Why Is This Modigliani Nude Priced at $100m? A voluble financial writer with a degree in art history asked on Twitter recently, “I don’t understand what happened between 2003 and now that this painting would go from $27m to $150m. Modigliani’s reputation hasn’t really changed.” But that has the relationship between Modigliani and his prices backwards. It’s not that Modigliani’s reputation has grown but that the value of money has changed with the increase and concentration of wealth over the last few decades. Colin Gleadell answers the question best when he charts the steady rise in value of Modigliani nudes:
- For the last 30 years, Modigliani nudes have continually broken the artist’s record. A seated nude (La Belle Romaine) which sold for a record $8 million in 1987, sold again in 1999 for a new record of $16.8 million, and then again in 2010 for a record $69 million. Sotheby’s $150 million painting was last sold (by the Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn) at Christie’s in 2003, when the Irish horse breeder John Magnier bought it for a then-record $27 million. …
A Couple of Artists Visit Wayne Thiebaud: Jonas Wood and Mark Grotjahn went to see Wayne Thiebaud late last week. Wood recorded the event on his instagram which included a look at some of the 97-year-old artist’s own paintings and his Rousseau and de Kooning works on display in his home. …
Brooke Lampley’s Advice for Navigating the Imp-Mod Market: The Robb Report asked Sotheby’s Imp-Mod maven where to “find value in this masterpiece-driven market?”
- I think that works on paper by great artists are a good place to start as they remain relatively undervalued. There are some exceptions, of course. With Magritte, for example, people are willing to pay a premium for a work in gouache—often much more than they might pay for a painting. But you can still get blue-chip works on paper at relatively affordable prices. I also think there are important artists associated with various movements who are not yet widely recognized and thus remain undervalued. The Cubists are a great example. While everybody wants a Picasso or a Braque, you can still find fantastic works by Albert Gleizes or Jean Metzinger for much more reasonable prices. …
The Baltimore Museum De-accessions for Diversity: With the release of the Contemporary art catalogues, we can finally see the works revealed last month as part of the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art’s plan to sell work where the museum is well-represented to raise money to purchase works by artists who are under represented in the collection.
- Going up for sale at Sotheby’s in May are two artworks by Warhol (“Oxidation Painting” from 1978 and “Hearts” from 1979) and one each by Kline (“Green Cross” from 1956) and Rauschenberg (“Bank Job” from 1979). Rounding out the seven are three paintings by lesser-known artists: Kenneth Noland’s “Lapis Lazuli” from 1963 and “In-Vital” from 1982, along with Jules Olitski’s “Before Darkness II” from 1973. …
The FT Takes a Tour d’Horizon of the US Art Fair Scene: The art press loves to complain about concentration an inequality in the art market but then turns around and sniffs that the US doesn’t have an art fair with equal stature to Art Basel or London’s Frieze. The proliferation of art fairs is positive sign even if it means there’s more art being sold that many commentators don’t valorize. But fairs in and of themselves are difficult to improve upon. The model isn’t exactly new, even if it is newly popular as a way to bring more art galleries to different regions. Interestingly, the dealers are the ones who would like to see something more:
- [Pace’s Marc] Glimcher says, “Frieze LA is a great idea, I’m looking forward to it. It’s just too bad that art fair organisers can’t come up with something more novel and engaging for buyers other than replicating events in another city.” …
Amid All the Hand-Wringing About Small Galleries, Frieze Holds a Tribute to a Gallerist Who Lost All His Artists: New York Mag’s Carl Swanson outlines Matthew Higgs’s tribute to Hudson, the maverick, idiosyncratic and visionary dealer—”more often than not, he’d lose the artist he’d nurtured to slicker, more on-the-money dealers.”
- Feature Inc. opened in Chicago in 1984 with a show of Richard Prince’s re-photographs (appropriately enough, on April Fools’ Day) and moved to New York four years later. Over its 30 years, it was among the first to exhibit the work of Takashi Murakami, Raymond Pettibon, Tom Friedman, Charles Ray, B. Wurtz, Judy Linn, Richard Kern, Lisa Beck, Tom of Finland, and many others.
