Christie’s 20th Century Design and Decorative Arts sale made $1.4m today. The big item was the Lalanne cheetah and the Frank Lloyd Wright windows shot over the estimates. Items from the Chicago Stock Exchange building performed well but not on the trajectory Eve Kahn sketched out here in the New York Times over the weekend:
“The ornament was filled with an energy and a cohesion,” said Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian for Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. “It was meant to give you an emotional reaction, like something you’d see in nature.”
The Stock Exchange components, he added, survived partly because they appealed to 1970s tastes for lush textures and dramatic, odd-shaped antiques. “Architectural artifacts had just emerged as a salable commodity in the early ’70s,” he said. “If the building had come down just five years earlier, it would all have ended up in landfills, like Penn Station.”
Prices for the exchange’s more intricate fragments have been rising for decades, and spiked in the past year. In October an eight-foot-long canvas frieze stenciled with overlapping diamond patterns brought $40,625 at a Doyle New York auction. (The presale estimate was $40,000 to $60,000.) In December Sotheby’s sold a 14-foot length of filigree from the exchange’s elevators to the Seattle Art Museum for $602,500. (The estimate was $250,000 to $350,000.)
Assets of Splendor from a Stock Exchange (New York Times)
