The Fingerhut Gallery: A Minneapolis Story, and What Those Serigraphs Are Worth Now

The man who turned a Minneapolis bus depot into First Avenue also opened an art gallery in Edina and spent decades publishing the Yunnan School. If you inherited one of those framed serigraphs with a Fingerhut certificate, here is the honest picture, including which pieces still hold real value.

SebastianCharles Auctions

Allan Fingerhut is remembered in this town for a building. In 1970 he bought the old Greyhound bus depot on First Avenue North and turned it into the club that became First Avenue. He owned it for 34 years. When he died in October 2020 at 76, that was the first line of every obituary.

The second line is the one that brings people to us.

Fingerhut, an heir to the Minneapolis mail order catalog family, opened the first Fingerhut Gallery in Edina. The gallery was always his own venture and never part of the catalog company. He built it into a business with five galleries, a publishing arm, and lithographs supplied to more than a hundred independent galleries around the country. In a 2004 trade interview he said he and his wife Rose started the company in 1976.

More than forty years later, the framed serigraphs that business sold are coming out of Twin Cities estates in real numbers. We get the phone calls. Here is the honest picture.

What Fingerhut actually was

Fingerhut ran two companies, and it helps to keep them straight.

Fingerhut Gallery, Inc. was the retail side. It was a Minnesota corporation, formerly named Allan F. Gallery, Inc., and Allan Fingerhut managed it. A federal court opinion from the District of Minnesota shows what the gallery was doing at its height.

In June 1981 a Chicago buyer called looking for a particular Chagall lithograph. Fingerhut offered him a different one, Marc Chagall's Paris From My Window, and shipped it overnight on approval with an invoice for $16,250. The buyer paid $5,000 and refused the rest. Fingerhut sued in Minnesota, and in October 1982 the court moved the case to Illinois.

Sixteen thousand dollars for a Chagall lithograph in 1981, sold over the phone from Minnesota to Chicago. That was the business.

Fingerhut Group Publishers, Inc. was the wholesale publishing arm. It was eventually based in San Rafael, California, and still listed a Minneapolis office as late as 2004. It published limited edition serigraphs, silkscreens on paper, deckled paper, canvas and silk, plus bronze editions. It sold them wholesale to galleries across the US, Canada and Japan, and the company had its own retail galleries in La Jolla, Sausalito, Laguna Beach and Carmel.

No Fingerhut Gallery operates today as far as we can find. The California listings all show as closed, and the company's websites no longer load.

The artist, and a correction

If you inherited a Fingerhut piece, it is most likely by Jiang Tiefeng, born 1938 and known as the father of the Yunnan School. You will also see his name written Tie Feng Jiang.

Fingerhut represented him for more than 25 years, going back to about 1978. In that 2004 interview, Fingerhut said he personally sponsored Jiang's immigration to the United States. Jiang's first sculpture, Emerald Lady, sold out its edition of 250 at Artexpo in 1986. Fingerhut summed up the business in one line: "I don't push pretty art, I push the history and the culture."

The look is easy to spot once you know it. Layered figures that look almost like X rays, Tang dynasty court women, panthers, elephants and peacocks, and rich jewel colors with metallic inks. Most are large, from 33 by 33 inches up to 44½ by 32 inches, and framed out to four feet square. Ting Shao Kuang is the other name from the same circle that turns up constantly.

A correction, because it is the most common thing people tell us on the phone. Peter Max, Erté, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Kinkade, Anatole Krasnyansky, Csaba Markus and Yuroz come up in almost every Fingerhut conversation. We found no documentation linking any of them to Fingerhut as publisher or dealer. Galleries all over the country sold those artists from the 1980s through the 2000s, which is probably why they feel connected. If a Peter Max comes in with a Fingerhut label, the label is the evidence. Without a label, the connection is a memory, not a fact.

What is documented: Jiang Tiefeng above all, Chagall on the secondary market, and later Laguna Beach shows that included Orlando Agudelo-Botero and the touring "Secret Art of Dr. Seuss." Chaseart published the Seuss work, and Fingerhut sold it at retail.

How to tell you have one

Check these, in order of reliability:

  1. A certificate of authenticity naming "Fingerhut Group Publishers, Inc." This is the most reliable marker. It often isn't attached to the frame, so look in the family's paperwork folder or behind the backing board.
  2. A printer credit. At least one documented Fingerhut certificate names Cohen Graphic, Inc. as printer, which makes a good cross check.
  3. A pencil signature and edition number in the lower margin. Watch for odd edition sizes. /293 turns up again and again (70/293, 89/293, 232/293), along with /300, /275 with 65 artist's proofs, and /250 on sculpture. Later canvas and silk work came in "regular" and "deluxe" hand embellished editions at different sizes.
  4. Period framing. Wide gold or lacquered metal moldings, double mats, and backing that isn't archival quality.
  5. An old retail invoice. These turn up more often than you would think.

