Monthly Masters

Now that many Americans feel flush with booming stock market profits and dot-com riches, an urge to flaunt symbols of personal wealth not seen since the ostentatious ‘80s seems to be returning. But as people who drive showy cars they can’t afford know, if you can’t pay for a status symbol, you can always lease it. The effect is the same.

New York art dealer and gallery owner Ian Peck understands that need to impress. He recently launched Fineartlease.com, a Web site that gives individuals and corporations a way to hang big-ticket artwork on their walls, for monthly fees that are a fraction of the purchase prices.

The site, at https://www.fineartlease.com, offers art that costs from $500 to $15 million for a major Impressionist work (think Monet, Pissarro, Seurat) and averages $50,000. Annual leases usually total about 15% of a painting’s value. A $100,000 painting, for instance, would be leased for $1,250 a month.

The payment includes insurance. Peck contracted with Lloyd’s of London to insure all the artwork he brokers.

Not everyone clicking onto the site is trying to acquire some class on the installment plan.

“The Internet is bringing new people to art and allowing them to become more educated and informed,” Peck said. “We recently sold an American 19th century painting to a couple in Indiana, for $65,000. They’d seen an ad we’d been running in the New Yorker. That says to me that there are a lot of people out there who don’t have easy access to the art world, but they’re interested in living with art.”

Susanna Jacobus, a 34-year-old investment banker, recently leased a modern British oil painting from Peck. She thinks she wants to own the $9,500 painting but isn’t sure.

“If I wind up getting sick of it after a couple of years, I can turn it in for something else,” she said. “The idea that I can give it back makes me really comfortable, and it has fundamentally changed the way I look at art I might want to own. It has opened a whole new world.”

Most of the pieces Peck offers can be leased, with an option to buy, or purchased outright. The exception is works that belong to museums.

“Museums only hang less than 10% of their collections, and the rest sit in their basements,” he said. “They’re prohibited from selling pieces because of legal constraints, and the political problems of deaccessioning artwork from museums are also complicated. So by finding people who want to lease, we’re giving museums a way to get some revenue.”

(Locally, the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the L.A. County Museum of Art features works by emerging Southern California artists who aren’t represented by commercial galleries. Rental charges range from $25 to $135 for two months for works worth between $300 and $6000. Anyone can visit the Gallery, in the museum’s basement, but only museum members may rent the art.)

Peck calls himself landlord of a virtual gallery. With a staff of six curators, he scours the world for great, available art, tapping museums, galleries and private collections.

“The Internet lets us have a living catalog that we can update easily,” he said. “We put artwork on and take it off on a daily basis. Ultimately, we expect to have 40,000 to 50,000 works of art on the site.”

Art lovers can search the Web site by genre, period or size, cruising past landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, Pop and abstract paintings, among others.

“It’s about freedom and flexibility, really,” Peck said. “One month you can have a French Impressionist, the next month you can have an Old Master.”

Fineartlease.com won’t send valuable art out to just anyone. It has a rigorous credit review process, conducted, naturally, online.