Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we will delve into an artist who had a breakthrough very late in her career. We're going to talk about Katherine Bradford and we'll explore her unique and highly collectible works. Joining me, as always, is our art expert, nicholas Robertson. I'm your host, Jeppe Curth. Let's get started.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:31

We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself, and how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls, to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value, with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Jeppe Curth: 1:29

Hi Nick

Nicholas Robinson: 1:29

How are you doing? I am fine, thank you. How are you today? I'm good, thank you, Good, good good.

Jeppe Curth: 1:38

So today is about Katherine Bradford, and maybe, as always, could you start by the beginning and start where she comes from.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:47

Sure, sure, absolutely yes, Katherine Bradford is a really interesting artist, really interesting story biography, an artist that I've known about for some time, but not an artist that I had spent a lot of time paying a lot of attention to. And this is a slightly rare case, possibly, if I may say, where you had been very interested in the work and your continued interest was a driver for my interest and my noticing the work, and we've got more interested in it over time, um, but that's a little bit the genesis of our interest, and I just wanted to sort of say that that, in this context, um, you're noticing the work was a catalyst for my noticing the work, and it doesn't happen that way around. So much anyway.

Jeppe Curth: 2:43

No, it's good to try that way around.

Nicholas Robinson: 2:45

Um no, but I'm just saying credit where credit's due, Thank you. But Katherine Bradford is. You know, we talk a lot about artists who have a very important role in history and perhaps their influence, their achievements, have not been noticed or acknowledged as much as we think should be the case. Katherine Bradford is a little bit different in that she's been painting for quite some time but, um, it took her a long time to get noticed. Um, she'd be the first to say this, having achieved, you know, a good, solid career now, but having taken a long time to get to that place. But I suppose I guess your question was related to the biographical information, right?

Jeppe Curth: 3:39

Just to get a background. Yeah, a little bit of background, as I also said in the beginning. Is she? Her breakthrough was very late in her career, so maybe we yeah, a little bit of background. As I also said in the beginning, her breakthrough was very late in her career, so maybe we could start a little bit before the breakthrough.

Nicholas Robinson: 3:49

Yeah, yeah, makes sense, makes sense. Well, she was born in 1942 and lived in New York City and Connecticut. We don't have, you know, tremendous amounts of biographical information about her, not that there's any sort of great secret, but she'd always been interested in art. But as a young person it seemed that the in her family context, the bohemian life of an artist was discouraged or certainly not encouraged. So she followed a very conventional path in life in the 1960s marrying, becoming a sort of dutiful wife and then mother, um. She had boy, girl twins born in 1969. Um.

Nicholas Robinson: 4:37

She spent her uh the 1970s living in Maine, um, and she was part of an artist community that actually included Lois Dodd and Yvonne, uh Jaquette Um, and with no training, she made some abstract works, primarily about color and its relation to landscape or the evocation of landscape. But in the late 1970s she realized that she, the artist's life, was a life that she wanted and it was a life that she was not leading, and she had to make a determination about how to get this life. So in 1980, with the sort of disapproval of her family ringing in her ears, I suppose she she moved to New York city in order to pursue a life in art and to be in contact with an active arts community. So already she was 30 years of age when she determined that she needed to make this serious commitment to being an artist. So she, yeah, she studied and then, in 1987, she enrolled in graduate studies at SUNY Purchase and very slowly but surely, began her exhibiting career.

Jeppe Curth: 6:04

Good, Thanks, and very slowly but surely began her exhibiting career. Good thanks, let's get back to that because it's a question for the next part. But could you start by describing her works and maybe also the accruing themes and motifs?

Nicholas Robinson: 6:19

she had. Sure, I mean the first paintings that started to gain her some attention, from the 2000s. A lot of them had a had a marine theme Collectives of people related to being on boats, being in the sea, paintings of swimmers. The other bodies of work include Superman and superhero paintings, figures, sort of liberated and flying free, and I guess I mean one of the very first sort of significant paintings I suppose that she has done is a painting called Runaway Wife, and there are many paintings that sort of relate to this theme of liberation, emancipation. In fact, there's a really interesting quote from her, if I may read it, so this is her words I was living in Maine year round in the 1970s.

