragging rights of owning your very own Renoir or Edgar Degas, even if it is just a doodle, are irresistible.
There is also a potential pay off: At Christie's, a simple terra-cotta limited-edition tile by Picasso that fetched less than $1,000 in 2010 can now sell for double that at auction, according to specialists. A Warhol cow wallpaper print that typically sold for around $5,000 a few years ago now can fetch $20,000 or more. Big gains can also be found outside an artist's primary medium: Alexander Calder's brooches were attainable for $10,000 before 2000, but lately have cleared $100,000.
The niche for lesser works has been troubled by fakes and theft. Some pieces are so simple they could be forged without great effort, or so small that they could have been stolen from a studio floor or plucked from the garbage without artists realizing it.
Strong demand has nevertheless spurred auction houses to hold online-only sales and other auctions specifically for works from the margins of a great artist's career. They repackage leftovers that used to get shipped off to museum archives or boxed up by heirs uncertain where else to put them. Now, some of these small works are surfacing for the first time in years.
"These are the names everybody knows—they feel safe for people, especially when no one quite knows exactly how long a good run is going to last," said Meredith Hilferty, a director at Rago Arts & Auction Center in Lambertville, N.J.
In the last five years, roughly 17,000 limited-edition pieces, works on paper and paintings by 10 top artists including Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Degas have sold at auction for $1,000 to $10,000—a 45% increase over works sold by the same artists a decade ago in a comparable price range, according to the auction database Artnet.
As lower-priced pieces enter the mainstream, some art experts bristle at what they see as a rising acceptance of irrelevant work with little artistic merit.
"Some of these things are indeed becoming financially valuable because they are praised by a growing number of ill-informed collectors," Véronique Wiesinger, former director of the Giacometti Foundation, wrote in an email. "It no doubt reflects a loss of connoisseurship, from collectors and auction specialists."
Others worry about potential fraud, honest mistakes and any other threats to a work's credibility. Earlier this year, Christie's postponed an online-only sale of Jean-Michel Basquiat items from a onetime girlfriend's collection—including a piece of paper scrawled with the word "Andy" with a low estimate of $3,000—after the late artist's sisters challenged the authenticity of some of the pieces. (The artist's estate disbanded the Basquiat authentication committee in 2012.)
Such sales have drawn protests elsewhere. The Renoir sketch bought by the Florida couple last year was unsigned and undocumented, but Heritage Auctions vouched for its authenticity with help from a past curator at the Renoir Museum in France, said Brian Roughton, managing director of Heritage's fine art department. The faint image looks like a smudgy face whose clearest features are a tuft of hair and a right eyebrow. The Florida bidders went up against 10 other people to nab it for more than twice its $3,000 low estimate, Mr. Roughton said.
In an interview, Jacques Renoir, the artist's great-grandson, didn't question the authenticity of the sketch. But in an open letter last year, he called the sale as a whole a "dismembering of Renoir's private life." The wide-ranging auction mixed the art alongside private letters, personal effects and other objects that had once belonged to the family. Mr. Roughton said heirs and museums in France had plenty of opportunities to buy back the bulk of the materials.
Though some art experts dismiss many small works as mere souvenirs, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, an art historian and Picasso's granddaughter, said a quick sketch can have real value.
"Behind a doodle, there is a hand, a spontaneous gesture, an idea," Ms. Widmaier-Picasso wrote in an email. "Actually, I have friends, amongst them some of the greatest collectors in the world, who would enjoy getting these sketches even more for those specific reasons."
In the arena of minor works by major names, Warhol leads the charge. Scores of pieces by the late artist have hit the market in recent years, including never-before-seen original drawings—a $3,250 sketch of a shoe, a $7,500 ballpoint-pen picture of a male nude, a $6,000 pencil drawing of a sprite at a typewriter.
Experts recommend buying from trusted sources—if something pops up in a Google search that looks too good to be true, it very well might be. Buyers should opt for pieces that include a documented line of ownership or come from a source with a direct connection to the artist. An understanding of the artist's work habits helps, too: Buying an etching initialed by Rembrandt? Think again. He rarely signed any prints by hand.
The smaller pieces vary widely in documentation, significance and quality. A limited-edition piece is worth less if it is created after an artist's death or comes from a huge batch that has languished on the market. A one-of-a-kind sketch might be flimsy or unsigned. Similar pieces can fetch starkly different prices or fail to sell at all.
