Stephen Foster Fine Arts is a private dealership specializing in the works of late nineteenth and twentieth century European modernism, mid-century American art, and the contemporary arts. Our primary focus is on those artists, American and European, who have most importantly constituted the defining basis of major twentieth century avant-garde movements and on those who have most impacted our current (21st century) understanding of artistic significance in the context of twentieth century visual culture. The firm's principals combine long experience in private dealing, curatorial work and art historical research and have been responsible for the sale of major work to private collectors both in the Americas and abroad. Stephen Foster Fine Arts is represented, and has secured significant markets in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
Constructed on a diversified base of extensive publishing, editing, curating and consulting, Stephen Foster Fine Arts has created a national and international network of artworld contacts and associations from both within and outside the trade. Spanning specialists in all fields of twentieth century European and American art, this network is composed of scholars, publishers, public and private art institutions, galleries and dealers, and private collectors. Together, they constitute a formidable resource for advising and consulting in the acquisition and sale of work by parties involved in private collecting, museum collections and art investment transactions. The potential and effectiveness of this network, based on its expansive radius, lies in its capabilities for providing a specific focus to a broad variety of emergent private, public, and institutional collecting situations and for securing informed and productive relationships among parties engaged in a broad spectrum of artworld agendas and transactions.
Stephen Foster Fine Arts is based heavily on a philosophy of collecting which intersects at issues of investment strategies, sourcing work, and collecting rationales. Our firm feels a responsibility to sell expertise as well as merchandise. The credentials of the firm are reflected in its historical radius, the breadth of artists and groups addressed in its past publications and exhibitions, and in its extensive network of scholars that fosters a closeness to significant research in a broad range of late 19th and 20th century subjects and areas. Our perspective here is historically and issue driven, both in matters internal to art and matters external to art. We stress work involving predictable markets and more substantial market histories that create more investment security. We believe that collection coherence and focus is historically achieved and, with the proper curatorial choices having been made, historically validated.
In terms of collecting strategies, Stephen Foster Fine Arts stresses the extreme importance of establishing the value and appreciation of a work in terms of how it is introduced into and perceived within an appropriately established context. This is an essential part of what we believe it means to build a significant and pointed collection. Consequently, we strive to assess a collection’s needs before identifying and recommending purchases.
In general, Stephen Foster Fine Arts favors investing in works that are secured in the history of art. There is more information and longer time frames within which to assess the artist's or movement's market performance. They are also made safer by their institutional authority. That is, they are warranted by their inclusion in major permanent collections and their wide publication in the forms of monographs, museum publications, etc. In terms of diversification, we advocate balancing investments between established artists, major movements, historiographically accelerating markets and, most importantly, the places where these intersect; places that are understood as "essential and defining" moments in the development of twentieth century art.
As do all fine arts investors, we closely watch art market trends, as they are reflected in the activities of the auction houses and in major museum acquisitions. We feel, however, that "trends" are best treated as "precautions" against market downsides rather than as "predictions" for market upsides. That is, while "trends" can provide useful parameters for investments, we do not think they should predicate investments or investment philosophies.
A deep and broad knowledge of the art market is clearly dependent on a detailed and reasoned understanding of the arts of a particular period and their coordinates within the history of the art market; in actuality, the history of radically different and competing art markets. There is no knowing the art market - indeed, no knowledge of the art market independent of knowing the historical context from which the work emerges and the status of that context in contemporary historiography. Understanding the art markets is not only to understand the respective places of the artists in the twentieth century history of art, but to understand distinct markets driven by fundamentally different historical and, consequently, investment considerations.
While it is widely conceded that the art market is doing well, it is also true that in the places where it is most succeeding, it has become highly selective, a fact that seems to bear out the investment cases made here. What is at stake for investors is the soundness of the criteria for being selective. Stephen Foster Fine Arts advises in the formation of public, private, and corporate collections as well as the deaccessioning of collections and estates.
We invite inquiries from collectors, museums, corporations and investment groups concerning the specifics of our firm's practices and their potential usefulness to your specific objectives. Meetings can be scheduled in New London or New York City.
Stephen Foster
Stephen Foster is founder of Stephen Foster Fine Arts and guides the firms's business strategy and vision. His twenty-five years of professional experience in fine arts business, research and teaching, consulting and arts administration brings substance, depth and effectiveness to his activities as a private dealer and closes the distance between what are conventionally (but not historically) perceived as distinct domains. He is committed to the idea that scholarship and historical criticism provide the best bases for securing informed and productive relationships among all parties engaged in artworld agendas and transactions. The uniqueness of Foster's expertise rests in his prosecuting a variety of related art world roles that have been applied to a broad cross-section of related art world contexts.
Foster's involvement in fine arts business dates to the early 1980 's and his position in FACS, a New York fine arts consulting firm. Since then, he has pursued an independent consulting practice, concentrating on the arts of the twentieth century, served as President of Foster & Vail Fine Arts and currently directs Stephen Foster Fine Arts. As faculty involved in teaching and research at major art history programs since 1972, he taught a full spectrum of twentieth century graduate courses and advanced seminars, supervised numerous M.A. and Ph.D. students through courses of study spanning all aspects of the history of twentieth century art, and has produced a distinguished record of broadly cited publications.
Foster has served the field widely (The National Endowment of the Humanities, The National Endowment of the Arts and the Getty Post-Doctoral Grant Program) in reviewing the scholarship of his peers and has administered and directed numerous fine arts and interdisciplinary cultural fine arts programs of international scope; most notably, the Program for Modern Studies, widely respected as one of the best and most successful programs of its kind, and The Dada Archive and Research Center, the largest American research center devoted to study in this field. Foster's consulting activities have ranged from advising prominent private, public and corporate art collections to corporate and industry consulting.