Nicholas Robinson: 7:21

I had two children and an ambitious husband who basically wanted to be governor of Maine. When I realized the implications of that, I thought this is going to be a train wreck and I didn't want to get divorced, but I also didn't think I could be the first lady in the governor's mansion. One day my husband invited some colleagues over for lunch and I told him I just couldn't hack it. I didn't want to be there for one more lunch. So when the people came down the driveway to our home, I jumped out of a window and ran to my studio. So this is a story that of course tells a lot about her mindset and about her determination to free herself from the shackles of this very conventional, straightening life and, yeah, embrace an artistic life, the life of an artist, the path of an artist. So these earlier bodies of work are characterized by the thematic subjects that we've already talked about the individual figure, sort of flying free or caped, so of course in this sense they're a superhero, sometimes very specifically Superman. And then we have the figures on boats and then swimmers, individual swimmers, groups of swimmers or people gathered by the shore. And the way these paintings are made they consist of large swathes of colour, blocks of colour that are built up through thin glazes, so the glazes are accumulated on the surface to create this sort of depth of saturation for any given colour, and then the figures kind of emerge, or sort of depth of saturation for any given color, and then the figures kind of emerge or sort of disappear a little bit into these color fields, these blocks and these blocks. They overlap each other, so you have these sort of diaphanous patches of color where you have these very sort of softly blended areas where the two types of colour overlap and these colours are designed to evoke elements of the landscape or different times of day or night, or seasons or whatever. So that's really what the paintings are look like. And then the figures.

Nicholas Robinson: 9:42

In these paintings the narrative is extremely ambiguous. We don't know exactly the interrelationship between these figures. So we see single figures existing in a somewhat flaneur-like attitude. Perhaps we see families, we see lovers, heroes and sometimes quite many people, a large group of people. So we have different commentaries on the individual, the personal and the community and the various ways in these different elements can interact.

Nicholas Robinson: 10:17

As part of this sort of general rumination on the human condition, one imagines the human condition, one imagines. Often we get this kind of sort of slightly nondescript feel, this more atmospheric feel, because the figures themselves are very soft-edged, with no particularly strong definition in the facial features, so we can't read them in terms of what they're saying or doing or thinking. So they become very, very generalized and a very sort of soft edged, um, uh, atmospheric evocation of something, um, and because the paintings are sort of built up in this way, um, with these, with these layers of glazes, um, we get a very particular kind of lighting and there's no individual light source in these paintings. The source of light in the paintings is from within. So these paintings, they have a sort of a soft ethereal glow as a result of having this sort of painterly luminosity and this light that somehow appears to begin within the painting and then somehow come outwards to us, the viewer Um. So that's a very specific quality, that's a very important part of looking at her work and understanding her work and feeling her work Um. So then all of these elements, they sort of combine um to create these, these, these figurative abstractions Um, if I could use that term.

Nicholas Robinson: 11:55

Um and the the, the events that are transpiring in the paintings are always fictitious Um. She completely invents these scenes um and these figures in these compositions, and then she develops them by intuition Um. She comes into the studio in the morning and there's a lovely video that I've seen of her um paint trays arranged on a work bench and they are not cleaned from from the day before, from the week before Um. There's just this sort of accumulation of paint in her signature colors um, which is very nice to see, and then these very crusty brushes um sort of staying wet in these, in these um trays of paint and, and she likes to not clean her brushes because she likes to be able to come in in the morning and she doesn't like to clean up because, of course, that's tedious and she doesn't want to begin the day with a sort of a chore like routine. She wants to be able to come in and survey the multitude of paintings that are arranged around her, all of which she's working on and evolving simultaneously, and then she just wants to be able to get in the zone and to start the challenge of moving these paintings forward in whatever way comes to her intuitively. So it's, it's really it's a really nice process.

Nicholas Robinson: 13:23

Um, that is, you know, becomes very clearly reflected in the way these paintings look. Um, and then I suppose, if I'm going to talk about the final characteristic of her paintings, um, a visual characteristic that is most striking about them is the perspective, now these, because you have these flat swathes of color, um, often actually also sort of finished with this scumbled, um, uh, paint application on the very top layer, the very top surface, and, and by that I mean a sort of a drier pigment that is sort of almost like scratched onto the surface, um, with a, you know, with a dryer brush, so you have some accumulation of small areas of impasto on the surface, but fundamentally you've got these big blocks of colour and the way they are arranged gives a very sort of non-specific sense of perspective. So the sort of space that these paintings inhabit is not the same sorts of planes that we're used to in highly realistic painting, but it's a much more sort of atmospheric sense of coming in and out.

Jeppe Curth: 14:38

Yes, thank you, nick, and that is what they look like. Can you maybe say a bit more about her palette and colors?

