E-mail this page to a friend

Heritage Auctions Magazine Presents: The Intelligent Collector — To Sell or Not to Sell

by Noah Fleisher

How long should you hold on to your beloved collection? Two collectors help illustrate two different outcomes.

Collectors are a special breed. For the most part we are passionately committed to whatever it is we pursue and little can stop us, minus the one thing most of us don't want to think about: death.

Without being an ascetic sitting in a high cave somewhere in the Himalayas pondering the deeper meanings of life and death, most of us will avoid the subject of our own mortality if given the choice. For the collector, however — and especially the high-value collector — it is a question that may be best dealt with, or at least considered, when still of relative sound mind and decent health.

In the last several months, Heritage Auction Galleries has seen a variety of examples to which this lesson can be applied. For the sake of this column, however, let's just take two: the Chicorel Collection of Golden Age Comic Books, and the Charles Martignette Collection of Illustration Art. These are two wildly different collections from two very different collectors, with valuable lessons in both.

Ralph Chicorel decided to sell his collection, including the first issue of Batman, while he could still personally manage the proceeds. His books realized more than $600,000.

As a young boy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ralph Chicorel lovingly collected the best comic titles of the day. He read them and put them away and, in his teens, moved on to other collecting pursuits. He did, however, keep his comic book collection in good shape, hidden away as the decades rolled on.

After selling half of his collection to finance a family move in the early 1970s, Ralph, now in his late 70s, willfully forgot about the other half. He became a successful businessman, a beloved father and the patriarch of an adoring family. Then, in 2009, he "re-discovered" the other half of his amazing collection and decided to auction it off. His gorgeous, mostly pristine books brought more than $600,000. He was at the auction with two of his sons, and his joy was palpable. The sale was a bonus to Ralph, the icing on the cake of a life well lived.

Charles Martignette was a collector of infinite passion with an incredible eye for what he loved. He devoted his life singularly to the pursuit and preservation of American illustration art, and amassed what is arguably the finest collection of it ever assembled. It's not out of line to say that he not only saved some of the greatest art — and artists — of the last 120 years from the ignominy of history's dustbin, he also helped create the collecting subset of Illustration Art.

Charles died relatively young, at the age of 57. He was not married, had no close relatives, and was a fairly controversial figure due in part to the unorthodox ways in which he pursued the paintings he loved. When he died, his paintings carried a conservative value in the low eightfigure range. As the collection is sold over the next few years, it's a good bet the overall value realized will be more than the estimate.

These two men represent opposite sides of how your collection can end up in other people's hands, but the lesson is not hard to glean.

Ralph Chicorel not only was ready and willing to part with his comic books, he also understood their value, and understood the good sense it made to liquidate them. Having such a valuable collection is a relatively heavy burden when it comes to considering one's own mortality, and Ralph made the choice to simplify things for his family and himself. Both of his sons with him in Dallas on the day of the auction, though nostalgic about their father's comic books and appreciative of their historic and monetary value, supported his decision to sell. It makes things easier in the future, avoids unforeseen complications and takes the pressure off his progeny to carry the collection in the family indefinitely. The decision to auction was the right one for him, and a lucrative one at that.

Charles Martignette never sold his collection. Those who knew him would tell you he never considered it. He lived his art exclusively. He was generous with his collection, loaning work to museums all over the nation and writing extensively, but the ultimate monetary value of his collection didn't play into his considerations. As a result, when he died prematurely, he left a huge estate with no clear line of inheritance, no legal documents regarding its disbursement or sale, and no close family to oversee the process. It all ultimately worked out, but it took much wrangling, more than a few lawyers and — it's safe to say — a ton of headaches for many people.

It's easy to praise Ralph Chicorel's action, or to question Charles Martignette's inaction. The point of this column, though, is not to pass judgment. It's simply to illustrate — whether you have a single coin or a multimillion dollar collection of fine art — the way things can unfold and the ways in which you can, or cannot, be prepared for it.

How a collection arrives at the doors of an auction house is not the issue. A good auction house aims to realize the highest prices no matter who gets the proceeds.

On a personal level, however — as a collector, columnist, husband, father and employee — I want to make sure that you, at least, consider your options before time gets the better of you.

Noah Fleisher is author of Warman's Price Guide to Modern Furniture and Accessories. He has written for New England Antiques Journal, Northeast Journal of Antiques and Art, Antique Trader, Style Century Magazine and Disney's Wondertime Magazine, among others.

Heritage Auctions Magazine Summer/Fall 2009 Copyright ©2009 by Heritage Auctions, Inc.

E-mail this page to a friend

Back to Heritage Magazine Articles Archive Page