Martignette in Times Square: Heritage Auctions' illustration art takes Manhattan

Oct. 14, 2009

Posted by Noah

Yes, the picture is real!

I can't help but think that not only would Gil Elvgren have been thrilled to see his painting - Something's Bothering You (What's Wrong?) - 25 feet tall and towering over Manhattan's times Square under the banner: "Masterpieces of Pin-up at Heritage Auctions."

The painting, one of the Elvgrens from the Charles Martignette Estate coming up for auction on Oct. 27 - just under two weeks - as part of the fall Illustration Art sale, featuring the second part of Martignette's epic collection, is one of many unabashed masterpieces of the form in the auction. If part one was any indication, the price paid for this painting, and all the Elvgrens, will far exceed the $40,000+ estimate. Maybe tack on $100,000 and you'll be close.

This picture came about as part of a press push we're doing, and it was picked up and put on the Reuters board in Times Square, and on the Reuters Board in Las Vegas. I'm sure the borough of Manhattan was duly impressed. If a picture like that won't stop New Yorkers then nothing will.

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-Noah Fleisher

Pin-ups and glamour everywhere: Must be Martignette in the air

June 19, 2009
Posted by Noah

Everywhere I look these days – be it around my desk, in my inbox or in my files – I am seeing scantily clad women. No, I’m not downloading dubious photos at work. In fact, they are actually images of pieces of great American art. For the most part they are from the Charles Martignette Estate, they’re the top of the pin-up art world – and the illustration art world, I might add – and they are readying for their debut at auction in about 3-1/2 weeks. It’s a tough job having to look at gorgeous pieces from Elvgrens, Vargas, Armstrong and Bolles, among the many many many. It’s a tough job, I know, but someone has to take one for the team.

The first selections from The Martignette Collection are going to hit the block on July 15 and 16. This is an exciting thing indeed. First of all because it’s great stuff, and second of all because work of this quality, in this quantity, from this many legendary artists, never comes on the market. Never. That’s big N little e-v-e-r and you get the point. The piece illustrated above is an Earl Moran, and I love it like no other, except for about 100 or so also in the collection. While this one won’t be publicly accessible for a while longer – it’s part of the September Glamour and Pin-Up auction – let this look just be a tease.

I’ve rambled a bit about the vastness of Martignette before, and I could certainly fill a year’s worth of posts talking about individual pieces, but I wanted to look at the pervasiveness of Pin-Up Culture all over our society right now. If you open your eyes and look for it it’s not hard to see, and it hasn’t been hard to see coming, which makes the release of the Martignette Estate all the more important.

Prices on the top examples of Pin-up and Golden Age Illustration (From Elvgren, Petty and Vargas to Rockwell, Leyendecker and Parrish) have been on the rise for quite a while, with good examples commanding appropriate high five and six figure amounts. Somewhere, though, in the last several years the imagery and philosophy of Pin-Up art has entered the mainstream consciousness.

My best guess is about three years ago when AMC debuted its amazingly good drama Mad Men. The fashion, the haircuts and décor are all spot on to the Mid-Century aesthetic; the designers on the show don’t miss a bit. But it’s in the character of the office manager, Joan Hollaway, played skillfully by the sultry Christina Hendricks, that we see the Pin-Up aesthetic in full glory. Ms. Hendricks is a walking pin-up, with the face, the hair and the body to do any great American illustrator proud. Her wardrobe is cribbed directly from any number of paintings, and the giveaway is that the producers thank the Alberto Vargas estate in the credits. If ever the new millennium will see a prime walking, talking example of a Vargas Girl, it’s Christina Hendricks. Check it out, really.

The culture is everywhere, from young girls inhabiting the clothes and ideas in the form of a bonafide subculture to its profusion in print and TV advertising, rock and roll and Hollywood, there is no mistaking this phenomenon.

It’s a beautiful thing no matter how you look at it, whether you choose to look back at the crumbling innocence of the age that originally produced the art or forward to an age when that innocence is replaced with empowerment. Personally, I choose to look to July 15 when the most important private collection of Illustration Art ever offered at public auction comes up for sale and the transformational effect its disbursement is going to have on a society ripe for its message.

