Art Market Monitor

With major auctions on three continents this month, Kishore Singh gives a detailed evaluation of the Indian art market as whole:

As many as 46 works by F N Souza are on auction this month, a pointer to his continuously rising importance and prolific brush. Nineteen of those works, including an unusual Beasts of Prey (estimated value between Rs 92 lakh-1.4 crore), will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York on March 23, followed a day later by five works at Sotheby’s, also in New York. On March 20, in Mumbai, nine drawings and two mixed media works by Souza will form part of Osian’s Masterpieces Series, but the real treasures are at the Saffronart sale on March 10 and 11, when 11 Souzas will enter the market, the most expensive of which isDecomposing Head at Rs 90 lakh-1.12 crore. Read the rest of this entry ›

Bloomberg has a few sales from Maastricht:

The 1982 Basquiat painting, showing a black figure and titled “Busted Atlas 2,” fetched $2.4 million. It was sold at the booth of the New York gallery Van de Weghe Fine Art to a German collector, said director Christophe van de Weghe. Read the rest of this entry ›

The Los Angeles Times provides elaborate details about Michael Crichton’s heirs and who will benefit from the $100 million sale of his art collection at Christie’s this May. Even though Crichton was on the board of LACMA, no art was bequeathed to a museum in his will:

Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christie’s Americas, said he expects the sale to bring in about $100 million. The money will go to Crichton’s widow, children and other heirs and to pay estate taxes. The rules of inheritance for wealthy individuals such as Crichton are rarely simple, and they have provided drama in this case, which combines vast wealth and valuable works of art.

Crichton’s 2007 will provided for the vast majority of his assets, including his art, to be placed in a private trust benefiting his fifth wife, Sherri, his then-teenage daughter from a prior marriage and other family members, friends and employees as well as a charitable foundation. At the time of his death from cancer the following year, his wife was six months’ pregnant with their son, John Michael Todd. The will did not provide for the unborn child. Read the rest of this entry ›

Art Dubai opens tomorrow but The National has the rundown of artists, galleries and shows today:

At Artspace we get Adel El Siwi, a well-known Egyptian painter who goes in for spiky, witty portraits: think Sue Macartney-Snape’s Social Stereotypes cartoons fed through the brain of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rose Issa is ploughing everything into Chant Avedissian’s sumptuous pop-culture riffs. Frey Norris is leading with the largest canvas yet from Kate Eric, the collaborative identity of Kate Tedman and Eric Siemans. [...] The Saudi conceptualist (and army major) Abdulnasser Gharem shares a bill with the Egyptian pop-artist Khaled Hafez, the British-Iranian painter Sacha Jafri and Canada’s hi-tech artist Daniel Canogar. Dubai’s own Carbon 12 is coming out with its usual cast of international talents: a splashy fashion rage from the painter Katherine Bernhardt, spooky theatre interiors from Gil Heitor Cortesao and Sara Rahbar’s satirical textile collages among them. Clearly there’s still room for the something-for-everyone approach. Read the rest of this entry ›

Singapore wants to be a global center of art and commerce. It hopes by attracting the arts it will be able to attract cultural and intellectual capital that matches its financial reserves and the native industry of its population. But the pursuit of global street cred can make for a amusing contradictions. The city-state is notorious for its strict code of public behavior, one that even bans chewing gum let alone street art and tagging. Nonetheless, some wise soul commissioned graffiti artist Daze to paint a mural there:

Spray-painting is still a rare sight there, where it’s still mostly associated with acts of vandalism punishable by up to three years in jail or eight strokes of the cane. Read the rest of this entry ›

In a lengthy story on Bloomberg that recaps much of what is already known about the wranglings surrounding the Salander-O’Reilly bankruptcy sale, Philip Boroff notes that a sale will likely take place in June.

The sale can proceed because of concessions made by a secured creditor, First Republic Bank:

U.S. Bankruptcy Court in January approved a settlement between unsecured creditors and Bank of America Corp.’s First Republic unit that cleared the way for an auction. First Republic lent the gallery about $30 million starting in 2002. “The bank had every right to be paid back first from the proceeds of art,” Feinstein said in the interview, citing loan documents.

The bank made “significant concessions” after lawyers for unsecured creditors investigated its relationship with the gallery and threatened to sue, Feinstein said. “We were trying to understand whether the bank knew he was involved in inappropriate behavior,” he said. “And whether it did anything to facilitate it.”

Feinstein wouldn’t say what unsecured creditors found. Read the rest of this entry ›

The Master, Judd Tully, reports on the sale of this Cranach at TEFAF that would be very close to the record auction price for the Old Master if it sold for the dealer Bernheimer-Colnaghi’s $7.3m asking price:

The price only slightly trails the auction record for Lucas Cranach the Elder, which was set at Christie’s London in July 1990 when his 1509Portrait of Kurfust Herzog Johann “Der Bestandige” Von Sachsen sold for £4,840,000 ($8,627,450).

The actual sale price to a European collector was not disclosed.

A Biblical Boost at Maastricht (ArtInfo.com)

Hauser & Wirth mounts a rare Eva Hesse show tomorrow. Here’s what the gallery has to say:

On March 16, Hauser & Wirth New York will open anexhibition of such objects: ‘EVA HESSE’ brings togetherfourteen works, many never before shown publicly inthe United States, that previously have been consideredimprovisational ‘test pieces’ or prototypes for largersculptures. Of these, eleven are delicate papier cachéforms – wisps of assembled paper, tape, cheeseclothand adhesive made between 1966 and 1969 – that areneither round nor rectangular, but indeterminate.

Saffronart had their Spring sale last week resulting in a solid 75% sell-through and sales volume right in line with the estimates, even showing a little strength at $4.6m.

Read the rest of this entry ›