China's great gift to art

String Quartet by Chen Yifei

In the early 1980s, I was studying at The Art Students League of New York. It's on 57th Street, not far from Hammer Gallery. I would often stroll by at lunchtime, if I had scarfed a slide of pizza from the joint next door to the school rather than going to Les Trois Petite Cochons for a then quite new and trendy croissant sandwich. I rarely entered Hammer; it was definitely at the high end of the price scale, and dressed as I was on League days in a paint-splattered denim skirt, I didn't think I'd fit in very well.

But one day, there was a painting in the window that drew me to it like a sunny day in Cornwall pulls me recklessly to the beach. I had never seen such perfection in a modern portrait. I was so entranced, I walked right in.

There were more. And then, in the next room, there were amazingly evocative paintings of China. (See below) I really didn't care about China. It was not on my lifetime must-see list. It was just, well, China. It wasn't, for example, Paris.

A helpful gallery employee came my way and I cringed. Obviously, I was not a wealthy patron of the arts, but rather a lowly student of the arts, despite being beyond normal student age. But he was very happy to show me the rest of the works, to talk a bit about the painter, and to tell me the prices.

I wasn't shocked by too much. I'd lived in New York quite a while, most of my life in fact. I had already determined that, no, I could not borrow five thousand bucks to buy a Dufy, nor to obtain a stunning example of the Hudson River School. I could spend a couple hundred, when the spirit moved me and times were flush, on such things as the little Henry Bright pencil drawing I still have in my living room. It has returned to the land in which it was made, and seems happy. (It was purchased in Noortman & Brod in Manhattan.)

No matter. Back then, right when Chen Yifei began to take the New York art world by storm and tobacco heiress Doris Duke's country home wall by wall, paintings started at $25,000. In 1983, that was a lot of money. Really a lot of money. I had bought a handyman special house outside NYC for not much more than that.

I would give a lot to own a Chen Yifei, but am fortunately wiser now (?), and would not seek a loan to buy a painting. The artist died suddenly and fairly young in 2005, and I have no doubt that finding a Chen Yifei for $25,000 would be an immense bargain these days. I could go to NYC and find out; Hammer is still handling his work. Maybe I should do some fund-raising. Maybe I could deduct the cost from my taxes as it could be claimed as an educational expense.

Or maybe I'll simply have to keep dreaming, and go back to my own work, a portrait on the easel right now that is, I'm hoping, quite derivative of the Chen painting at the top of the page.

I'll let you know. 

Waterside Village by Chen Yifei