Nicholas Robinson: 14:47

Yeah, the colors are very, very often bright, luminous colors, very, very kind of warm colors often, but a strong, strong. She's a strong colorist and I suppose you know you can see her. You know she's a New York painter. I suppose you know you can see her. You know she's a New York painter. I suppose, essentially, even though her paintings are ostensibly figurative paintings, there's a great deal of abstraction within them, if that's not too much of a paradox. The colors that she chooses to work with, I mean you can see the influence of Matisse and Bonnard very sumptuous, rich, saturated fields of color from which these figures emerge or submerge. I guess, to talk about her work in a wider art historical perspective, figures in the water is extremely prevalent in her work and recurs, you know, over many, many years, many bodies of work and of course the theme of the bather in painting is a very longstanding classical one. I mean, in the 19th century we could see the bather, the nude bather, sort of dressed up in classical themes in the work of Cabanel or Bougerot, and then in Corbet, the work of Corbet, and then in the later 19th century the work of Bonnard and Matisse. Really important sort of lineage, I guess, not necessarily to place her very specifically, but to understand different examples and how she might be placed within that kind of trajectory. So, nick, let's get some facts on the table. Okay, yeah, so can you take it away? Uh, okay, well, um, for, uh, she's in her 70s now and and I suppose in terms of a career, we can still describe her as a relatively new artist.

Nicholas Robinson: 17:25

Um, she came to prominence in the in the two thousands, or prominence. She started to gain some traction with her work in the two thousands and I suppose we could trace her breakout exhibition to 2016,. Um, which was her first solo exhibition with Canada, which is a really nice gallery, really good gallery in New York City. But her teaching, beyond her exhibiting career, she has an important role as a teacher and her teaching legacy includes influencing many young artists through various teaching positions. She's taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts. She's taught at the FIT in New York Fashion Institute of Technology, that is. She's taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and in 2017-18, she was also the senior critic on the painting faculty at the Yale School of Art. So she's, you know, she's been involved in some really venerable institutions. Um, where she's, where she's been teaching painting.

Nicholas Robinson: 18:34

Um, she's received quite a nice uh array of awards and honors. Uh, she's been granted a Guggenheim fellowship, a Joan Mitchell foundation grant. She's been elevated to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in a really nice sort of you know gesture nod to her status, she was commissioned to make a mural, a set of murals for the First Avenue station on New York City Subway's L train, murals for the first avenue station on new york city subways l train. You know this is out in williamsburg, uh, brooklyn uh, where she's had her studio for many years, um, starting in the 1980s when she moved back to the city. This was a neighborhood that was really just a neighborhood consisting largely of polish immigrants and not at all an artistic bohemian neighborhood. It was really just a cheap place for artists with no money to get studio space. But now she has this incredible set of murals in the in the subway station. So that's the sort of a nice public acknowledgement of her, of her role in this community and her, you know, a role as an important artist to gain such a commission In public collections.

Nicholas Robinson: 19:49

Her paintings are in some really quite prominent public institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art as, I suppose the most prestigious of these the Brooklyn Museum. The Portland Museum of Art Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, texas. The Portland Museum of Art Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, texas. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. So she's, she's, she's.

Nicholas Robinson: 20:11

She's being acquired by important institutions, I suppose primarily in the United States, but she has some really nice galleries. The gallery that has, I guess, been most indelibly associated with building her career is Canada. That I've already mentioned. And who else? She shows with Katharine Rapetto in Milan. She has a really nice gallery. She's done some really nice shows with Gilles Presti and Emanuele Campoli. They had a gallery called Sudden Lane which became Campoli-Presti. She's shown with Haverkampf in Berlin. So she has really nice medium-sized galleries that have a really nice sort of outsized influence in their individual sort of geographic markets but with a really nice nice programs related to painting and such so, as you just mentioned, uh, nick, with the numbers, uh and years, bradford started showing frequently in New York in 2007 and up In 2016,.

Jeppe Curth: 21:30

as you said, she did her first exhibition at Canada and after this exhibition, her career as an artist started taking off. She recently gained significant attention, I would say, in popularity around collectors. Um, what do you think has contributed to her rise in in interest?

