Sotheby’s announced another lot designed to temp buyers at their February Impressionist sale. This Berlin street scene by Ludwig Kirchner is the last one in private hands.

With two recent major museum shows, the ground has already been prepared well to support Kirchner’s prices.

Almost as important, the Sotheby’s lot comes with a strong provenance. It was last sold during the agenda-setting Tabchnik sale more than a decade ago. It was there that Fauvism and Expressionism first began to climb in value.

Here’s Carol Vogel in the New York Times:

The painting that Sotheby’s is selling — “Street Scene,” from 1913 — was not in either exhibition. It was last publicly seen at Sotheby’s London 11 years ago as part of a group of Fauve and German Expressionist works that were sold by Charles Tabachnick, a Toronto collector. It fetched $3.3 million, a record price at the time. That buyer, whom Sotheby’s refused to identify, is selling the painting next month.

“That was a groundbreaking sale,” said Helena Newman, vice chairwoman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department worldwide. “It was the first time German Expressionist art was put center stage, and it made a record price that set off an extraordinary period of growth in the German Expressionist market.”

On the Block: Berlin Street Scene (New York Times)

Here’s a reminder of what it means to live with art–and the benefits of having a good idea and a keen interest in painting. Mary Ann Monforton and Morris Shuman bought a new apartment and renovated it with the proceeds from the sale of one of the several Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings she bought directly from the artist at the beginning of his career.

“God bless Jean-Michel,” said Ms. Monforton, who became a friend of the artist when, at about age 17, he used to sit on her stoop in the East Village, across the street from a “Flat’s Fixed” sign. The motif later appeared in many of his paintings.

“We thank him all the time,” Mr. Shuman said.

The couple still buy art, often at charity auctions. Last year, Ms. Monforton bought a work by Kara Walker at a Bomb magazine benefit.

“This is my I.R.A. — Individual Retirement Art,” she said.

What’s funny about the story is that we generally hear so many negative comments about people who buy art as an investment.  Something about their story, the exchange of opportunity between owning art that is meaningful to them and having a nice home, gets to the heart of what has been happening in the art market up until recently.

Bankrolled by a Basquait (New York Times)

Carol Vogel surveys the auction houses and her favorite sources for a recap of the state of the auction market. You already know the tune but some of lyrics have changed:

“We knew from 1990 that when the market cools, it happens very suddenly, in the course of two weeks,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America. “What we didn’t know is if it was going to happen last May or last month. Now we’re in a period of assessment as we try to figure where we go from here.”

Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer mentions Beuys and Polke as possible names he’ll focus on going forward and he makes a few predictions about what won’t show up at auction any time soon:

Such results present difficult choices for experts putting together the next big round of auctions. “Nobody’s going to be selling a Jeff Koons or a Bacon or a Lichtenstein any time soon,” said Tobias Meyer, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department. “Why would they, since they missed the boat?”

Philippe Ségalot reminds Vogel that Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Gober had particularly fertile periods during the slump of the early 1990s (though it isn’t clear how that would be relevant to the auction market for their works that only came to life nearly a decade later.) But he likes Michael Day Jackson.

New York Magazine sits down with Vik Muniz to talk about his juxtapositions of MoMA collection works for their Artist’s Choice Series. Here he talks about Picasso’s Guitar, left, and Charles Sheeler’s African Musical Instrument:

“Picasso loved African art,” says Muniz “There’s a structural connection between his cardboard sculpture of a deconstructed guitar and the print by Sheeler—which is a photo-realistic facsimile of an African instrument.” He adds that Picasso’s model, for a later sheet-metal sculpture, “was probably one of the first times in history that someone made a sculpture, an art object, about something common.”

The Matchmaker (New York)

It’s one thing to talk about the redemptive power of art. Jan Krugier lived it. Born to a Jewish manufacturer in Poland in 1928, Krugier’s father was a modest art collector and a Polish patriot. He stayed in Poland until it was too late leaving the 13 year old Jan to become a member of the Polish resistance. Jan was captured in 1943, ending up in two concentration camps and as slave laborer in a Farben plant. After the war, Krugier studied art but was haunted by his experiences. The work of other artists was a balm to his tortured soul (those words might be romantic in another context but are merely descriptive here.) Participating in the creation and distribution of art as a dealer became his life’s work. Eventually he owned galleries in Geneva and New York (operated by his daughter.)

