Serious Things

The Master, Judd Tully, demonstrates his superior skill, determination and stamina in his Armory Show round up of sales. Proving once again why they call him The Master, Tully assembles a fair report that’s quotable to the last comma. Here’s sample but remember to click through and read the original:

“There’s serious interest in serious things,” said Chelsea exhibitor Nicholas Robinson. “But people are taking a lot of time to make up their minds.”

Robinson had sold an early Elizabeth Peyton drawing in graphite on paper, Winston Churchill at the age of five (1994), to a New York collector he hadn’t met before for around $25,000.

“He got a modest discount, so we didn’t get beat up too bad,” Robinson said. [ . . . ]

Another dealer in American art, Michael Rosenfeld, had sold a 1941 abstract painting by Werner Drewes for $170,000 to an American collector, and has had “strong interest” in a 1987 Joan Mitchell painting priced at $2.6 million. “This fair looks great,” said Rosenfeld. “The quality of the crowd is what one hopes for. We’ve brought the best of the best at fair prices.” The Drewes work, he said, is the largest of its kind. [ . . . ]

As for those New Yorkers dealing exclusively in photography, Yancey Richardson had sold several of Sharon Core‘s photographs of still lifes after Old Master paintings for $6,500 apiece; one went to what gallery director David Carmona would only describe as “a great American museum.” And Bruce Silverstein had parted with several archival pigment prints from 2006 by Shinichi Maruyama for $7,500 apiece. He also had on offer a selection of works by Weegee and Aaron Siskind, rare examples of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Edward Weston, a full wall of Robert Frank, another of John Coplans, and a 1963 Diane Arbus print for $325,000. “Photography is still undervalued,” he said.