Sotheby’s strong South Asian sale; Ketterer’s €28m Spring sales; The Kleptocrats documentary; Two Palms lets Dana Schutz and Carroll Dunham talk.

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Sotheby’s South Asian = £7.45m ($9.5m)

Bhupen Khakhar, Two Men in Benares (£450-600k) £2.535m

Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sales together made £7,459,000 ($9.5 million) above the pre-sale estimate of £4.1 – 5.8m which excludes fees. These sales have not been at this level for nearly a decade.

A single-owner sale, Coups de Coeur: The Guy and Helen Barbier Family Collection, comprising 29 works that had never been auctioned, the majority of the pieces having been acquired directly from the artists themselves, doubled its pre-sale estimate of £2.1-2.9m to sell for £5,489,875.

The top lot in that sale was Bhupen Khakhar’s landmark Two Men in Benares (1982) which established a new record for the artist at £2.54m ($3.2m) (£450,000-600,000), more than doubling the previous benchmark of £1.1 million set by De-Luxe Tailors (1972) at Sotheby’s auction of Howard Hodgkin’s collection in 2017.

In the various-owners sale, M.F. Husain’s Marathi Woman (1950) quadrupled its pre-sale estimate to sell for £435k ($553k) over a £75-100k estimate; a figurative work by Ram Kumar, Untitled (Man and Woman Holding Hands) from 1953, sold for £519k ($659k), double the pre-sale estimate (£220-280k); and Anatomy of that Old Story (1970) from Rameshwar Broota’s Ape series also quadrupled its estimate to make £423k ($537k) against estimates of £90,000-120,000.

The afternoon various-owner sale of Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art which followed was led by Francis Newton Souza’s Untitled painting which sold for £1.2 million (est. £600,000-800,000).

Francis Newton Souza, Untitled (£600-800k) £1.2m

Ketterer Makes €28m from Warhol, Kandinsky and More

Ketterer says it had its best Spring sale ever last week. They sold 55 works for more than €100k topping out with Wassily Kandinsky’s Treppe zum Schloss (Murnau), 1909 which sold for €2.5m and this Warhol society portrait from 1985, Andy Warhol
Portrait of a Lady, which sold for €1.125m. Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Günther Uecker, Daniel Richter, Franz Marc, Max Pechstein, Cy Twombly and Wojciech Fangor made up the top works.

The Reporter Who Revealed Jho Low’s New York Real Estate and Art Purchases Has a New Documentary

Louise Story did ground-breaking investigative reporting for the New York Times in 2013 revealing how apartments in the Time-Warner Center were being bought by dark money. The series of revelations has had a huge impact on the very top of the real estate market in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Hawaii. She was also the first to reveal that Jho Low had been the buyer of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads for a record price. Now at the Wall Street Journal, Story is a writer and executive producer of the new documentary about the 1MDB embezzlement scandal called, “The Kleptocrats.”

Dana Schutz Talks to Carroll Dunham

Two Palms, the Soho studio that works with a range of artists like Richard Prince, Mel Bochner, Jeff Koons, and Peter Doig producing monotypes, etchings and prints. They’ve inaugurated a new podcast series with Dana Schutz and Carroll Dunham who begin discussing working in a collaborative studio like Two Palms but quickly meander off into a range of fascinating topics around painting, politics and the fickleness of fame. Well worth a listen.