![]() But back in 1979, Warhol proposed a trade of modern art for historic illustration: a complete set of his Monroe silk screens for a single Audubon avian print. In fact, it’s worth more than almost anything: In May, a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe sold for $195 million, the most ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. “In the 1960s, history was worth more than art,” he said. Today, Robert estimated, it could fetch $45 million. A Winslow Homer oil painting was sold in 1964 for $45,000. But it sold many of them in the mid-20th century before prices surged. The family was prescient in buying paintings by 19th-century American masters like Frederic Remington and George Caleb Bingham. An 18th-century globe their grandfather dropped wound up egg-shaped. A ship model emerged from the car with a broken mast. Kenneth’s sons, Robert and Harry, recall road trips with their father in the family station wagon, which returned home stuffed with antiques bought at flea markets and auctions. Newman’s son, Kenneth, joined the business, and the two sailed to Europe to butter up art dealers - with real butter and eggs, then scarce commodities on the Continent - and snap up prints. (As president, Kennedy, a Navy veteran, also purchased naval prints from the shop.) He bought a Currier & lves portfolio to hang in the Oval Office. Roosevelt, a former secretary of the Navy and a collector of maritime prints, made a much-heralded visit to the shop soon after he was elected in 1932. As he taught himself about art and acquired important works, his renown grew. Gottschalk and bought the business from him in 1928. Newman sought out other prints and paintings for Mr. He sold them to Edward Gottschalk, who had founded the Old Print Shop years earlier in Greenwich Village. The brothers’ grandfather, Harry Shaw Newman, was cleaning the attic of his mother’s New Jersey boardinghouse shortly after World War I when he discovered a roll of prints by Currier & Ives, the New York publisher whose inexpensive lithographs became a household staple in 19th-century America. Even the overstuffed closet held a prize: a rare watercolor view of New York City in the 1820s.įinding gems in unlikely places is how the business began. The Newman brothers found a James McNeill Whistler etching they’d lost track of. If clearing out the shop’s three floors has hit some speed bumps - mold, a scourge for anything made from paper, turned up in several boxes of prints - it has also yielded the occasional reward. “We’re looking to upgrade the collection in favor of quality,” he said. They’ll move about three-quarters of their holdings to the new shop, and store or donate the rest. “One of our stranger requests,” Robert said. ![]() An earlier inquiry had come from Rikers Island, seeking frames for detainees’ projects. For three months, the brothers have led an exhaustive effort to haul out, scrutinize, pack and transport an inventory of more than 100,000 pieces that includes Currier & Ives lithographs, John James Audubon illustrations, New York City scenes, antique maps, contemporary art and prints by early-20th-century American masters like Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Thomas Hart Benton.Ī staff member was on the phone arranging a pickup of empty frames by Materials for the Arts, a city program that steers donations to artists. ![]() The business, founded in 1898 as the Old Print Shop, is in the throes of moving out of the storefront on Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill that it has occupied since 1921 and into a sleeker, second-story space several blocks west. This is what happens when you spend three generations building a family business out of buying and selling history, most of it on paper - beautiful, valuable, hard-to-part-with paper. To be fair, it’s not all Dad’s fault Granddad and the brothers themselves had a hand in creating the clutter. “My father was the biggest pack rat there ever was,” he said. His brother, Harry, has had a similar thought. Inside, crammed floor to ceiling, were still more piles. Robert Newman had already sifted, sorted and sweated through untold mounds of paper - which to keep, which to sell, which to give away? - when he came to a closet door he hadn’t opened in 20 years. ![]()
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