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-Noah Fleisher

Rockwells and Elvgrens and Vargas, oh my! The Martignette Collection has arrived

April 3, 2009
Posted by Noah

The Charles Martignette Collection of American Illustration Art has arrived at Heritage – as of last week, I believe – and I still don’t necessarily know how to write about it. Never one to let not knowing what was going to happen stop me from rushing in at full tilt, I’ve decided to charge ahead blindly and see if I can make some sense of this gargantuan, stellar collection. For once, though, no one could accuse me of torturing syntax or over-hyperbolizing when I saw that this is easily the most important collection of illustration art to ever come on the market.

This collection hits me in the gut. It is as important as a survey of American art over the past century-plus as it is as a timeline of prevailing attitudes, ideas and sociological constructions over the same course of time. It moves from the formal (Howard Pyle and Brandywine) to the idealistic (Rockwell) to the controversial and profane (Elvgren and Vargas), and absolutely everywhere in between. To try to sum up the depth and breadth of Charles Martignette’s passion, as embodied by this collection, is ridiculous. He invented the field, period.

Martignette fell in love with pin-up art in the early 1970s and made a concerted effort to track down as many of the original illustrations as he could from the artists themselves, their surviving spouses or their families. In a lot of cases he got canvases for a song that are now worth well into the six figure range. His love of illustration art quickly spread from glamor paintings to encompass all periods of American illustration. He became the foremost expert in the field, wrote books on the subject and was a driving force behind what is now a legitimate niche in the field of fine art. I defy most anyone to look at the best examples in this collection and tell me they don’t satisfy all codified and subjective criteria to exist as bonafide “Art.”

What Martignette was really known for, however, was the pin-up, and you can’t talk about pin-ups without mentioning the names of the greats like Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas, both of whom have established track records of greatness at Heritage. Both also had, shall we say, a certain fondness for the female form. It’s this very fact that will make the collection and its subsequent auctioning so attractive to many and so divisive to others. Vargas exhibited his “appreciation” a little more freely than Elvgren. Elvgren exposed his subjects just enough to be titillating but not enough to kill a sense of mystery and – dare I say it? – innocence.

When we sent out a press release a week ago on this collection I got a good handful of responses back from people – inside and out of the company – that took issue with the use of an Elvgren in promoting the acquisition, the same one you can see up top here. Nobody was threatening mayhem or protests, they simply wanted me to understand that they would have appreciated a less overt display from the collection, like one of the pieces we used further down in the press release, like the one you see next to this graph, an amazing J.C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover from the 1940s. I am not so benighted that I couldn’t appreciate those concerns. Nor am I going to say that the forms that Elvgren portrayed aren’t some of the finest representations I’ve ever looked at – both from an aesthetic and visceral viewpoint. That’s a politic way of saying I think some a’ them girls are real purty…

Here’s the thing: Martignette was known for his pin-up art, and for his wide appreciation of how the genre evolved. Did he like to look at beautiful women in states of semi-undress? Okay, yes. Did he evolve as a collector and refine his palate as his tastes and appreciations grew and changed? Without a doubt. It is in his expansiveness that Martignette made a difference in American art, helping to expand the definition to include a vast array of brilliance across a century that far exceeded whatever boyish lasciviousness may – or may not – have played into the initial spark that awoke the world class collector in him.

The collection, 4300-strong and easily worth in the range of $20 million, will be auctioned off over the course of a year or so here, starting in July, I believe. The job of cataloging the collection has just begun and will take over the better part of an undisclosed location lucky enough to witness its scope. You can bet that I will follow the auctioning of this art closely, especially the marquee lots – here’s a link to the Heritage Press release, which highlights just a touch of them – and you can bet I’ll check back in when they are getting ready to hit the block. It should be a fun year.

It is getting on 6 a.m., my coffee cup is empty, and I have to be getting to work. Have a good weekend.