Ovadia Salama is a former Harvard University Professor in the Graduate School of Design Departments of
Architecture and of Landscape Architecture.
Dr. Salama and Professor Alexander Tzonis, now Professor of Architecture at the Technical University of Delft
(Netherlands), were among the teachers at Harvard, of Fuller Potter's son, Daniel, an Architect and a diverse
and accomplished artist on his own right.
A thirty year long friendship among them followed, with several trips to the Potter family homes in Connecticut
and multiple opportunities to interact with Fuller Potter and with all his family members over the years.
Our location:
Our specialty is to conduct on behalf of our customers, searches aimed at locating works from passed artists.
We assist in negotiations and in facilitating out-of-auction direct sales, to the benefit of all parties.
We are located in Midtown New York City, just opposite the United Nations Headquarters building, at the
following address:
Ovadia Salama
45 Tudor City Place, Suite 1921
New York, NY 10017, USA
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Fuller Potter is one of the rare profound and totally sincere (i.e. non-commercially motivated) abstract painters of
the Jackson Pollock times, who has not been "discovered" and abundantly commercialized.
It is well known that a large number of people possess one or more of Fuller's paintings. Very few, however, are
willing to part from any item. There is now a shortage of these works on the market, compared to a growing
demand. Indeed, owners simply enjoy Fuller paintings more every day, and they know that whatever high price
they may get for them today, it will probably be higher in a year or two, as an increasing number of savvy art
collectors and investors come across his works.
Fuller's market profile is due to the fact that, through his wealthy wife Alice, he was financially independent, and
didn't need to live from his work. He effectively sheltered himself from distracting commercialism, and
succeeded in avoiding ever becoming the prey of what he considered as "infuriating and demeaning gallery
constraints and market manipulations".
In our market-driven and ego-driven Art Scene, Fuller's circumstances have created a rare paradox, unseen
perhaps since the time of Toulouse-Lautrec, who also enjoyed financial independence, and who also was a
discrete, low profile, yet highly creative professional artist, and not a dilettante.
Fuller's paradox lies in that artistically, he ranks among the great masters, on the ground of his works incredibly
high quality and depth. On the other hand, in the eyes of art gallery managers and in those of art marketing
specialists, Fuller ranks low in comparison with today's crowds of often shallow, but aggressively self-marketing art
pros.
This situation is quickly changing though, because of the recent Connecticut big-bang style dissemination of his
works. These works are no longer stacked in vaults or in sheds, but they are in the hands of a multitude of
middle-class, educated, cultivated, well-networked, Internet-navigating, discriminating art connoisseurs and
academics.
The word about Fuller is that it may still be possible, but not for long, to afford a masterpiece by this modern artist,
to keep it and to enjoy it, and maybe to sell it, at a much later day.
This word is spreading around. Fewer pieces are on the market, and prices go up. An art dealer was writing
about Fuller Potter's paintings, as recently as October 2004: "I was amazed that the prices of (his) paintings
increased in less than five years from $10 to $100 to $1000, and now $10,000...".
This trend is clearly established, and we are still far away from the spiraling prices, observed along with the quick
turnover of Post War art, associated with the more advertised and familiar names of Fuller Potter's
contemporaries.
In relative terms, for Fuller Potter paintings, prices have a long way to go up, and the sky still seems to be the limit.