Nicholas Robinson: 21:57

um, well, a figurative painting, I guess, sort of goes in and out of vogue a little bit. So her painting, firstly, has sort of coincided with an interest in this kind of enigmatic, narrative, figurative painting. She's really a good painter and people that are highly skilled in their field invariably not always, but often get the attention that their, their work uh, deserves. Um, and she's, you know, she's a really contemporary painter in that her painting really straddles this interesting sort of ambiguity, uh, this paradox uh, between figuration and abstraction, between figuration and abstraction. The paintings, like I said, have very large blocks of sort of washy color. They're very flattened out, so they don't tend to evoke a very. They don't have an easy relationship with perspectival space, they tend to sort of repudiate those conventions. So there's a sort of simplification of figure ground relationship, which, which is really nice. So they've, they're very distilled, very elemental, and that you know they're very, they're very poetic. So any, any, any, any work that embodies all of these kinds of qualities, these technical qualities. Her paintings are very atmospheric, with these sort of primordial atmosphere, these luminous stars. They're just, they're just. Really there's a, there's a incredible delight in these paintings, um, and obviously with combination of really good galleries, being very dedicated to the work and uh sort of institution.

Nicholas Robinson: 23:52

This is a. This is an artist who started to become really, really comfortable in her own skin, having spent a long time struggling to achieve a certain sort of status, and I don't mean status in terms of, you know, works costing a lot of money, just breaking her way in becoming acknowledged by the industry, by the art market, by the art world, struggling for years to, you know, be treated respectfully by her peers. You know, this is an older woman now, who is, you know, a young artist, I suppose, and yet, and yet, she paints with maturity and confidence because she's been doing it for a long time and, you know, all of these kinds of things have, have coalesced her auction record is 163 000 for 90 by 120 work.

Jeppe Curth: 24:46

Is that her level in on the secondary market and what are the primary prices on kathleen brentford's?

Nicholas Robinson: 24:51

works um primary prices. Well, the primary prices started around a 20 25 000 I guess for a very small painting um, a painting that is um sort of a meter and a half, maybe 150 centimeters tall. I think that that's probably around 80 000 today. Um bigger ones more, smaller ones a bit less, but this is the sort of general range. Secondary market paintings are a bit more expensive than her primary market paintings. It's not impossible to buy them on the primary market, but it it is quite difficult and has been quite difficult um why is that?

Nicholas Robinson: 25:30

we're now into, uh, july 2024 and we're seeing a slightly different art economy. So, of course, when, when the the market softens, then it becomes easier to buy paintings on a primary market, but they have been very highly demanded. Um, and you know, like anything, when, when a very good example becomes available on the secondary market, it can achieve a good price.

Jeppe Curth: 26:00

So we have acquired works by Bradford and also placed some good works with collectors. Can you explain the process and list of buying record and her works and why do we believe her works and the future growth in it?

Nicholas Robinson: 26:18

Well, the paintings are really really good paintings and they're reflective, like I said, of an artist who's really come into a rich vein of form. You know, her maturity sort of shines through but there's still like a sort of a youthful vibrancy, a kind of a faith in humanity. There's something really uplifting about these paintings. So, you know, we always have to go on the strength of feeling that we have for a work. Obviously, our interest is substantiated by these other factors in the market that make us feel that, you know, we're not some lone voice in a vacuum. There's a lot of interest in her work. They're very well regarded, there's a strong regard for them across the world. So we just feel that, you know, these are, they're not cheap paintings, they're not expensive paintings. There's good value for the quality and we feel like it's a really. You know it's a really. It's a really good artist to pay attention to and to be committed to. So that's that's really what it comes down to.

Jeppe Curth: 27:27

And what kind of work would be good to acquire for collectors?

Nicholas Robinson: 27:32

Well, I think that works are best described in terms of the balance of composition, the quality of the light, a certain harmony between these elements. So I suppose, really it just comes down to a sort of a qualitative assessment of individual paintings, but thematically, paintings of swimmers, paintings that have these figures somehow interacting. There's something.

Jeppe Curth: 28:03

The heroes.

Nicholas Robinson: 28:03

There's something, yeah, the hero paintings are nice People flying in the air, kind of completely liberated from their you know, earthly woes, so to speak. Um, there's something really really nice and free about those pictures, um, and then I really think the paintings that have this built up, uh, layers of glazing that allows the kind of light to shine from within, from within, uh, there's, like I said, there's no specific light source in the paintings, and so when you feel that they have this warm inner glow, then I think that you know you have something that really embodies what she's really good at doing can you maybe also try to explain where she is in her career?

Jeppe Curth: 28:45

um, I don't believe that we can label her as like a blue chip artist, but I guess she's maybe becoming that, or is that still to be determined?

