Artelligence for May 15, 2018

Brooke Lampley Makes a Good Case for the Modigliani Deal: By now you’re probably tired of reading about the Modigliani sold last night at Sotheby’s for $157m. So watch this interview with Brooke Lampley instead. Newly arrived at Sotheby’s, Lampley is becoming their go-to representative on Bloomberg mostly because she stakes the right ground and defends it well. Here, she talks about the Modigliani price as a confirmation of an earlier public price and some lower, controversial private prices. Watch Here …

Rockefeller Profits Might Also Have Been About Timing: Colin Gleadell maks an interesting observation about some of the returns on the Rockefeller works of art, “a Juan Gris cubist still life that he bought for $45,000 in 1966 sold for $31.8 million. By the same token, a Georges Seurat painting of a fieldworker, bought in 2006 for $1.4 million, sold for half that.” One factor could be time. Larger gains come from longer holding periods. The Seurat bought in 2006 hasn’t had much time or chance to appreciate. Then, again, the Gauguin still life bought around the same time sold for multiples of its fairly recent price. …

Heritage Holds $12.2m Comic Book Auction, The Largest of Its Kind: In Chicago, Heritage set some new records for Comics and comic book art:

• Chicago’s largest public auction dedicated to vintage comic books and original comic art fetched $12,201,974  – setting the world record for the most valuable sale of its kind. The top lot claimed its own record when artist Frank Frazetta’s Original Art titledDeath Dealer 6, 1990 – first published as the cover for Verotik’s 1996 Death Dealer #2 comic book – more than doubled the all-time auction record for any piece of comic art when it sold for $1.79 million. “As the live session opened, the Frazetta painting had a bid of $600,000, but within moments it had come down to two collectors, bidding by phone, who waged a pitched battle for this very desirable painting,” said Barry Sandoval, Director of Comics Operations at Heritage.