Most guides to art investment teach you to read a market: which gallery represents the artist, what the auction results say, how the price indices move. That information is real, and I am not disputing it — I have a market rating myself. But it has a limit nobody mentions: it says nothing about painting. A rating records what a market has already decided about a name. It comes after the work, and it tells you nothing about its quality.
This text takes the other road. I am a painter, I have been working for forty years, and I am going to give you the criteria I use to judge a fellow painter’s work — criteria you can check yourself, on any artist, without knowing anything about the market.
A warning first, because leaving it out would be dishonest: nobody can promise you that a painting will gain value. Not me, not an advisor, not an index. Work by a living artist is an illiquid asset with no guaranteed secondary market, and its value depends on events nobody controls. What I can give you are the signs that distinguish a built body of work from an opportunistic one. That is already a great deal, and it is what will spare you the costliest mistakes.
1. Coherence across the body of work, and how to check it
This is the most reliable criterion, and the easiest to verify without expertise. Look at thirty works by the same artist, made in different years, on different subjects. Do you recognise the same hand?
Be careful not to confuse coherence with repetition. An artist who paints the same landscape fifteen times in the same palette is not coherent: he has settled into a formula that sells. Coherence is something else — it is when the subject changes and the questions remain. The same way of attacking the canvas, the same relationship to material, the same handling of light or emptiness, whether he paints a city, a bouquet or a crowd.
What to look for, concretely:
- The brushwork: is it recognisable from one series to the next? A learned gesture stays; a borrowed one gets lost.
- The material: thick, thin, scraped, layered? How a painter loads the canvas is a signature that is hard to fake.
- The construction: where does the artist put his masses, his verticals, his breathing space? That is the skeleton of the picture, and it varies little in someone who knows what he is doing.
- The relationship to the subject: do you recognise what is painted immediately, or do you have to search? Either answer is fine — what matters is that it is held.
A simple test: ask to see works five years apart. An artist who has changed manner three times in five years is still searching — not disqualifying in a young painter, but worrying in a mature one.
2. Output: the rhythm says more than the number
Two hundred works built up over twenty years does not mean the same thing as two hundred produced in eighteen months. The first indicates a practice; the second, often, a response to demand.
Check whether the work is dated and whether the dates are spread out. Be wary of a catalogue where everything is recent: either the artist is starting out — and you should know that — or the older work has been removed, which raises the question of what is being kept from you. Be wary of the opposite too: an artist who has painted nothing for three years may have stopped. That does not make the existing paintings worse, but it changes the bet — you are buying a closed body of work, not a trajectory.
3. Series: does the artist know where he is going?
Work organised into series — groups that explore one question across several canvases — almost always indicates someone with a method. Conversely, a catalogue in which every canvas is an isolated subject, unrelated to the next, often signals work made to order or to mood.
Ask the artist to explain one of his series. The answer is very revealing. Someone who has worked seriously will tell you what he was after and what he found — often that he found something other than what he was looking for. Someone reciting a sales pitch will talk about emotion, soul and inner journeys, and never about painting.
4. Whether the prices hold
This point is technical, and it is where buyers are most often taken in.
A serious artist has a legible, consistent price structure: price follows format, technique, and possibly the work’s place in the body of work — not the look of the client or the time of the month. If two canvases of the same size and technique are offered at very different prices with no explanation, something is wrong.
Be especially wary of steep discounts. A canvas sold at half price to close a deal destroys the value of every other one: it establishes publicly that the listed price is fiction. An artist who discounts is not defending his market, and you inherit that problem the day you want to resell.
Ask whether prices have risen in recent years, and by how much. Slow, steady progression is a good sign. A sudden jump with no event to justify it — a major exhibition, entry into a collection, an award — is a bad one.
5. What comes with the work
This is the most concrete point, and the one buyers neglect most. What you receive with the canvas determines what you will be able to do with it in twenty years.
- A certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, giving the title, year, dimensions, technique and support.
- An invoice in your name — that is what establishes ownership and the date of acquisition.
- A high-resolution reference photograph of the work.
- The work’s number or reference in the artist’s catalogue, if he keeps one.
An undocumented work is not unsellable, but it will always be worth less than a documented one, and reselling it will demand work you will not want to do.
6. So what about the market rating?
It matters, but not at the moment people think. An established rating — public results, presence in reference databases, a sales history — tells you a market already exists for this artist, so resale is possible. That is information about liquidity, not about quality.
What it does not tell you: whether the work will hold, whether it is coherent, whether the artist is still painting. A name can be rated while the work stopped ten years earlier. Conversely, solid work may have no rating at all, simply because nobody has resold yet.
So the right order seems to me this one: judge the work first, with the five criteria above. If the work holds, then look at the rating to know which market you are entering. The reverse — rating first — will have you buying names, which is exactly the speculator’s trade and rarely the happy collector’s.
7. What I would advise against
- Buying a canvas you do not like because it might gain value. The reasoning fails twice: the return is uncertain, and you may live in front of it for twenty years.
- Buying beyond what you would accept losing. The rule applies here as elsewhere, and particularly to a little-known artist.
- Buying on a promise. If someone announces a return, a coming rating or a guaranteed valuation, he is lying to you or to himself. None of those events is within his control.
- Confusing decoration with acquisition. A canvas chosen to match a sofa will be replaced along with the sofa. Not a criticism — simply a different purchase, one these criteria do not govern.
How to apply all this
Take an artist who interests you, and ask the questions in order: is the hand recognisable from one series to the next? Is the output spread over time? Is the work organised into groups? Are the prices legible and held? What is handed over with the work? And only then: what market exists for him?
Clear answers guarantee nothing about future value. But they tell you that you are dealing with someone who works, rather than someone who produces. Over time, that is the only thing that has ever made a difference.
You are welcome to apply this grid to my own work: the catalogue is online, dated, organised by series, with formats, techniques and prices shown. It is built to be checked — including against me. And if you would like to talk about it: contact@hervebouhnik.com.