It was greed that ruined the art world, Kasmin told me not long after I had positioned my tape-recorder on a desk in the middle of the gallery. Kasmin was skittering about on parquet, putting prices up on the works for his show. He was a small man with big round glasses and an open-necked striped shirt, not quite sixty. He used a Bic Biro, and I made a mental note: times tough indeed!
'God, I should never have had a last show,' he said. 'Too many people get sentimental. I really should have done it several years ago. As the prices went up I found it an increasingly meaningless and silly activity. But partly you carry on by impetus, and you get spoilt when the money keeps coming in and it's easy to make.'
But then, in the dealer's phrase, 'the business just stopped. You've got to be very convinced of what you're doing in the face of no possibility of making money, only of losing.'
Value in art was like value in stamps. You couldn't eat off art, unless it was Julian Schnabel's smashed plates. When the bottom fell out of the art market, the market in stamps declined at the same time and for the same reasons—over-speculation and recession. Neither had intrinsic value beyond the price of postage and canvas. For too many people, an enjoyment of art and stamps declines proportionately alongside their value.
Kasmin told me that he always believed the cost of art had to have some sort of benchmark; his final show contained a large Stephen Buckley work in mixed media, and traditionally Kasmin had always priced Buckley's work in line with the cost of a new Mini, but now Minis were costing more and Buckley wasn't selling so fast. I asked him when things ceased to be fun for him. Kasmin called it 'Saatchi time ... All these people in the eighties buying things to leave in warehouses. I began to feel less and less part of it because the money thing just wasn't my game. I don't like to be short of money, but I could never get into it. I always liked dealing with people who used it. You know, that old-fashioned thing: people putting art on the walls and looking at it.'
The good news was, there were now bargains to be had. Not the sort of bargains that Kasmin once enjoyed—five Bacons for six grand. But very good value for the art lover so long as the art lover held their nerve. In Kasmin's last show there was a big John Hoyland painting—a painting, not a print, seems mad now—for £5,000. And there was a Hockney—which was a print, one of an edition of five early lithographs—going for £6,000. It was called Fish and Chip Shop and Hockney had made it in 1954, at the age of seventeen, when he was at Bradford Art School. The print showed the interior of a local chippy, a plump man in a white coat frying, a woman in an apron serving. She was serving a young blond man who looked rather like Hockney, except Hockney hadn't yet bleached his dark hair. It was a vivid, warm scene, with a skilful display of perspective. It was romantic, and I wanted it.
And £6,000 didn't seem like a lot for an early Hockney.* I could have put it on my MasterCard, and even if I didn't pay it off for years it would still have been a steal. But it seemed like a lot of money at the time, and far more than I had ever spent on anything apart from a house and car. Also, something honourable inside me told me that it would have been a little odd for a journalist to have bought it before the private view later that evening, which was obviously complete rubbish. So I didn't put it on my MasterCard. And when I came back the next day it had a red sticker next to it.
Kasmin's real name was John Kaye. He was born in White-chapel, east London, in 1934. He grew up in Oxford, and at seventeen he fled to New Zealand to write poetry and escape his father. He became a sort of Kiwi beat, and made himself undesirable by trying to rob a bank. On his return to England he fell into art dealing via bohemian Soho, and soon established himself as someone with original taste; when Pop was all the rage, Kasmin said it was junk.
Kasmin was not gay: he was keen to tell me of his many, many successes with women in the mid-1950s when he was just starting out with the dealer Victor Musgrave. 'Nothing else to do but screw in those days. Certainly so little business.' But the man who walked in about twenty minutes after me was gay, something that was first visible to the general public from his earliest art in the 1950s.
'Here is Mr Hockney,' Kasmin announced as Hockney walked in from the street. He had come to say that he was too tired to attend the opening that evening, but he wanted to wish him good luck. He looked just like Hockney should: green shirt, red tie, beige baggy suit, two-tone suede and leather shoes, light blue raincoat, lime green umbrella, tortoiseshell glasses, and a hearing aid that was half bright blue and half bright red. He poured himself a mineral water in Kasmin's office. He was in from Los Angeles to see his mother and receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art.