Publications include An American Odyssey, 1945/1980: Debating Modernism, 2000, with additional essays by Daniel Siedell, Estera Milman and John Yau (chronology by Janis Mink). Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, contributing editor, 1998. Dada Cologne Hannover, contributing editor with Charlotte Stokes, 1997. Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics, contributing editor,1996. Franz Kline: Art and the Structure of Identity, 1994. The Avant-Garde and the Text, eds. Stephen C. Foster and Estera Milman, 1988. "Event" Art and Art Events, contributing editor, 1988. The World According to Dada, 1988. Dada/Dimensions, contributing editor, 1985. Lettrisme: Into the Present, contributing editor, 1983. The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, 1980, 1985. Dada Spectrum, co-contributing editor with Rudolf Kuenzli, 1979. Intermedia, co-editor with Hans Breder, 1979. Dada Artifacts, with contributions by Richard Sheppard and Rudolf Kuenzli, 1978.
Additionally, he has served as consultant and series editor for UMI Research Press' and Macmillan/G.K. Hall's fine arts publication programs. Numbering over sixty volumes, the UMI series ( Studies in the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde ) represented an exhaustive revisionist study of twentieth century art history employing the expertise of many of today's most widely respected scholars. In addition, the ten volume G.K. Hall project ( Crisis and the Arts: A History of Dada ), described as the most comprehensive monograph on a movement ever undertaken, has set new standards for publication of its kind. In both of the above cases, Foster has managed and coordinated large teams of experts, numbering in the dozens, into systematic, coherent research and publication programs whose impact has been substantial and enduring. Understandably, the above activities have productively intersected with his curatorial activities.
With many exhibitions behind him, Foster is now engaged in curating, formulating and facilitating a variety of international exhibition programs. Among other ongoing publication projects, Foster expects to see the Franz Kline monograph and catalogue ( www.franzkline.org ), originated through his organization of the European Kline exhibition, Franz Kline: Art and the Structure of Identity , to their completion. (Fudacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Saarland Museum, Saarbrucken). He will continue to commit time to a number of other writing and publishing projects in the areas of post-WWII American art and the twentieth century arts in general.
Foster received his Ph.D. in art history from The University of Pennsylvania and has been the recipient of honors and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Grant Program, The Mellon Foundation, and the Smithsonian.
Estera Milman
As a broadly published expert in the contemporary arts, Estera Milman brings over two decades of experience in program and collection development to the firm. She is Founder of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts, for which she served as Director, from 1982 through 2004, and a charter member of the Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online consortium. As Co-Founder, Associate Director and Faculty Fellow of the Program for Modern Studies she consolidated cross-disciplinary course offerings in contemporary art history, taught graduate level courses and seminars in her field of expertise and supervised M.A. and Ph.D. research. Her books, exhibition catalogues and special issues of journals include “NO!art” and the Aesthetics of Doom, Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts: Subjugated Knowledges and the Balance of Power, Fluxus: A Conceptual Country, and Art Networks and Information Systems all of which were funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Counted among her recently published critical essays, “Pop, Junk Culture, Assemblage, and the New Vulgarians” (Circulo de Ballas Artes, Madrid and The City University of New York) addressed the context specific agendas that informed the identification, depoliticization and prerequisite “Americanization” of the New York artworld’s anointed successor to Abstract Expressionism. She has curated numerous exhibitions, film and video festivals and other intermedia projects, often in collaboration with the Anthology Film Archive, Franklin Furnace Archives, SoHo TV, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. These events were variously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and a host of corporate, institutional and private sponsors from across the United States and abroad. Milman is currently working on a new book entitled, Neo-Dada: Selected Essays on the Politics of Marginalization.
Milman concurs with the firm’s conviction that scholarship and historical criticism provide the best bases for securing informed and productive relationships among all parties engaged in artworld agendas and transactions. Her primary responsibilities within the firm are the predication, from a position firmly rooted in the present, of emerging contemporary as well as historical markets. These emerging, rather than accelerating, markets encompass both young artists whose production maintains a historically identifiable continuity with existing markets and historiographically marginalized mid-twentieth century artists who will predictably be written back into their respective periods. She further believes that the concept of “art in the public interest” cuts across institutional, corporate, and private collecting agendas. Because she understands that, first and foremost, the process of collecting is a reflection of the identity of the collector, Milman is committed to the facilitation and construction of comprehensible new collection strategies and identities.
This is particularly true for the private investor who is philanthropic in her/his approach to buying with an eye to eventually gifting their holdings to a public institution or buying directly for a specific public collection. Both approaches are indicative of enlightened private investing in the public interest. For these collectors the informed management of emerging contemporary markets offers a rich trove of possibilities; so too does sound investment in historical figures who were positioned on the margins of our art historical canon based on the vagaries of then in place cultural politics of the artworld. For collectors interested in issues of marginalization, carefully managed collecting in this area, organized on sound historiographic lines, provides long-term loan and gifting posssibilites that would greatly enhance serious educational objectives. The same strategies in accessioning/de-accessioning policy would also greatly benefit smaller public institutions with limited budgets, who, nonetheless, wish to construct meaningful new identities for themselves and to make more visible contributions to their inter-institutional consortial networks.
Recent paradigm shifts in corporate strategies have led to the abandonment of collecting as a means by which to construct a public face, in favor of the decoration of offices. It could be argued, however, that the failure of the old collecting model was based on a lack of clearly and coherently defined collection objectives. The model proposed here would allow corporate collecting to be reconstituted as a resource for exhibitions and publications by public institutions and define the corporation as a clear and focused player in the arena of art in the public interest, and thus in the artworld more broadly described.
