The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, and: The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730–1900 by Thomas M. Bayer and John R. Page (review)

At the heart of each of these rich, rewarding studies is the same desire: to reassert the importance of an analysis of the art market to the clearer understanding of developments in art itself, in England, in the modern period. Between them spanning a two-hundred-year history, the books plumb the depths of the complex relationships between art and money that were forged in the crucible of an increasingly urbanised consumer society. These are complementary titles, approaching the subject from different disciplines. While Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich have edited a collection of tightly focused essays by both established and emerging art historians on some of the institutions, agents, and practices of the art market, Thomas M. Bayer and John R. Page have co-authored a volume—published in Pickering & Chatto’s Financial History series—using the methodology of economic history and crunching large quantities of data drawn from art sales to identify broader trends in the development of the market. Together, these books undoubtedly offer what Fletcher and Helmreich welcome as a much-needed “balance between the quantitative and the qualitative” in the historical analysis of the art market (21).

Here is a neglected history: while work has been done on the art trade in the Netherlands, and on dealers’ networks in later nineteenth-century France, few scholars, with the exception of Iain Pears, in his groundbreaking The Discovery of Painting (1988), have attempted anything like a sustained interrogation of the distinctive features of the modern art market as it developed in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the remaining patchiness of the literature on art’s relationship to the market anywhere may be seen as a problem integral to the subject of art: new studies such as theirs, Fletcher and Helmreich suggest, are demanded “by the practice of art history itself” (2). They argue that recent decades of the social history of art have—rather ironically—neglected “economic factors” in their attempts to resituate art within its social and historical context, at the expense of an interest in identity politics (1). Certainly, the scholarly suspicion of art reduced to a mere plaything or function of the market has traditionally run deep, not least because of the resilient vocabulary of art as, variously, sacred, gentlemanly, autonomous, transcendent, and always beyond the taint of trade. For Bayer and Page, too, this “‘apotheosis’ of art has been so persuasive that we instinctively react defensively against any attempts that might undermine this sacred status—scholarly examinations not excluded” (3). (Indeed, any readers who are likely to flinch at the description, for example, of secessionist paintings as “conspicuously differentiated new art products” should look away now [115].) Instead, they insist, “our evidence shows that any understanding of the art produced within the market structure of a modern consumer society must take into account the myriad implications of artists acting as producers, dealers and critics as exchange agents and market makers, auctions as exchange platforms and buyers as consumers of luxury goods with a perceived asset quality” (3). Indeed what both volumes do effectively is put flesh on the bones of the undoubtedly often bald and flattened characterisation of the market. They argue that in the long nineteenth century the art market was in fact a multi-actor network: a tapestry of intricate interdependencies between artists, dealers, critics, collectors, patrons, institutions, and the public, relationships which were increasingly mediated and then significantly transformed by the press as the nineteenth...