Hockney (pulling up a chair): Being a doctor is not that much use really. You still can't write prescriptions for your own drugs. Someone asked me how it felt. I said, 'Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.'
Kasmin: I've hung up Fish and Chip Shop. Did you see it as you walked in? I thought, in a rather kinky show, why not have a kinky Hockney?
I'll miss having a place where people can drop by and see what I've got. If I get really itchy and absolutely hate it I'll maybe open up a shop or a café. For now I think I'll just put my head down for a bit and become a collector. If you become a collector you get invited to all the parties. People say, will I still go abroad, and I say I won't need to any more. I used to go abroad only to run away from the gallery. I used to travel a lot with people like Bruce Chatwin. I used to love adventures. But now a lot of friends are dead. I'm going to another funeral of a great friend tomorrow, the architect who's always done my galleries. It takes the taste off things a wee bit.
Hockney (patting Kasmin's stomach): You're exercising, are you?
Kasmin: I've just been fed up by an old friend.
Hockney: You should exercise.
Kasmin: Since I've given up smoking and drinking I've taken up ice-cream.
Hockney (horrified): You'd be better off smoking than having ice-cream.
Kasmin: I like the ice-cream, thank you.
Hockney (still outraged): It's very bad for you.
Kasmin: I only eat it every now and then.
Hockney: It's solid fat!
He pours himself more water and asks: Why am I drinking so much of this stuff?
Kasmin (who once drank heavily): My unaccustomed bout of sobriety has made me look at things in a completely new light and realise that I've been thrashing about a bit, going on showing what I always did, picking out good art, but no pacemakers. This is not a position to feed you, to make you want to go on into the headwind.
Hockney: I think it's all rather good now. It's like the art world is going back to being sane again.
Kasmin: The picture of yours that brought the most money at auction [in May 1989] you painted at art school. You painted it very, very big in order to get a bit of privacy. It was as big as a wall.
Hockney: I got paid £85 for it.
Kasmin: That was from me! I couldn't work out where to put it. It just fitted in the hallway of my little house off Fulham Road when I was dealing from home. I thought, what am I going to do with it? I finally sold it for £150 to a man who swore to me that it was going to his children's primary school. [The picture was later sold on.] Then at auction twenty-five years later it sold for $2.2 million to some mad lady in America.
Hockney (wistfully): It was called A Grand Procession of Dignitaries.
Kasmin: When are you coming back here again?
Hockney: Tomorrow, if you like.
Kasmin: No, coming back. To Britain.
Hockney: I'll be coming back to start the opera around 20 October. Die Frau ohne Schatten will hit the fans at Covent Garden on 16 November. Hit the fans. Get it? The Schatten will hit the fans.
Kasmin: Oh, the Schatten.
Hockney: That was a joke. I won't explain any more. Kas has no ear for music whatsoever.
This one afternoon in the presence of Kasmin and Hockney formed an obsession that later took on the form of a life's quest. Their conversa
tion also assures me that I am not the only one to muse on inflation and opportunities lost.
Of course, it's not just about money. I'm not sure one ever forgives oneself for the errors one makes as a collector, and on that afternoon I made the greatest error possible, the classic mistake: I didn't buy something I loved. A few months later, the former Time Out art critic Sarah Kent told me that she had once done the same, and she was a professional. She also said that she might regret the non-purchase until she died.
I asked Kasmin if there was much of Hockney's work that he didn't like.
Kasmin: Of course. I go through periods when I don't like some of the stuff at all. But I don't actually hate it. Sometimes David doesn't like it, but he only doesn't like it afterwards. David changes so much. It would be impossible for one person to like everything he does.
Hockney: The only person who likes all kinds of art is an auctioneer.
Kasmin: Or your mother.
Hockney: Oh yes, my mother.
They wander out of Kasmin's office. Hockney settles by 'Fish and Chip Shop'.
Kasmin: I always wondered, was that boy meant to be you, David? An idealised you?