Here’s a great story about Krugier by the excellent Nicholas Fox Weber:

New York Times: Alum of Hell

(The Jan Krugier Gallery’s obit after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »

Saltz and Gardner: Too Good to Ignore

We’ve covered the wonderful Morandi show at the Met before. But this essay in the Wall Street Journal and Jerry Saltz’s review in New York are both just too good not cover this ground again. Let’s start with Gardner:

To understand Morandi in his sullen greatness, to appreciate the full flowering of his art that took place in the 1950s, you need to understand his evolution as it is set forth at the Met. Half a dozen still lifes of bottles on a table from the mid-1950s can be seen as the logical summation, if not the manifest destiny, of Morandi’s entire career. They are the goal to which, patiently and methodically, he advanced over half a century, though not without the occasional detour or misstep. In getting to that point, much of Morandi’s earlier career proceeds along two parallel tracks. On the one hand, he is fishing around in the sundry styles of his day and producing works of widely differing appearance. On the other hand, at any moment he can return to the placid quasi-realism of those bottles on a table that he produced, with remarkably little fundamental variation, throughout his career. [ . . . ]

(More after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Summing Up Has Commenced

Lindsay Pollock looks at the role of guarantees in Christie’s sale:

Christie’s International and Sotheby’s sold about $418 million of art over three nights, below their combined low estimate of $682 million. The total was off about 37 percent from $665 million a year ago, even after Christie’s added an unusual second evening auction. (Tallies for both years omit day sales.) [ . . . ]

The results appear to have been helped by arrangements made prior to the sale. Five of the top 10 lots, including the Kandinsky, were subject to an auctioneer’s saleroom announcement that “parties with a financial interest will be bidding.” These works had effectively been sold weeks or even months before the sale date.

Christie’s had locked in “third-party guarantors,” according to Toby Usnik, Christie’s spokesman. These guarantors, who sometimes are required to place a bid, have been paid a fee to assume Christie’s risk. The guarantor’s compensation includes a portion of the revenues on the sale, whether or not the guarantor is the top bidder, he said.

These sorts of deals have been used over the past few years as the financial side of the auction business has become much more involved and competitive. They had a major impact last night: The five lots with third-party guarantors wound up contributing $63.1 million to the sale, or 43 percent of the $146.7 million total.

Souren Melikian gives the speculators what-for:

Of all the economic sectors, the art market alone is beating a fairly orderly retreat from the wild excesses that characterized it in the last four or five years. The major evening auctions of Impressionist and Modern art that began this week at Sotheby’s on Monday and ended at Christie’s on Thursday delivered two unequivocal messages. First, money is still available in abundance when rarities of stellar importance or, more simply, very beautiful works of art turn up. This is because, unlike the manufacturing sector or financial services, the actors here are driven by desire. And as anyone who ever yearned to acquire a coveted picture or object knows, the fear of missing an opportunity unlikely to come back is powerful enough to overcome awareness of economic difficulties.

The second message should come as a sobering thought to auction house managers who had better respond there and then if they are to avoid big trouble. The waves of newcomers loaded with money and playing the auction field as if works of art were chips in a poker game have vanished, leaving the floor to traditional buyers who know something about the art they chase.

NY Impressionist Sales Fall 37% from 2007 (Bloomberg)

Mixed sales reflect a return to basics and sanity (International Herald Tribune)

The theme of the evening was relief. Midway through the sale, when yet another lot was bid close to the low estimate only to be bought in, the audience let out a groan of frustration to which auctioneer Christopher Burge responded with a genial, “I know.” It was easy for Burge to make light of the 36 passed lots because Christie’s was able to sell their guaranteed lots.

