Art Market Monitor

On Tuesday, Philadelphia-based auction house Freeman’s sold Viennese artist Carl Moll’s White Interior (1905) for a record-breaking $4.75 million during its European art and Old Masters sale, which brought in a collective $6.4 million.

The result for the Moll painting marks the highest price achieved for a single lot in the house’s history, surpassing the $3.1 million paid for a Chinese vase in 2011, and Tuesday’s sale is now the biggest auction ever held at Freeman’s. White Interior also bested Moll’s previous record of $385,700, paid for a landscape by the artist at Austrian auction house Dorotheum in 2007.

The record-setting painting, which depicts art critic Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps in her Döbling apartment in an all-white palette, surfaced on the market after more than a century of being held privately. It came from a German family collection, having passed through inheritance to the California-based heir of the original owners, where it has been since the 1970s, and it is the only figurative Moll painting ever sold at auction.

“Everyone thought it was lost, because it was only known through a black and white photograph from a show in 1905,” said Freeman’s European art and Old Masters specialist Raphaël Chatroux. “But in fact, we believe the work was bought directly by the family of our consignor. We don’t know if it was bought directly from the artist by them, but we think that it is highly possible it was bought right after it was shown in Vienna in 1908, because otherwise the artist would have continued to exhibit it.”

The painting was first exhibited in Berlin in 1905 and later at the Museum Folkwang in Essen the following year. It had last been shown publicly at Vienna’s Kunstschau in 1908, alongside Gustav Klimt’s iconic The Kiss (which is now held by the Belvedere Museum in Vienna).

Moll was one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession movement. With a market concentrated mainly in Europe, he is known for his idyllic domestic scenes. Moll, who supported Nazism, committed suicide in Vienna upon Germany’s defeat in 1945.

Part of White Interior‘s success owes to its subject—another Moll portrait of Zuckerkandl-Szeps is held in a private collection. According to Chatroux, Zuckerkandl-Szeps played a diplomatic role in maintaining artistic ties between French and Austrian artists during World War I. By World War II, the Jewish intellectual fled to Paris, then to the Maghreb (Northwest Africa). “She was very known for her modern and bold views because she used to write in newspapers to defend artists of the avant-garde,” said Chatroux. “She was a big Klimt supporter, especially when he was painting nudes that were considered a bit too realistic and graphic.”

After a protracted bidding period that lasted just under 10 minutes and involved a dozen parties, an American collector won the work. Following the sale, the auction house reported that the anonymous buyer was planning to exhibit the work at New York’s Neue Galerie, which houses the formidable German and Viennese art collection of New York investor Ronald Lauder. The Neue Galerie did not respond to a request for comment.

Christie’s is making a move into the emerging crypto art market with plans to offer a fully-digital work of art, making it the first major auction house to offer a piece of this kind for sale.

The work, known as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token), is by Beeple (né Mike Winkelmann), a net artist and graphic designer who has amassed a large following on social media producing commercial projects for pop stars and brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike. A Christie’s representative called him “a leader in the digital art community.”

The work selling at Christie’s, titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021), is a digital collage consisting of 5,000 images, one made each day over the course of 13 years, from 2007 to 2021. Unlike most works, which come to sale with a predetermined estimate, Everydays does not have a price range. Bidding will begin at $100 in an online auction that runs from February 25–March 11.

The unique edition from Beeple’s Everdays series is comprised of drawings responding to current events, incorporating surreal scenes of politicians like Donald Trump and Mao Zedung and cartoons featuring Pokemon and Mickey Mouse.

Christie’s is not the first to auction an NFT work by Beeple, whose collection of 21 original works from his Everydays project generated $3.5 million in December in an auction with crypto art platform Nifty Gateway.

Crypto art relies on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the transaction and ownership record of which are encrypted and unable to be duplicated. The present work exists as an encrypted file, and its purchase at the end of Christie’s auction will be registered on the blockchain.

Christie’s has taken an interest in digital technologies, both on the block and behind the scenes. In October, the house sold a piece from Robert Alice’s 2020 painting series “Portraits of a Mind” that incorporates Bitcoin code into its composition. And in 2018, the house collaborated with blockchain-backed art registry service Artory to host the sale of Barney A. Ebsworth’s American art collection.

Through these tech-based initiatives, Christie’s is gauging existing and potential clients’ interest in the nascent market for digital works and blockchain-backed art buying.

“There has been an understanding that the blockchain was going to inevitably play a role in the art business,” said Noah Davis, a Christie’s specialist in post-war and contemporary art in charge of the Beeple sale. “We’re still at the very infancy of how this technology is going to impact the art world.”

For Christie’s, the move into the market for NFT works signals a possible push to attract a new generation of clients who fall outside the traditional fine art collection realm. For the present work, such an audience, Davis said, “skews younger, more in the millennial range” and is “definitely male and more American than not.”

Christie’s, the leading auction house by market share, is not known for its forays in experimenting with emerging markets. But with the current sale, the house seems to be changing course.

“We’re at this moment in time where there could be a drastic shift— a demographic shift, a generational shift— when it comes to what excites younger collectors,” said Davis. “Christie’s as an organization is really excited about a moment in time where you see $3.5 million of sales just organically appear out of thin air. That’s something we want to capitalize on.”

