The art market is not just about Klimt and Picasso. While some collecting categories are thriving, others are sleeping—or at least sleepy. Fine works are out there, not yet swollen by hedge fund money or celebrity endorsements. But tread carefully—The marketplace is complex, imperfect and quirky, neither completely rational nor susceptible to normal cause and effect. In this follow-up to “Sleeping Giants, Part I” (June 2005), Art & Antiques surveyed top market watchers to disclose select categories that currently may be underappreciated and therefore perhaps undervalued.

JAPANESE PRINTS
Specialists in the arts of Asia say that despite blazing prices for ceramics, bargains can be found in Japanese prints, those early works that helped put the “modern” in “modern Western art” (think Japonism). Katsura Yamaguchi, head of Christie’s Japanese Art department in New York, cites ukiyo-e prints (translated roughly as “pictures of the floating world”) as a category worth watching. These polychrome woodblock prints date from the Edo period (1603–1867), when the shoguns ruled and Japan was both isolated and at peace. The prints were mass-produced and immensely popular. Typical subjects are Kabuki actors, teahouses, geishas and courtesans, sumo wrestlers and land- and seascapes.

“Japanese prints across the board are undervalued in terms of their art historical significance and the expertise and craft that went into them,” says Los Angeles dealer Veronica Miller of Egenolf Gallery. “Meiji prints are the most undervalued by the market in general.” Her tip: “Hundred Famous Views of the Moon” prints by Yoshitoshi (1839–92) can be found for less than $1,000.

Sebastian Izzard, who has monitored the market for more than two decades as an auction house specialist, appraiser and dealer, thinks the soft print market reflects Japan’s weak economy over the past decade, as well as changes in Japanese taste, which right now is “more Western in feel and enamored of the decorative, more modern prints of the late 19th and 20th centuries.” He reports that the “classic six” of Japanese print-making—Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hiroshige and Hokusai (creator of the iconic 1831 “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”)—are all well under the money they brought 15 years ago. Izzard recently reappraised a collection of classical Japanese prints that he had originally appraised in 1991 and found that the same group was worth 40 percent of its prior value. In 1989 a Sharaku print sold at auction for $460,000, a price since unmatched. “One would be hard-pressed to find prices anywhere near that today,” Izzard says. “The sorts of prints found in textbooks, the great names of Japanese print-making like Hiroshige and Hokusai, are not expensive at the moment.”

AMERICAN SCULPTURE
It may be time to take a look at American sculpture, long in the shadow of American paintings. Alice Duncan, director of Gerald Peters Gallery in New York, thinks sculpture in general is always undervalued against paintings because of technical issues (like patina and casting dates) and some people’s qualms about art produced in multiples. “Learn to rely on your response to a work. Then look at the piece negatively, as a dealer does. It has to prove itself,” she says. “Whatever isn’t current taste tends to be undervalued, so trust the work you respond to.” Duncan mentions Anna Hyatt Huntington; Charles Grafly, a Philadelphia sculptor who studied and then taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and whose students ranged from the very famous Paul Manship to the little-known Albin Polasek (a 1910 Prix de Rome winner whom Duncan also cites); and Isadore Konti, in whose New York studio Manship once was a studio assistant. Works by Huntington sell for $8,000 to $50,000, Grafly for $15,000 to $80,000, Kontis for $8,000 to $30,000 and Manship for $40,000 to more than $1 million.

Joel Rosenkranz of Conner Rosenkranz in New York points to a group of 19th- century American sculptors who studied in Italy and produced large and small classical marble figures, often depicting women: Hiram Powers, Chauncey Ives, Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis, an artist of black and American Indian heritage known for works expressing Abolitionist ideas. And he notes that the years book-ended by 1893 (the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago) and 1939 (the New York World’s Fair) saw an explosion in figurative American sculpture of high quality. “Sculptors like John Gregory and Bessie Potter Vonnoh were producing small classical bronzes of great refinement and beauty while, at the same time, modernist impulses from Europe energized a new American aesthetic” that led to the more abstracted figures of Elie Nadelman. Rosenkranz notes that more young scholars are entering this field and more catalogs and books are coming out—including one on Harriet Frishmuth by his partner Janis Conner and others (Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth. A Catalogue of Works, available through Christie’s).