What I’ve Learned: Richard Lloyd

Name: Richard Lloyd

Job title: International Head of Prints & Multiples

Location: New York

Years at Christie’s: 30

Key areas of expertise: Prints and multiples

My auction career began in 1989 as a picture porter at a small auction house in London. I had studied politics at university and fully intended to become a journalist, so I assumed the job would be temporary. Then, out of the blue, I was offered a position in the Prints department, and it changed the course of my life. Overnight I was handling works that stretched across five centuries of Western art. I found this extraordinary. I still do. It was my first lesson, and one I have never forgotten: the most significant moments in a career are often the ones you haven’t planned. After nearly a decade there, I was invited to run the Prints and Multiples department at Christie’s in London. I became International Head in 2007 and moved to New York in 2012.

Prints are often described as a gateway into collecting, and in terms of price that is perfectly true. But a gateway is something you pass through, and I have never seen prints that way. They are a destination in their own right: an art form embraced by many of the greatest artists who ever lived, with enough depth to reward a lifetime of study and exploration.

Printmaking has its own language and its own history, and it offers possibilities that artists have been exploring for centuries. Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Warhol, Hockney and Mehretu, amongst so many others, have all discovered in printmaking ways of thinking and working they found nowhere else. I have come to believe that you cannot fully understand many of these artists without looking at their prints. Jasper Johns has spent decades working in print studios. If you are interested in Johns the artist, and not only Johns the painter, it is worth finding out what he has been doing there, and why he considers it such an important part of his practice.

There are many different threads to follow as you immerse yourself in the field. You might pursue a particular technique, an artist or a period, or simply follow your eye. And once you start looking closely, you discover that, in many cases, each impression of a print is subtly different. The inking, the paper, the workshop and the state of preservation all leave their mark. Learning to appreciate those variations is the essence of connoisseurship. It is a skill I am still refining after more than 35 years, but you can begin the first time you see two impressions side by side.

One of the unsung advantages of collecting prints is that if you fall in love with a particular Gauguin woodcut, say at an exhibition, you can realistically set out to find an impression of your own. It may take years, but another example is often out there somewhere, and there is something rather wonderful about that. Fall in love with a Cézanne watercolour, however, and the best you can hope for is something similar.

Much of what I know, both in terms of technical expertise and simply ways of looking at an object, was passed on to me by the specialists who took me under their wing when I started. Now, when I’m in our warehouse with younger colleagues and talk through what we are seeing, I am aware that it is my turn to pass on what I know. But it has never been a one-way street, and I learn a great deal from them too. A fresh pair of eyes can reveal something previously unseen in a work I thought I knew well. That continuing conversation is one of the things I value most.

Perhaps the biggest change I’ve witnessed during my career is who the buyers are. When I started, prints were largely bought by print collectors, who identified as such. Whilst dedicated print collectors certainly still exist, prints are increasingly bought by people who think of themselves simply as art collectors. A few years ago, I gave a lecture to a roomful of people, mostly in their late twenties and early thirties. I asked how many considered themselves to be print collectors, and not a single hand went up. Then I asked how many had bought a work of art in an edition in the previous couple of years, and virtually every hand went up. That show of hands told me a great deal: the line between multiples and unique works matters far less to a new generation of collectors than it once did.

People sometimes think of an auction house as a kind of museum, and in one sense it is: both revolve around objects of great beauty and cultural significance. The difference is that in an auction house, every object has a person – often several people – attached to it. We never deal with works in isolation, and it is the relationship between people and objects that makes what we do both fascinating and challenging. One season you might discuss a Matisse inherited by five siblings; the next, a similar work might arrive with a collector whose tastes are changing. The works may be alike, but the conversations could not be more different. The longer I do this, the more I realise that knowledge of the objects alone is not enough. I am also required to understand what motivates the people who come to us and how we can best serve their needs. Buyers, sellers, objects and the market are all in motion at once, and our job is to bring them together.

I am an auctioneer, and this gives me a very privileged perspective. Bringing down the hammer is the moment when an object leaves one owner and begins its life with another. Sometimes we have known clients for many years, long enough for them to become friends, and selling on their behalf can feel like the last line of a story we have shared for decades. It is also, of course, the first line of the next one. I never felt this more keenly than when I took the closing session of the third and final sale of Rembrandt prints from the collection of Sam Josefowitz, the greatest in private hands. We had worked with Sam and his family for 40 years, and knocking down the very last lot was bittersweet. We spend our working lives putting a monetary value on objects, but I have come to appreciate that the friendships we make along the way have a significant value all their own.

Ultimately, what still delights me about this profession is the combination of familiarity and surprise. Experience means that I have a good idea of what Monday will bring, but never precisely. There is always a new element, or an unfamiliar set of circumstances, to keep me on my toes. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. That feels especially true of life in an auction house. The patterns are familiar, but no two objects, collectors or situations are ever quite the same. That is why, after all these years, I’m still learning.