One honest gap: we have not found a photo or description of what a Fingerhut certificate looks like, whether it carries an embossed stamp, or whether the gallery put labels on the back. So we won't guess. If you have a piece with its paperwork, you hold better documentation than anything online, and we would like to see it.

What they are worth

One comparison does all the work here. It is not a Fingerhut piece. It is a Ting Shao Kuang from the same Yunnan School circle, sold through a different gallery chain of the same era. It is still the clearest example we have found of what happened to this whole category.

Ashima at Sunrise, serigraph, 1986, edition 244 of 275. The auction catalog stated its history: bought from a retail gallery on October 15, 1987, for $1,950. The estimate was $250 to $350. It sold for $150 on three bids, below the low estimate.

A Minneapolis gallery currently offers the same title, from the same 1986 edition, for $6,600.

So the print cost $1,950 at retail in 1987, carries a $6,600 gallery asking price today, and brought $150 at auction. Adjusted for inflation, that auction result is about three percent of what the original buyer paid.

That is not an outlier, and Jiang follows the same pattern. Current auction estimates for Jiang Tiefeng serigraphs run $200 to $800 across several houses. Spring, 89/293, at $600 to $800. My World, 282/300, at $300 to $600. Royal Couple, 267/300, at $200 to $400. Those are estimates, not results, but they show what professional catalogers expect this material to bring. By contrast, a St. Paul seller asks $420 to $700 for Jiang serigraphs, and Minneapolis retail asking prices run $3,150 to $6,000. Estimates, asking prices and results are three different numbers, and the gap between them is the point of this post.

Why prices fell

The problem is not authenticity. We have seen nothing to suggest the Jiang serigraphs Fingerhut published are anything other than what they say they are: genuine, signed, hand pulled screenprints. The problem is arithmetic.

Editions of 250 to 350, plus artist's proofs, sold nationwide through hundreds of galleries for two decades. Now the original buyers' estates are all selling at once, into a market whose collectors are aging out. The supply is huge and permanent. Demand is shrinking. No scarcity is coming.

The other half of the explanation is a definition almost nobody heard at the point of sale.

Galleries in this field often handed buyers an "appraisal" along with the certificate. Across the trade, the value on that kind of paperwork commonly meant retail replacement value: what it would cost to buy the same print again from a retail gallery. That is a price list, not an independent opinion of what the print will sell for. We have not seen how Fingerhut's own paperwork defined it, so check yours.

Retail replacement value and fair market value answer different questions. Fair market value is what a willing buyer pays today. That difference explains most of the gap between what a folder of 1980s paperwork says and what the saleroom pays, and explaining it is one of the most useful things we do for families with this material.

What still holds value

Not everything in this category is a $150 lot. Sort before you sell.

Check condition honestly, too. These were framed in the 1980s with mats and backing that aren't archival. Faded sheets, mat burn and rippled paper are the norm.

What we would tell you on the phone

If you inherited a wall of these, start with a sort, not a valuation. Editioned prints go in one pile, sculpture and originals in another, paperwork in a third. Each pile has a very different answer.

Then we tell you the number before the catalog goes live, not after. It isn't a fun conversation. It is much better than the alternative, a family finding out on sale night that the "$6,000 appraisal" in the folder was a 1988 retail price list.

The same gap between a famous name, confident paperwork and thin resale shows up in other categories. We cover a version of it in our post on Frank Lloyd Wright material in Minnesota estates. For other galleries whose labels turn up on art in Twin Cities homes, read our posts on Dayton's Gallery 12, the Locksley Shea Gallery, the Suzanne Kohn Gallery and Wally Findlay Galleries.

Selling a Fingerhut piece

Our prints department handles estate collections of published prints regularly. Part of the job is knowing when to group pieces and price them honestly at modest money, and when to pull one out and catalog it on its own because it really is different. Both decisions save you money.

If you have Fingerhut material, especially a certificate, an old invoice, or a piece you think might be an original, send us photos of the front, the lower margin and any paperwork. Sebastian personally reviews every inquiry. A first opinion costs nothing, and you can request an estimate here.