APPRAISER: In Louisville at 2007 it was incredible when one of our guests came in with a
collection of maquettes, original paintings and posters, all designed by an
American designer named Bern Hill. He designed these posters to be the covers
of magazines but his name had never gotten out there and he was literally
unknown to collectors. And in this collection you have some original
artwork and you have some of the actual posters. One of the artworks you've
brought by Bern Hill is this piece that we have on the ground hand-signed by him
as some of the others are. And we also have here the poster that was created
after the artwork. And I know you're fairly familiar with the value of these
posters through your work on the Internet, so the values of these posters
you think are? GUEST: Anywhere from between 1,200 to 2,200 dollars each. APPRAISER: I'm gonna go with the
upper end of what you think to be the estimate and estimate them at $2,000
apiece and I just want to go through some of the images because they are so
unique, I've never seen any of them before. I think it's something exciting
for other people to look at such as the modernist design the, shadow of the
bridge in this case. Here we have a very European-style
low vantage point with a big wheel of one train in the foreground and the
engine. They keep going and going and going. Here are some beautiful pastel
images of the southwest for the Santa Fe railroad, truly an exceptional collection
of posters. As far as the value on the original artwork goes and we have here
two other poster studies .And we have here what we call locomotive portraits
along the top. Maquettes in the artists own hand
the originals tend to sell for less money than the actual poster. GUEST: That's pretty
amazing. APPRAISER: That's the bad news. GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Here's the good news. GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: The good news is that these images actually transcend the
poster market. From the 1950s, most of them in my estimation the original
studies for the posters themselves are worth at auction 3,000 to 4,000 dollars
apiece. GUEST: Oh wow! APPRAISER: And the little train profiles of little
train portraits are worth between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars
apiece. GUEST: Okay, that's good. APPRAISER: And with the 12 posters with
the valuable of $24,000. What's the most you paid for one of the original pieces? GUEST:
$500 for the one in the front. I paid $1 apiece for the posters. APPRAISER: A dollar a piece is
a good, you know, if you're buying them for a dollar and selling it for two
thousand dollars you're doing alright. GUEST: I thinkI'll be fine.
APPRAISER: And these designs were so extraordinary it was one of those, "I can't believe I
don't know that these exist," moments. And I was so excited to see them and they
were great, it was a wonderful segment. And then that guest actually became a
client and we offered some of the posters for sale. They did incredibly
well, selling for thousands of dollars, which was, they deserve to be sold at
that price. And this is like a strange phenomena of the auction world or what
happened was after we put these posters in the auction and after they sold for
several thousand dollars each, our clients who get our catalogs all the
time basically must have had their own "aha" moment of their own "Eureka" moment.
And all of a sudden I started getting calls from people like, "well we have
posters by him we just never knew they were valuable." So what it took was that
sort of initial impetus to get them into an auction and more and more kept coming
out of the woodworks. Since then we've been selling them regularly.
I believe he designed a total of 56 posters and some of them sell for as
much as three or four thousand dollars now. They're extraordinary and they
really came to market only because of that appraisal in 2007 in Louisville.
Since 2007 the price of the posters has almost doubled at auction with the best
examples of his work regularly fetching between 3,000 and 4,000 dollars a piece.
And while none of the maquettes, none of the original artwork has come up for sale I
have to imagine that if it were the paintings on which some of his best
posters were based the prices would be substantially higher maybe four to six
thousand five to seven thousand or more. Having Bern Hill's pieces walk into the
show in 2007 really opened up a door of a previously unknown American graphic
talent. His work was out there it had never been brought to the public's
attention and it's kind of an honor to be at the forefront of that.