A gallery took 50 percent of 9,600 and I signed it without reading the storage clause
Sold a 190 x 150 canvas in June. Nine thousand six hundred euro, which is a good price for me, and I was pleased for about four days.
Then the invoice came. Fifty percent to the gallery, which I knew, that is not the surprise, that is just how it is. But there was also a line for framing, 340, and a line for transport to the fair in Basel, 480, and a line for the catalogue photograph, 120. Nobody mentioned those on the phone.
So the maths: 9,600 becomes 4,800, becomes roughly 3,860. Then the pigments and the wax and the linen for a canvas that size, call it 900. Eleven weeks of work, but not eleven weeks of only that work, so I cannot honestly divide it. Somewhere between 14 and 20 euro an hour, depending on how generous I am to myself about the hours.
What actually keeps me up is not the number. It is that I signed the contract in March in about ninety seconds, standing up, because I was flattered to be asked. There is a clause about storage: if the work does not sell within eighteen months the gallery may store it and charge me 25 euro a month. I found this out last week. From a friend, not from them.
I am not going to name the gallery. They sell work, they are serious, I would sign again. But I am reading the paper now with a pencil, and I have started writing my own exclusions into the consignment sheet, which so far has made one gallerist in Düsseldorf sigh audibly at me.
Curious whether anyone here has actually won one of those clauses back, or whether we all just sign and find out later.
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The commission itself is rarely the thing that hurts. It's the deductions that arrive after the fact, framed as though they were always understood. Framing, transport, catalogue photography, none of that is unreasonable in itself, but it should have been on the table before you agreed the price, not revealed when the invoice landed. Fifty percent is already a steep share of your work.
On the framing line specifically: 340 suggests they chose the frame rather than you, which is worth clarifying for next time. If a gallery specifies presentation, the cost of that presentation is arguably theirs to carry, or at least to agree with you in writing first.
The storage clause you mention but don't quote is the part I would look at hardest. Those clauses tend to hold your work indefinitely at your risk, and sometimes at your cost, with no obligation to sell it. Read it before the next one, and get the incidental costs named in the consignment agreement. You did the work properly. That deserves to be the thing that is protected.
The framing line is where I would push back too, but I would not go as far as "arguably theirs." In my experience the gallery usually does own the frame, and then keeps it, or reuses it on another wall. If they paid for it they would care how it looked. If I paid for it, I want the frame back when the painting sells, or at least the right to say no to it.
340 for a canvas that size is not even outrageous. It is the not being asked that costs.
You are right, and I was sloppy with "arguably theirs." The frame is theirs once they pay for it, that is the logic of it. What I actually object to is that I was never given the chance to say I would rather have paid for it myself and kept it. A frame on a 190 x 150 is not nothing, and when the canvas comes back off the wall in five years for a different show, it will come back naked while their frame hangs somewhere else. That is the part that stings, not the 340.
So the rule I am keeping from now on: anything they spend on my behalf, I want named in writing before it is spent. Not to fight about it. Just so I can decide. It is the deciding I am missing.
Ja, the frame. That is the part that sits wrong with me too. I never saw it. They chose it, hung the show, and billed me for the taste. If the gallery wants a certain presentation for their wall, fine, but then it is their wall and their frame. I will not sign that line again without asking first whose decision it is.
The transport to Basel I half accept, a fair is a fair, it costs what it costs. But 480 appeared only on the invoice, and a number you cannot see in advance is not a cost, it is a surprise. That is the difference.
Fifty percent I made peace with years ago. The deductions after the fact, those I did not.