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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Dec. 7, 1961
Sweet is revenge—especially to women.—Lord Byron
Ostreicher Gets Strange Art Call
By Frederick M. Winship United Press International
NEW YORK-Edward Oestreicher, one of the nation's leading purveyors of art reproductions can remember when Maxfield Parrish's "The Dickie Bird" was the hottest print in America.
"We've come a long way since then," said Oestreicher, 57, whose grandfather founded the family firm in 1898. "People aren't buying pretty girls swinging through blue, blue skies any more.
"They've been buying the French impressionists and post-impressionists—Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Bonnard, Van Gogh—and now modernists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Braque and Picasso are popular. It's very fashionable to have in the house—modern but not too abstract.
response to Salvador Dali's surrealistic "Christ of St. John of the Cross."
Oestreicher and his son, Lloyd,
keep 300,000 different pictures in
their inventory which fills three
floors of a building just off Fifth
Avenue. They get orders from all
over the world, many on the re-
mcommendation of museums. Oestreicher
goes to Europe every two years and
"buys like a drunken sailor."
"WE GET COPIES of every picture that is reproduced in the Western World, purchased directly from the publishers," he said. "About 70 per cent of the total output comes from Europe, about 30 per cent from the United States. Our prices range from about $2 to a top of $400 for signed limited editions of original lithographs."
Collectors of original lithographs are a sort of bridge between people who are satisfied with reproductions and buyers of oil paintings. Oestreicher is convinced that a reproduction of a good painting is preferable to an inexpensive oil, most of which are the products of the nation's many thousands of dilettante painters.
OESTREICHER EMPLOYS two girls who do nothing but answer request letters. Hospitals ask for appropriate prints (peaceful landscapes and still lifes), antique collectors want period pictures (reproductions of American primitive painting are booming), and new schools request wall decoration (old masters and historical subjects).
"There are so many people with little training or experience painting today who have nothing to recommend them as artists except a little color sense," said Oostreicher sadly. "They are getting away with murder and calling it abstract art."
Oestreicher's has provided pictures for everything from Levitown houses to skyscraper office buildings. Sometimes the only guidance given by a mail-order customer is a swatch of drapery or upholstery material and a description of the wall color with which the reproduction should harmonize.
"We get some very quaint requests like the one from a man who wanted to make up a clever birth announcement," Oestreicher said. "He wrote us for a picture of a pregnant woman. We sent him a masterpiece—Vermeer's 'Girl Reading a Letter.'"
RECENTLY OESTREICHER obtained the first reproduction of Marcel Duchamps' "Nude Descending the Staircase" and sold 150 copies within a month. This is the Cubist painting that was derided by the public when it was shown at the New York Armory Show in 1913, about the time Parrish's pretty glimpses of never-never land were popular.
"So one can see how the public taste changes," observed Oestreicher. "Even in religious art. Heinrich Hofmann's realistic 'Christ in Gethsemane' was the favorite for many years. Now we are getting a great
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