Kandinsky, Gris, Giacometti and several of the Picassos sold. Lindsay Pollock has this quote on Bloomberg:

“There was actually quite a positive mood in the room,” New York private dealer Christopher Eykyn said.

The Master, Judd Tully, has this:

“There’s still a little life left in this market,” said Christie’s CEO Edward Dolman moments after the sale, “and I think that’s what people should be concentrating on.” Of the guaranteed lots, the standout star was Gris’s rare and widely admired Cubist masterpiece from 1915, Livre, pipe et verres, which sold to New York dealer Franck Giraud of Giraud Pissarro Segalot for a record $20,802,500 (est. $12.5–18.5 million).

“It’s a fantastic picture,” said Giraud, moments after the 90-minute sale. “But I was surprised there was competition. It could have been cheaper!” The dealer said that he was bidding on behalf of an American collector “who wanted the picture for a long time and brought it home.” Reflecting a widely held belief among the trade, Giraud added, “It shows that the market is intelligent and there’s a lot of competition for rare things. If it’s a replaceable item, you can wait for another time when it may be cheaper.”

And Carol Vogel this:

The bidders on Thursday were controlled and careful, but Christie’s executives seemed much relieved afterward, having sold the works in which they had large financial stakes. “There’s still a great deal of money left in the art market,” said an optimistic Christopher Burge, Christie’s honorary chairman in America and the evening’s auctioneer. “But we have to look at a new, reduced price level.”

Christie’s Couldn’t Attract Bidders to the Star Lots

Fresh to the market is a common phrase at the auction houses and private collections are usually the best source of works that get called “fresh to the market.” That held true last night at Christie’s–even with the dis-connect between estimates and economic reality–for many of the lower priced lots, especially the Surrealist lots by Magritte and De Chirico. But the big works by Manet and Rothko, which could have carried the evening as they did at Sotheby’s on Monday, didn’t attract bids.

Lindsay Pollock has this:

“There were some wonderful bargains to be had for people who have cash,” said Nash, after the sale. [ . . . ] `Prices are at the levels of two years ago,” said New York dealer David Nash. [ . . . ] Last night’s sale was an addition to the usual calendar, an auction comprised of fresh-to-the-market, but uneven estate material. “In a bull market, they would have got away with this,” said London dealer Guy Jennings, of Theobald Jennings Fine Art. “It was overly ambitious.” Jennings said that when these sales were organized in the summer, it was “a different world” and art prices were better.

The Master, Judd Tully, had these observations:

In total, 41 of the 58 lots offered found buyers for a respectable buy-in rate of 29 percent, but the majority of sold lots went for substantially reduced, and in some cases fire-sale, prices. There were plenty of bargains for those willing to make bids. “I bought exactly what I wanted,” said London dealer Libby Howie, who acquired two works on paper: Pablo Picasso’s pen-and-India-ink drawing Trois Nus (August 5, 1938) for $578,500 (est. $700,000–1,000,000) and Henri Matisse’s Le Modèle for $362,500 (est. $600–900,000). [ . . . ] Long Island dealer David Benrimon acquired three significant works, including two bargain-basement deals: Georges Braque’s Nature morte à la corbeille de fruits for $842,500 (est. $1.2–1.8 million) and Joan Miró’s Femme et oiseau devant le soleil for $2,154,500 (est. $2.5–3.5 million). “Tonight you had great opportunities,” said the dealer. “It’s between 20 and 25 percent below market value,” he added of the works he purchased. [ . . . ] Benrimon’s also acquired Rene Magritte’s gouache-on-paper L’Empire des lumières, for which he paid $3,554,500 (est. $2–3 million), a record price for a work on paper by the artist. Though this was one of the few works to exceed its estimate, the dealer speculated that six months ago, it would be have been worth $4 million. [ . . . ] Another high achiever was Alice Neel’s stunning portrait Robert Smithson, which went to a telephone bidder for $698,500 (est. $300–400,000). The work was chased by at least four bidders, including dealers Jeffrey Deitch, David Zwirner, and the ultimate underbidder, Andrew Fabricant of New York’s Richard Gray Gallery.

(The bad news after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »