Rembrandts help refine the art of the sale

Robert Hoehn might be the only automobile dealer ever to employ valuable prints by the great artist Rembrandt van Rijn as props to motivate his sales staff.

That's right, and we're not talking about just Rembrandt reproductions here but prints made during the great artist's lifetime (1606-69).

Hoehn (rhymes with Owen) is a 21st century American car dealer who became obsessed with collecting prints made by a 17th century Dutch master who conjured dark, magical images using copper plates, acid, an etching tool and a press.

Hoehn, 63, co-owner of a Carlsbad, Calif., dealership group with 10 franchises (see box, Page 20), has shared the masterpieces he owns with his staff and with the University of San Diego in the form of two galleries he and his wife, Karen, have endowed.

Robert Hoehn keeps the light- and temperature-sensitive prints at his home except when they're on loan to art museums around the world. The valuable framed prints don't leave his home without a good reason.

This spring, Hoehn completed his core collection of about 20 Rembrandt prints from the 1650s portraying gospel subjects. After three years searching, he finally found the missing piece of the puzzle -- an elusive copy of the artist's 1651 "The Flight Into Egypt" -- through an art dealer in Duesseldorf, Germany.

Hoehn "has to be thought of among the top collectors in the world when it comes to Rembrandt prints," says Derrick Cartwright, director of USD's University Galleries, which the Hoehns have endowed and where his print collections have been exhibited. "He's been so disciplined and interested in quality, not quantity."

Hoehn decided to bring the prints to his Honda and Jaguar-Land Rover dealerships because he thought he could use them to teach staffers a lesson in building value in the minds of consumers, even if they weren't art connoisseurs.

Rembrandt is known today primarily for his paintings, but his fame during his lifetime rested at least equally on his etchings, regarded as groundbreaking at the time.

Hoehn says: "Rembrandt prints are a notoriously difficult area of collecting because a lot of Rembrandt's copper plates survived his death, so people would keep printing from them."

Because copper is soft, the number of best-quality prints made from a single plate is finite, which accounts for the huge discrepancies in quality and value of the prints available. That means a print done 100 years after Rembrandt's death could sell for several thousand dollars while one made by the artist during his lifetime could fetch well into six figures, Hoehn says. When Hoehn brought a Rembrandt print to dealer sales meetings, he would commence the discussion by showing the print without naming the artist or offering any other comment.

"We would start talking about the print. I'd ask everyone to come up with a figure they thought it was worth," Hoehn says.

The staff members became "surprisingly engaged" in the exercise, he says.

Some staffers reasoned that because prints are made from a plate and can therefore be reproduced more than once, the print in question might be worth just a few hundred dollars. They were in for a surprise. Slowly, Hoehn would introduce more information.

"I would try to increase their perception of value each step along the way," he says. "You build value by selling the product."

Each detail Hoehn added further illustrated the value of the print.

Hoehn would talk about the artist's painstakingly elaborate technique. Rembrandt created his etchings by covering his copper plates with a soft, waxy, acid-resistant material before etching his designs with a needle called a burin. He then removed the soft material and dipped the plate in a dilute hydrochloric acid mixture to create the design. After that, he would roll the plate with ink and then wipe it clean except for the acid-etched grooves. He then placed a damp sheet of paper over the plate before rolling it through a press. Rembrandt would often go back and modify plates after making prints, sometimes drastically altering the original.

Hoehn says it would take him half an hour or so to run through the value exercise.

Finally, at the end, when Hoehn told his staffers the print was a Rembrandt, their perception of value would be transformed. Hoehn wouldn't give precise dollar values, except to say that the print was worth well into five figures or even more.

His point was to encourage staffers "to take a little bit more time with the whole product presentation and not just try to skip steps."

Hoehn admits that it took him a long time to understand the value of Rembrandt's prints and what an innovator the artist was. Hoehn's fascination with prints started in the early 1970s when he was a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He saw an exhibition there called "The Language of the Print" and became hooked. His interest began with old master printmakers such as Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) and more modern artists such as Grant Wood (1891-1942).

"It is with some embarrassment that I confess I did not "get' Rembrandt until after many years of collecting," Hoehn wrote in the foreword to The Hoehn Collection, a hardbound catalog of the prints he owns. "When I finally did, it was something of a Damascus moment."

For Hoehn, the collection is more than a hobby. He laughingly describes his passion for Rembrandt as a "disease" or an "obsession." It's an obsession that has taken him all over the world to hundreds of museums and galleries.

Hoehn became particularly fascinated with Rembrandt's work in the 1650s, "a decade not only of technical brilliance and boldness, but also of penetrating insight into his subject matter," he wrote. "This combination of technical and interpretive genius produced some of the most compelling images not just in the history of printmaking, but, indeed, in Western art."

Now that Hoehn has completed his collection of Rembrandt gospel prints from the 1650s, he's searching for another area in Rembrandt's vast body of work, perhaps landscape etchings.

He admits that using his art collection to teach dealership staffers a lesson in value had a short shelf life. That's because Hoehn has been such a public figure in the San Diego art scene, with the two galleries the Hoehns endowed named after them. So his Rembrandt obsession is no longer a secret to his employees or the community.

But Hoehn says he's going to bring the art history exercise back in some form soon enough because of popular demand.

"The managers have asked me to repeat it because they think it's a good tool."