Hockney: Kind of. Yes, I'm always leaning like that. It was always the husband who did the frying and the woman who did the serving. When I was younger I used to go into fish and chip shops late at night and say: 'Got any chips left?', and when they said yes, I'd say, 'Well, it's your own fault for cooking too many.'
Kasmin (examining print): You don't get vinegar shakers like that any more.
Hockney: You do in Bridlington.
Kasmin: The whole thing has a Vuillard feel to it.
Hockney: Any student doing a print like that in those days made it look like Vuillard.
Kasmin: Have you got a copy of it?
Hockney: I think so. Had to buy it, though.
With this horse's-mouth provenance, how on earth did I miss my chance? I asked myself this for nine years, from the moment I followed Hockney out of the gallery until the print—i.e. one of the five of them—came up for auction at Sotheby's in November 2001, and I was there with my paddle waiting for it. The collectors Reba and Dave Williams were selling their prints, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicholson and all. I was now more keen than ever on the lithograph that I had been introduced to by Kasmin and Hockney, and its greatness as a piece of art had probably grown in my mind beyond its true merit. But I felt it was my piece of art, just one degree from having sketched it myself.
Unfortunately, someone else felt a similar way. The bidding started at £5,000, and soon rose to £8,000, which was my absolute, 100 per cent limit. I raised my paddle again at £8,400. The person on the phone said something to the auction house staffer in the room, and the staffer relayed the news with a nod. £8,600. I bid £8,800. More phone talk. Another nod. The auctioneer looked at me with a look approaching pity, which I regarded as encouragement. My paddle said £9,000. Who was that person on the phone? Why did they want Fish and Chip Shop so much? After a few more back-and-forths I conceded defeat, and the auctioneer said 'It's yours!' to the faceless buyer at the end of the line. Worse was to come: the successful buyer's number—let's call it 666—was logged several times in what remained of the sale. They were buying a lot of work. Perhaps they were speculating, perhaps they were decorating a loft. At any rate, I couldn't see how they could have loved the picture like I did.
The next time I saw another copy of the print was at the London Art Fair at Islington's Business Design Centre. A lot of fairs were held here regularly, including the bi-annual stamp show Stampex. Alan Cristea, one of the art galleries that had established itself in Cork Street following Kasmin's departure, took a regular stand at the London Art Fair, and displayed its crowd-pleasing array of Hodgkins and Opies and Blakes and Caulfields, and in 2002 it had a copy of Fish and Chip Shop. I saw the left half of it first, from an angle of about twenty yards. Then I got nearer, and saw the right side. There was a little red dot on the side of its frame that indicated it had been spoken for.
'Just sold it,' a man confirmed.
'When exactly?'
'Half an hour ago.'
'Half an hour ago? Really? Can I ask for how much?'
'It was ten thousand pounds. Are you familiar with it?'
'Yes, I almost bought it myself once.' Almost, I pondered. Could have, but didn't. 'I have a sentimental attachment to it.'
'It was one of his earliest works,' the helpful man said. 'Done when he was still at art school in Bradford. The boy being served is Hockney.'
A long gap. 'The thing is,' I said, noticing it was a full red dot rather than just a half one (which would have meant that the buyer had an option on it and was thinking it over for a while), 'is there any chance the buyer will change his or her mind?'
'No! They've just given me the cheque.'
The gallerist seemed upset that I was upset. He came up with what he thought was compensation.
'We do have Woman with a Sewing Machine, which is from the same period. I'm not sure I have it with me, though.'
I knew this work. It was a bit static, I thought. A flat-faced woman with high hair at her Singer.
'Thanks,' I said eventually. 'I'll keep on looking.'
This has been the case, and now the price has risen out of my league. If Fish and Chip Shop came up for auction today, it would probably be nudging £15,000. Because by the summer of 2007, only fifteen years after Kasmin and his colleagues had judged the art world to be in trouble, the art world wasn't in trouble any more. In fact, it had gone totally nuts, with ordinary art reaching ridiculous prices and the money flooding in from big City bonuses and Russia. So Kasmin's fears—he told me in 1992 that he thought he was seeing something far worse than a recession, something approaching meltdown—turned out to be unfounded. One of the beneficiaries of the boom fifteen years later was Kasmin's son Paul, who had become a big dealer in New York. Not that this helped me: my Fish and Chip Shop became more unaffordable every year; once, when Hockney made it more than fifty years ago, it was worth about twenty large portions of cod. When I first saw it, it was about a thousand portions, and now it could feed the entire population of Bridlington.
