When sculptor Rob Fisher died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of sixty-seven in 2006, he left five large-scale commissioned projects uncompleted. In most contracts to produce a new work of art, there is a clause to cancel the agreement in the event of the death of the artist, but Fisher’s family looked to maintain and extend his legacy. Over the ensuing six years, his son Brett and daughter Talley took over the process of completing these commissions and even began new projects that they themselves designed, however still under the imprimatur of Rob Fisher Sculpture.
“Those [older] contracts were made with Rob Fisher Sculpture, LLC so we needed to keep operating under the company name,” Talley said, who has a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon and worked closely with her father in the last years of his life. “As I began to create my own artworks, I found it very rewarding. I plan to continue on this path, independently. I have created almost thirty of my own designs. The task of changing the name of the business is daunting and will require an enormous amount of work, lawyers, etc. We simply haven’t gotten to it since I’ve been so busy.”
Talley Fisher’s entry into the art world is not wholly unprecedented. Mira Nakashima, an architect by training, took over the furniture-making business of her father, George Nakashima, after he died in 1990, fulfilling his orders, creating replicas of his best-known pieces and even expanding the Nakashima studio’s offerings with new designs of her own.
There are many ways in which an artist’s heirs may carry on that person’s legacy, of which producing new work under the now deceased artist’s name is one. After sculptor Harry Bertoia died in 1978 at the age of 65, his son Val, who earned an undergraduate degree from Indiana Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering and worked for his father for the last six years of his life, “took over the business.” That business now largely consists of making replicas of his father’s smaller-scale sound sculptures, as well as producing his own sound sculptures. “In some cases, people who bought Harry’s work buy mine,” he said. “People are interested in my work, although at lower prices. In a dark room, you can’t tell a Val Bertoia from a Harry Bertoia,” although he acknowledged that the designs are different, based on “different curvatures” of the metals used. The remaining part of the business is offering tours of Harry Bertoia’s studio, making repairs to the older artist’s work and authenticating pieces done by the artist.
Val “channels his father’s design sense,” said Michael Jefferson, senior vice-president of Wright Auctions in Chicago, which included in an upcoming sale a 32” tall Val Bertoia sculpture in his father’s “sounding” or “sonambient” strain of work in which air flowing around the metal elements create a musical sound. That 2010 untitled work was estimated by the auctioneer at $2,000–3,000, which is one-tenth the estimate offered a few years earlier for a 16” tall 1970 Harry Bertoia with a similar look. “The chances of misattributing which works are by Harry and which by Val are fairly low,” he said.
It should not be particularly surprising that a child of an artist grows up with a desire to make art and, historically, this has frequently been the case. The Renaissance had numerous father-and-son pairings of artists, although rarely were they of equal renown. Being the son of an artist was a tremendous advantage then, as it led to instant recognition and commissions. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–69) was undoubtedly the finest Netherlandish artist of the sixteenth century, and his sons Jan (1568–1625) and Pieter the Younger (1564–1638) were also talented painters who generally pursued their father’s style and themes. A similar sort of progression existed with the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) and his capable if less original son, Lucas the Younger (1515–86) as well as the Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia (1400–82) and his son Giovanni (1469–1529) and his nephew Andrea (1435–1525), who largely carried on, mostly working from Luca’s designs.
A certain progression of increasing renown through the generations can, however, been seen with Pisan sculptors Nicola Pisano (1239–84?) and his son Giovanni (1258–1325?). While the father was a highly expressive artist, the son was far more revolutionary in outlook and is considered a precursor of the advanced Renaissance style soon to predominate Italian sculpture. Also with Hans Holbein the Elder (1465–1524) and Younger (1497–1553), the son was by far the more forward-looking, employing a painstaking realism and psychological nuance that gave his paintings real forcefulness. Similar conclusions may be drawn about the sons of Jacopo Bellini, Giovanni and Gentile, although probably not about Filippino Lippi, son of Filippo Lippi—all of whom were fifteenth-century Italian painters. Antonio da Sangallo the Elder and his nephew, known as the Younger, were both architects and sculptors, and historians generally take no stand on their relative merits.
Sculptors, always as much craftsmen as artists, tended to need assistants, and they brought their sons and relatives into the business. Family, as well as artistic, traditions were carried on this way.
