Capitalizing on the Hockney Sales Spike, Joe Lewis Dangles His Hockney: Observant art market professionals carefully scrutinized the large canvases by David Hockney gathered in a single room at the Met’s recent retrospective. Sharp eyes saw that the artist’s Pool with Two Figures from 1972, and a few of the other keystone works in the show, is still in private hands.

The painting was once owned by David Geffen but the show clearly identified former Christie’s owner and financier Joe Lewis as the current owner.

Now Katya Kazakina has been strategically leaked the fact that Lewis is shopping the work. Kazakina says Lewis wants $80m.  Is that a good price? Possibly on the private market. But word is that Lewis has shopped the painting at that price for a little while. The highest price for a Hockney from that era was set several years ago at just under $8m; the top pool price was set in may at close to $12m; and the best Hockney price ever was achieved that same season at $28m for a late landscape.  …

Heritage Auctions Sells $6.6m in Comic Books and Comic Art Led by $660k Frank Frazetta Painting: A lot of five and six-figure comic books are selling through Heritage Auctions:

• “Frenetic bidding drove the final price for Frank Frazetta’s Escape on Venus Painting Original Art (1972) to $660,000 to claim top-lot honors in Heritage Auctions’ Comics & Comic Art Auction Aug. 2-4 in Dallas, Texas, which brought in a total of $6,670,739. The price realized by Escape on Venus was the third-highest ever through Heritage Auctions for a Frazetta painting.Death Dealer 6 Painting Original Art (1990) brought a record $1,792,500 in May 2018, and Frank Frazetta At The Earth’s Core Paperback Cover Painting Original Art (1974), sold for $1,075,500 in August 2016. Used as the cover image for the 1974 re-issue of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of the same name, Escape on Venus was created in 1972 and released as a print later in the decade.” …