That was my first mature experience of object desire. As a child I had coveted toys and such, and of course some early error stamps, but as a child one has no easy method of obtaining something one desires beyond nagging or the upcoming birthday. We do not have credit cards or the possibility of the remortgage. But by the time I had started getting mad for stamps again when I turned forty, all that had changed. I had three credit cards and I began to hear voices in my head: Why would anyone pay £5,000 for a tiny bit of postage? And I began to answer: Because it is exceptionally good value.
The only other piece of art I had wanted as much as the Hockney was much cheaper. In theory. In practice, as David Brandon had told me, if it's not available then the price is immaterial.
As far as I could tell, Terry Frost had a few things in common with David Hockney. They were both popular artists fond of experimentation, they both made prints, they were both personally and creatively accessible. They both delighted in light and colour, they were both Royal Academicians, and they both smoked. In 1978, Frost started making bold ceramics—mugs and plates in limited editions and unlimited editions to be sold in the Tate and Royal Academy gift shops, and on one trip to St Ives with my wife in the late 1980s I bought four of the mugs from the back of a gallery—two red and black, two yellow and black. We got them home and started drinking out of them until one got broken and we decided they should be put on a shelf for display only. Then something tipped, and I decided that these mugs should form the basis of another collection. And so it was happening again, like it had happened before and would always happen: I wanted more of something I had never wanted before. Before the Internet, this collection would only be added to by subsequent trips to St Ives. Then I bought a couple of plates at auction. Then I bought a mug on eBay in 2001. I have five Frost plates, and seven Frost mugs, an
d to me they are stunning: bold, solid, sunburst. They brighten any room. There are two plate designs and two mug designs I don't have, and this wouldn't normally bother me; they'll turn up, I think, and their value is uncertain, and I may get a bargain. Unfortunately I have an adversary, an unexpected one; he is a dealer, a trader with Frost ceramics on display in his window, and he won't sell. Why won't he sell? I don't think it's money. I think it's personal.
He is a man called Henry Gilbert, known to his friends as Gillie, and he runs a shop in St Ives near the Barbara Hepworth Museum called Wills Lane Gallery. At least I like to think of it as a shop: you go in, he greets you, you look around, if you see something good and can afford it then you can buy it. This works for most things in the shop, but not the Frost ceramics. The reason for this may be gamesmanship—the unique power of the dealer over the collector—and it may lie deeply embedded in the creative history of St Ives, or at least from that point where Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson came down during the war to live in nearby Carbis Bay and unleashed the wild and elemental area in stone and marble and carved relief and paint.
The reason why St Ives attracted Hepworth and Nicholson and later Rothko and Pollock was the same reason it had attracted holidaymakers and artists almost a century before: the remarkable Mediterranean light. For the tourists the light illuminated the beaches and the cottages set into the hillside, and for the artists it illuminated a new non-figurative way of imagining the natural world; no view was ever the same twice, as the granite, slate, heather, wind and sea created a space where the artist could quite realistically believe themselves to be part of the landscape rather than just a chronicler of it.
Gillie, who was an architect, came down and became a friend of the scene: not only Hepworth, but also Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Naum Gabo, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and the Leach family. He formed a close bond with two men in particular: John Wells, a doctor based on the Isles of Scilly who came relatively late to abstraction, and Terry Frost, who came to Cornwall in 1946 after four years as a prisoner of war. When Frost died in 2003 at the age of eighty-seven, Gillie (who I judged to be in his early eighties at the time, firmly established as the oldest and most anecdotal Trustee of Tate St Ives) set up a sunny shrine to his friend: some handmade Christmas card collages Frost made each year, a couple of small prints, and some mugs and a plate. Every time I went in there—which was approximately every nine months—we would do the same dance.
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