A drawing by Vincent Van Gogh made during the artist’s final years will sell at Christie’s as part of the drawing collection sale titled “A Family Collection: Works on Paper, Van Gogh to Freud” on March 1 in New York. Estimated at $7 million–$10 million, the work is titled La Mousmé (1888).

The rare drawing comes from the family collection of London dealer Thomas Gibson and depicts an anonymous young female sitter. It is the last work of a group of 12 originally gifted by the artist to Australian painter John Russell that still remains in private hands. Other works from that gift, which include 9 landscapes and 2 portraits are held by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“The work is incredibly rare,” said Giovanna Bertazzoni, Christies co-head of 20th and 21st century art department, adding that pieces of this quality typically end up in museums. “When I saw it in the flesh for the first time, I was very moved.”

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most expensive contemporary artists, is set to continue his reign next month at Christie’s in Hong Kong. His 1982 painting Warrior will be auctioned on March 23 during a single-lot sale titled “We Are All Warriors.” The work, which carries a third-party guarantee, is expected to achieve a price between $31 million and $41 million (HKD 240 million–HKD 320 million). If the present lot meets its low estimate it will be among the top 10 Basquiats to ever sell at auction, surpassing the price of $30.7 million paid for Flesh and Spirit (1982), from the collection of Herbert Neumann, at Sotheby’s in 2018.

“It is simply a masterpiece,” Cristian Albu, Christie’s international director of postwar and contemporary art, said of Warrior.

The large-scale painting, made with acrylic, oilstick and spray paint on wood panel, features a sword-wielding figure with Basquiat’s signature skull-like head. Its subject is brutality, and Basquiat had the threat of state violence in mind when he made it.

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A rare 15th-century Renaissance portrait by artist Piero del Pollaiuolo is set to go under the hammer during a cross-category auction at Sotheby’s in London on March 25. Portrait of a Youth depicts a young male sitter set against a blue sky background and is expected to fetch £4 million–£6 million ($5.5 million–$8.2 million). It will hit the block alongside Old Masters works and contemporary art.

The painting—the only known portrait by Pollaiuolo left in private hands—was once held in the same private collection as the one that included Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, which sold for a record-breaking $92 million at Sotheby’s on January 28 during the house’s New York “Classic Week” series. The previous owner of the two works was Thomas Ralph Merton, a prominent scientist who worked with the British secret service in the 1930s and ’40s.

The painting was first recorded in the collection of Hertfordshire’s G. M. G. Wilshere. In October 1942, the work is said to have been sold to Mendelsohn Bartholdy, who purchased it at Sotheby’s when it was attributed to a painter in the Florentine School (Sotheby’s is still conducting research to confirm this record.) Eventually, the work passed onto Sir Thomas Merton in the 1950s. The last time it sold at auction was in 1985, when it left Merton’s collection and sold at Christie’s, which attributed it to another Italian artist, Cosimo Rosselli.

Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Youth and Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel once hung side by side in Merton’s study. His collection also included works by Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Bartolomeo Montagna, and other Italian and Northern Renaissance, some of which are now in U.K. museum collections.

Though lesser-known today than his contemporary Botticelli, Pollaiuolo was among the top artists working in the 15th century. Together with his brother Antonio, he ran one of the era’s most advanced Florentine studios, making commissions for elite Italian patrons such as the Medicis.

Piero, who despite having being less prolific than his brother, completed important projects independently, the most prestigious of which was the cycle of six paintings representing the Virtues for the audience chamber in the Tribunale di Mercanzia in Florence in 1469. The works are now at the Uffizi in Florence.

“In Renaissance Florence the Pollaiuolo brothers, Piero and Antonio, made important innovations across multiple art forms, not least in the field of portraiture, and their workshop rivaled that of Andrea del Verrochio for importance and prestige,” Cecilia Treves, Sotheby’s head of research on Old Master paintings, said in a statement.

Today, few major works by Pollaiulo remain in private collections; most are held by museums. (A 1480 profile of an elite woman, for example, is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) The last time a Piero portrait appeared on the open market was in 2012, when a 1470 drawing of a young man sold at Sotheby’s for $1.4 million, against an estimate of $300,000. The buyer was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Like the drawing purchased by the Getty, the present work depicts its sitter posed frontally—which is rare for the era, since most commissioning portraits were done in profile. According to Sotheby’s, the sitter’s young age is also rare, and “may have been intended as an affirmation of dynastic hope.”

This past November, the work was reviewed by the Art Council England, a body of the U.K. government which examines art objects that may be valuable to U.K. public collections.

In a statement to the Secretary of State, experts argued to keep the painting in the U.K. because of its potential significance for Renaissance scholarship. “It is the earliest painting in a British collection to illustrate a moment of change in Florentine portraiture—the movement from profile to full-frontal depictions of sitters,” said an expert adviser in the statement. Despite experts’ objections, the painting was approved for export.

In Sotheby’s forthcoming auction, the work will be sold alongside examples by David Hockney, Arshile Gorky, and Edvard Munch, among others.