Art for Gifts' Sake

In 1918, when U.S. art galleries were the private preserve of the plutocracy, an $18-a-week office worker named Edith Halpert ventured uneasily into the domain of Manhattan Dealer Joseph Brummer, offered him a down payment on a then $650 Seurat. Growled Brummer contemptuously: "Go to Macy's."

Mrs. Halpert's answer was to start her own gallery in Greenwich Village. She soon staged what she believes to be the first U.S. "Christmas Exhibition," with prices ranging from $10 to $50 (on the installment plan). Last week, when her gallery -- still dubbed the Downtown, although it has long since moved midtown --launched its 35th annual Christmas Exhibition with a price list from $35 to $1,000, a line of 30 people stood outside the door. "We keep our rich collectors away for this sale, or they'd come in and buy six paintings at a time," she says.

In similar Christmas-shopping sprees across the land, art-conscious Americans cleaned out nearly a fifth of the stock during the first five hours of the University of Chicago Renaissance Society exhibit (its title: "Contemporary Art for Young Collectors"), bought $22,000 worth of art from the St. Louis City Art Museum. Manhattan's Galerie Felix Vercel summed up the nationwide trend by advertising a show of "Big Names in Small Sizes." The names were indeed big -- Pissaro and Utrillo -- and the pastels were indeed small; the prices were $1,250 and $3,800.

Prints -- especially in signed, limited editions -- were one answer to the poor man's status search. Signed color lithographs by Dubuffet and Braque sold for $45 and $75 at the University of Chicago show. New York's Juster Gallery offered such signed works as a Miro color etching for $90, a Picasso poster for $75. The Associated American Artists started with Raphael Soyer at $14.75, and its unsigned prints included a $19.50 Manet, a $32.50 Chagall, a $40 Renoir, a $70 Cezanne, a $190 Rouault.

For those who wanted to drop cigarettes as well as names, the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills was selling a $30 Picasso ceramic ashtray. A somewhat older artifact -- an Egyptian cosmetic palette from 3000 B.C. -- was available for $280 at Manhattan's Komor Gallery. And the nearby Judith Small Gallery offered a large array of pre-Columbian sculpture, including, at $100, some Mexican fertility figures so tiny that 50 would fit in a Christmas stocking.

Of course, not everyone needs a fertility figure, and some galleries are wary of the Christmas trade. Says Beverly Hills' Frank Perls: "Giving pictures is worse than giving ties; unless a gallery owner wants many happy returns, he shouldn't be eager for Christmas sales."

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