As time passed and tastes changed, it was no longer considered adequate for an artist to continue doing the same kind of art as had been done by one’s father (or in one’s father’s day) but, rather, to strike out on one’s own. In some cases, children have worked in different media than their artist parents as, for instance, did Jean Renoir, filmmaker and son of Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. Norman Rockwell had three children, of which two became artists—Thomas a writer and Jarvis a sculptor. Painters Roy Lichtenstein and Robert de Niro, Sr. both had sons who became actors, and two of novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s daughters paint.
“I’m a sucker for people from the Midwest who had to break away from their disapproving parents and come to New York with great hopes of being artists,” said Kiki Smith, a sculptor and daughter of sculptor Tony Smith. “Those people really had to work to be artists but, for me, it never seemed all that hard.” She noted that much of what she learned as a child came “through osmosis, and all the artist friends, like Barney Newman, who came by the house and talked.”
Rather than inheriting the dealers and collectors of her father’s work, Smith created her professional connections by herself. Her sculpture is also quite different from that of her father, although it shares many of the same humanistic concerns. Tony Smith, a trained architect who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright for two years in the 1930s and did not devote himself full-time to sculpture until 1960, was a minimalist. His fame rests on monumental plywood or steel sculptures that often start with a triangular base but twist and turn in various directions, frequently suggesting modern-day man. Kiki Smith’s interests are less about her father’s formal concerns about volume, shape, and size and more about the everyday concerns of women—household objects and the shape and structure of their own bodies and internal organs. She is particularly interested in the physical and psychological damage that may be visited upon women by others as it is evidenced by the physical condition of the body.
That feminist orientation may have also been a reaction to, as well as a product of, her home environment, since “my father never assumed that I’d be a sculptor like him because I was a girl. I never really had any ambition one way or the other.” Deciding on her career was not easy. She had once studied to be a baker at a trade school in Newark, New Jersey. (“I always liked making things—art, food.”) Smith also trained as an emergency medical technician, where she learned about the human body at its most vulnerable. It wasn’t until she was twenty-four that Smith decided to be a sculptor and not until age thirty that she became “serious about [her] work.” Unfortunately, her father died when she was twenty-eight, so she did not have the benefit of his advice and counsel as the artwork matured.
The current relationship between artists and their heirs tend to have less to do with carrying on a tradition than promoting a legacy, such as establishing a foundation that makes the artists’ works and archival material available for exhibition and scholarship. Artists often own the largest collection of their own works—partly because they couldn’t sell them and partly because they didn’t want to—and heirs need to determine what to do with this vast quantity of material. Lee Krasner, who managed her husband Jackson Pollock’s estate until her death in 1984, provided an even flow of works onto the market in order to keep prices high and avoid a deluge. The estates of painters Milton Avery and Philip Guston were also handled in this way.
On the other hand, the widows of sculptors Sir Jacob Epstein and Julio Gonzalez inadvertently hurt the market for their late husbands’ works when they began recasting their pieces—failing to keep good records on how many reproductions were made in Epstein’s case, failing to label the recasts as posthumous with Gonzalez. The families of painters Raoul Dufy and Thomas Hart Benton helped depress the prices for their paintings by dumping a large number of them onto the market after their deaths.
The responsibility of artists’ heirs is to continue to promote the artwork, which maintains the visibility of the artist and market for potential sales. Certainly, what the heirs and dealers of deceased artists do not want are actions that add confusion to the artist’s market and reputation. One artist whose afterlife was problematic is Frederic Remington, who kept no record of edition sizes during his lifetime. After his death in 1909, posthumous castings appeared in waves—some authorized by his widow, who died in 1919, some produced after 1919 by the same foundry his widow had used, others generated after 1970 when copyright on the original bronzes had expired. With these editions came differing bases, chasings, numbering, and loss (and addition) of detail, resulting in a wide range of prices for ostensibly the same works of art.
Confusion was introduced into the market of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) with a 2014 exhibition of five works at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan that consisted of editions of five polished bronze sculptures produced in recent years by the Brancusi Estate. These new editions were produced from the artist’s own molds that were left in his studio. The catalogue for the exhibition noted that these sculptures are posthumous, if one happened to read the catalogue. There was no wall text next to each work identifying them as replicas. A typical label was “Constantin Brancusi, La Muse Endormie, 1923-2010, polished bronze, 7 3/8 x 10 1/4 x 6 1/8 inches, edition of 8.”
Full disclosure and clarity matters. I think “Rob Fischer Studio” or “Val Bertoia” makes things a lot more clear.