Prices Going Up

The market for modern art is booming as never before. Some startling particulars of the boom were ticked off this week by Collector-Critic James Thrall Soby, writing in the Saturday Review: "If the prices for Matisse, Picasso, Rouault and Bonnard have tripled or quadrupled since the war, those of some of their less overwhelming colleagues have soared in far greater proportion ... A Kandinsky costing less than $1,000 in 1930 would now fetch about $8,000; a Mondrian actually bought by an American museum 20 years ago for $400 would be almost $10,000 today . . . Paul Klees, which used to be less than $500, are now ten times that price and going up steadily."

Soby himself is bullish, with reservations : "Certainly some of the famous artists of the past 75 years may one day slide abruptly down the banister of the staircase their market has ascended by stages; some will make the climb again; others will slump forever at the bottom of the flight. It seems to me, however, that the big figures in 20th-century art will hold their lofty place or go still higher."

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