Such vagaries weren't a deterrent for Cliff Fong, who nabbed a piece by Christopher Wool last year for $4,375, just months before the edgy contemporary artist hit his all-time auction high of more than $26 million.
The prize now hanging salon-style in the 44-year-old interior design consultant's Los Angeles home: A map to the hardware store that Mr. Wool once dashed off for a studio assistant—some lines, two messy X's and the price "$1,000" scrawled next to his signature. Wright, an auction house based in Chicago, described the piece as an untitled drawing that exemplified Mr. Wool's wry take on art-world celebrity.
"I've always liked Christopher Wool's work, but prices especially in the last three years have become really prohibitive," said Mr. Fong. "It's just a little something to give you a taste of that dream."
At least one observer was not amused by the sale. "I knew that the artist himself wasn't delighted," said Richard Wright, whose auction house featured several pieces by Mr. Wool, including a text work that fetched more than $500,000. "We tried to show what was clearly a work of art and what was kind of a gray area." Mr. Wool doesn't address questions about his market, according to his gallery, which also declined to comment.
Experts disagree over the value of these pieces as investments.
"The increase is going to be, if any, very slow," said New York art dealer Emmanuel Di Donna, former world-wide vice chairman at Sotheby's. Small pieces by art legends don't seem so rare to seasoned buyers, he said.
Los Angeles art lawyer Joshua Roth considers these purchases more emotionally valuable than investment-worthy. One of his first art acquisitions was an Andy Warhol sketch of a soup can, which he bought for about $2,000 in the 1990s and later traded for a few rare books. It's hard to say what he would've gotten for it today: More than three dozen Warhol soup can drawings have sold at auction since 2009, according to Artnet. In 2012, the works fetched anywhere from $1,955 to $16,250—and three didn't even sell.
The return for artworks bought for more than $1 million and sold at Christie's and Sotheby's last year averaged 6%, said Michael Moses, who heads the art-market research firm Beautiful Asset Advisors. Works bought for less than $5,000 and sold in 2013 averaged returns of nearly 10%, though the average time between the appearance of those objects at auction was more than 40 years—roughly four times as long as the more expensive pieces.
Big names aren't always in fierce demand. Alexander Hayter, international head of the modern and contemporary-art department at Bloomsbury Auctions in London, said lower-priced limited-edition prints by British artist Damien Hirst have slowed at auction lately thanks to a large supply of his work and changing tastes of collectors. "They're not as easy to sell as they used to be," he said.
Jason Beard, creative director of Other Criteria, a company Mr. Hirst co-founded that sells his work, said in an email that Mr. Hirst's limited-edition prints are selling well and are "as popular as ever." Editions range from 15 to 5,000 and are priced from $1,300 to $40,200 each.
Sotheby's has largely opted out of this market, pointing to internal research showing that new customers who start out bidding low on the whole do not turn into bigger spenders 20 years later, according to previous statements by auction house officials.
Christie's has taken a different tack, putting a new focus on smaller pieces, particularly since expanding its online-only sales. In the past couple of years, the auction house has been trying to build a market for Warhol's photographs, along with many other works from his estate. The photos have sold for an average $4,700 online. About 37% of those bidders identified themselves as new to Christie's, said Amelia Manderscheid, Christie's global head of e-commerce for postwar and contemporary art.
Those novice buyers aren't chasing Warhol's other untested mediums, like multiple images sewn together. "Everybody understands a shoe drawing, not everybody understands a stitched photograph," said Ms. Manderscheid.
The niche for lesser works can be fraught. Prices can range widely for Rembrandt etchings, for instance. A fine version of a later print could sell for more than an older example that looks beaten up. Complicating matters: Not everyone agrees on the exact dates of some pieces and whether Rembrandt was alive when they were made.
Todd Weyman, vice president and director of prints and drawings for Swann Auction Galleries in New York, said there is "100% secure scholarship" that Rembrandt created his own etchings and printed them on his etching press. "It's a very stable market and it's going back to a market that's been in existence since the 1600s," he said.
Still, Mr. Tom, the Rembrandt enthusiast, acknowledges there are limits to what he can know about even the finest etching in his collection. "It may not be real," he said. "There have been a lot of notable people who do this for a living who have been fooled."
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com