Michael Craig-Martin valuation
Said a glass of water was an oak tree, then drew everyday objects in flat line and hot colour.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, raised largely in the United States and trained at Yale, and settled in Britain in 1966.
What a work by Michael Craig-Martin is worth
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Bio
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, raised largely in the United States and trained at Yale, and settled in Britain in 1966. An Oak Tree of 1973 — a glass of water on a glass shelf, accompanied by a text in which the artist states that it is an oak tree — is the conceptual work he is best known for. Alongside it runs the practice that fills the walls: ordinary manufactured objects, a lightbulb, a safety pin, a pair of spectacles, a filing cabinet, drawn in flat unmodulated line and set against saturated colour. He taught at Goldsmiths through the 1980s, where his students included Damien Hirst, and was knighted in 2016.
The graphic clarity of the work makes condition unusually visible: the colour fields are flat acrylic or vinyl and every knock, retouch and edge repair shows. A great deal of the market is editioned — screenprints, and wall works and installations issued with instructions rather than as objects — and it is worth being precise about which of these is being offered, because a work that consists of a certificate and a set of instructions is bought and sold in a different way from a canvas. Signature, edition and the studio's documentation are the reference.
An Oak Tree, and what an instruction work is
Craig-Martin's best-known work, An Oak Tree of 1973, is a glass of water on a glass shelf beside a printed text in which the artist explains that he has turned the water into an oak tree. Damien Hirst, who was taught by Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, later called it the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture, and it made the idea of a work as an object plus a statement familiar in British art.
That idea runs through the market for his later work. Wall drawings and some painted works are sold as a certificate with installation instructions, to be realised on a wall by someone else, and the certificate is the work: without it there is nothing to sell. Screenprints are more conventional editions, signed and numbered, and should be checked against the studio's records.
Bogotá, the Yale colour course and the Chatsworth steels
Craig-Martin grew up mainly in Washington, D.C., where Rothko's paintings at the Phillips Collection made a strong impression on him, and spent a period at the Lycée Français in Bogotá, where his father was working, taking drawing classes with the artist Antonio Roda. After Fordham and a spell at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1961, he took the painting course at Yale, still shaped by Josef Albers's teaching on colour, with Alex Katz and Al Held among the tutors; everything he knows about colour, he has said, came from that course.
His box-like constructions of the late 1960s gave way to ordinary household objects, and from the late 1970s to the line drawings whose vocabulary he has used ever since, before he moved decisively into painting in the 1990s. The National Gallery of Australia bought An Oak Tree in 1977, and Tate has an artist's copy; Australian customs once stopped it at the border as vegetation until he explained it was a glass of water. At Goldsmiths he helped bring the Freeze show to the notice of established figures in the art world. Since 2011 he has made powder-coated steel outlines of everyday objects, first shown in the gardens at Chatsworth in 2014, and his book On Being an Artist came out in 2015.
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