Nicholas Robinson: 28:57

Yes, absolutely, it's still to be determined. I mean, she's a really successful artist whose work is still good value, but can good value but can be expensive. I think that she is a painter who will really really have a strong sort of residual career and reputation, a legacy, if you like. I do not think that her works are sort of transient and fleeting. Think that her works are sort of transient and fleeting. I think they have a strength and a confidence and a potency that will endure and I think when you have something that you know has the ability to be a unique sort of visual thing that then can become a an iconic kind of look and feel, then then you have an artist who has longevity to look forward to, and I believe that's the case with her work for sure.

Jeppe Curth: 29:56

So why should everyone consider adding a Catherine Bradford painting to their collection? Well, it's not a Picasso, right? Picasso, everybody knows Picasso, but. But kathleen batford is maybe not that known? No, but it's um, for for us, with our eyes, with the knowledge we have with our into the market, what we believe in, we think it's a really good thing to have. Why is that?

Nicholas Robinson: 30:24

well if, for the reasons that I've described, I mean, they're, they're just, they're really good paintings, they're easy to live with, they're easy to see these qualities that I've described, they have a strong sort of place. You can visit any prominent art fair. You'll see numerous examples of her paintings. She is, you know, extremely well established and yet her work is enormously less expensive than her. You know more than her peers that have had a longer career than she has had. So I suppose you could say she's a, she's a really mature artist with, you know, a long history of developing her craft and her skills, and yet her prices are more related to a younger artist.

Nicholas Robinson: 31:19

So you might say you get, like, a lot of painting heritage for the money that you have to spend to get one, which I think is, you know, it's good. I mean, everybody likes to feel like things are good value rather than overpriced, obviously, um, so I think that's sort of part of it. But by the same token, the works are not sort of $12,000. They're not cheap pictures. She is a very well-known artist. She is an artist whose career is, you know, been in the ascendancy for some time. So my feeling is that that's just something that will. I feel that will continue.

Jeppe Curth: 31:57

Sounds good. Maybe this is a little bit recap in it, but for someone new to the bread for work and now want to explore her art, maybe want to buy some work of hers um, what should they do?

Nicholas Robinson: 32:13

well, um, there's quite a few places where one can see works by her. I mean, there's many exhibitions that she's had. You can just obviously refer to the gallery websites that I mentioned. Canada has really good exhibition history with her going back around 10 years now, so there's always a few shows that you can look at. There. You can see the installation images, you can see the examples. Their website is really well laid out in that there's really interesting biographical information. Each show, of course, has a press release which describes the thematic nature of that particular show and also, what's really good is is the. The exhibition pages on canada's website have links to all of the press that each of her exhibitions has received and there's some really nice reviews that speak of these kinds of themes.

Nicholas Robinson: 33:12

Um, critically that I have described Um, so that's that's the first um resource. I would recommend Um and I think that the um, uh, emanuela Campoli's website is really good also Um, and then and then just you know, googling her name, you'll see. Actually, one thing that's really nice is to look at um, is to look at YouTube. There's she's been, she's. She's really a quite a generous interviewee and there's many instances of people being with her in her studio you can sort of get a little taste of what her practice is like, the way she conceives of herself and her work and her life as an artist, and she talks very openly not only about her struggle and her journey and her looking for a way into this world, but also her process, her methodology, the way she makes paintings, and it's really you really can see and feel how she works thanks, nick.

Jeppe Curth: 34:14

Um, I think we covered the most of katherine breadford. Do you have anything to add?

Nicholas Robinson: 34:18

no, I I don't. I think that that we've we've described, we've described her work, we've described her career path to the kind of status that she enjoys now. We've talked about what to look out for. We've talked about her place in the market. Um, she's a really really a really great artist, um, who, who really has a lot of fun with making paintings, who obviously really enjoys and appreciates where she's at as an artist. You know, she's had this sort of circuitous, maybe slightly torturous, route to get there and now you can feel that there's this sort of celebratory quality in her work, happy in her own skin, confident in her ability, in her achievement. And you know, look at the paintings with all of these things in mind and you can feel this.

Jeppe Curth: 35:08

Thank you, nick, for once again giving us some deep insights. Thank you, eva. Thank you, nick, for once again giving us some deep insights. Thank you, so if you have or you want to know more about uh katherine battery, if you have any request or you, you can contact us at info at nordic art partnerscom and we will do whatever we can to help you. Thank you for listening to us and I hope to have you. Thank you for listening to us and I hope to have you back.