At the end of December, Paris-based auction house Artcurial staged its Contemporary African Art sale at La Mounia, a luxury hotel in Marrakesh. The sale, which was one of three slated across the evening, came on the heels of the appointment of Christophe Person as the new department head in September.

Across 48 lots, the contemporary African art portion of the night, dedicated to offerings of emerging contemporary artists across the continent, made €463,000, or €602,000 ($818,000) with buyer’s premium, just above its estimate of €402,800. The auction yielded a 68 percent sell-through rate.

In the market, awareness of contemporary African artists has expanded, attracting leading commercial players. This fall in London, the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair partnered with Christie’s to host an online leg of the 2020 London edition, in a sign of the region’s growing prominence in the market.

Artcurial’s expansion in the region signals rising demand among collectors. According to a statement from the auction house, several collectors from France, England, Switzerland, the United States, and Belgium, as well as several African countries, including Morocco, battled for work by Aboudia, Joseph Ntensibe and Dickens Otieno.

Among the top lots included was Ntensibe’s Tropical Garden, which sold for 780,000 MAD ($87,400). “Ntenisbe’s works are rare on the market and prized by some collectors who follow him, several bidders fought for this Tropical Garden, canvas which has almost quadrupled its estimate,” said Person.

Based in Kenya, Otieno was represented by an untitled upcycling work sold for 494,000 MAD ($55,400), more than six times its estimate. “Beyond the visual aspect, Otieno reflects on consumer society and its consequences on the abundance of waste and its impact on our living environments,” Person said of the artist’s work. 

Elsewhere in the sale, French-born artist Maya-Inès Touam’s untitled triptych also outpaced its estimate of 44,000 MAD ($4,900), selling for a final price of $338,000 MAD ($37,900). Parliamentarians Standing (2019) by Zemba Luzamba, whose figurative works featuring political rituals are influenced by the artist’s coming of age in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sold for 286,000 MAD ($32,053), three times the pre-sale estimate of 88,000 MAD ($98,62).

Another major artist represented in the sale was Gonçalo Mabunda, whose three mixed-media sculptures sold for prices between 32,500 MAD and 65,000 MAD ($3,600–$7,300). Drawing on political history of his home country of Mozambique, Mabunda creates works from weapons recovered in 1992 at the end of the 16-year civil war that divided the region. The artist represented Mozambique in the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Ivorian artist Aboudia’s 2015 untitled mix media canvas sold for 201,500 MAD ($22,600), more than three times its estimate of 66,000 MAD ($7,400). “Aboudia made his debut in the art market with the exhibition ‘Pangea’ held at Saatchi in London in 2011, during which emerging artists from Africa and Latin America were presented,” said Person. “Quickly spotted by English and American galleries, then Ivorian galleries, he has been one of the rising figures of Contemporary African Art for nearly 10 years.” Works by Aboudia appear regularly at Sotheby’s and typically surpass estimates. In October, his 2018 canvas Le petit chien rouge sold for £75,600 ($102,700), four times the pre-sale estimate.

Elsewhere in the sale, Sudanese painter Salah Elmur‘s painting The Green Room (2019) sold for 201,500 MAD ($22,583), below the estimate of 220,000 MAD ($24,656). Recognition of Elmur has been on the rise since 2018, when he was featured in a group show at London’s Saatchi Gallery titled “Forests and Spirits: Figurative Art from the Khartoum School.” He was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates in 2018. The artist’s auction record was set at Sotheby’s in 2019 by the $30,600 paid for The Family Portrait (2017).

Amand Boua, an Ivorian artist whose acrylic and collage works of formless figures respond to ongoing political unrest in West African, was also featured in the sale. His newly completed work Covid-19 and Baby’s children (2020) sold for 91,000 MAD ($10,200).

A restituted Gothic painting of the Madonna and Child by 14th-century Italian painter Jacopo di Cione will head to auction in New York at the end of the month as part of a settlement agreement between the estate of its late owner and the heir to the work’s previous owner.

Sotheby’s will auction the di Cione painting, which comes from collection of Hester Diamond, the late New York art patron and interior designer who died last January, on January 29 as part of its Masters Week, in which the house offers a series of sales of Old Masters art and antiquities. The work is expected to fetch between $300,000–$500,000. The painting’s sale comes after a legal agreement was reached with the Diamond estate and heir of August Liebmann Mayer, a prominent German Jewish art historian and curator who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

A specialist in Spanish and Italian art of the 16th and 17th centuries who served as chief curator of the Bavarian State Painting Collection and taught at the University of Munich in the years leading up to World War II, Mayer acquired the soon-to-be-auctioned di Cione work from prominent Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer sometime after 1927.

Mayer resigned from his curatorial post in 1931 and eventually fled to France in 1935, despite begin arrested by the Nazis two years earlier. While in Paris, Mayer continued working as an art historian under the pseudonym Henri Antoine, but he still faced Nazi persecution in France and fled Paris for the French countryside several times until his arrest and deportation in 1944. In May 1942, Mayer’s Paris residence was seized by the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), the Nazi art-looting organization, and a portion of his holdings, including his extensive library, were sent to Berlin.

A portion of Mayer’s collection was sold through Hugo Helbing auction house in Munich in November 1933, including the famed 16th-century painting Still Life with Game Fowl by Juan Sánchez Cotán, which now resides in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is unclear if the di Cione work was sold during this auction.

“We do not know exactly how or when the Jacopo di Cione left the Mayer collection,” Lucian Simmons, vice chairman and worldwide head of Sotheby’s restitution department, said in an email to ARTnews. “All we know is that it was after 1927.”

The di Cione work resurfaced after the war as part of the Pardo collection in Paris from 1966-68. (The Pardo ownership was uncovered during Sotheby’s research process into the di Cione as part of bringing it to market for the upcoming sale, but further details around the collection are unknown.) The small-scale altarpiece was sold at Christie’s London for £55,000 ($101,706) in 1988, then attributed to the Master of the Ashmolean Predella. Diamond then acquired the work privately through dealer Harari and Johns, Ltd in 1989. The reattribution to di Cione was recently provided by scholar Larry Kanter.

In the present case, Sotheby’s served as a liaison between the Diamond estate, represented by Bill Charron, a partner at Pryor Cashman LLP and Mayer’s heir, his daughter Angelika B. Mayer, who is based in California. The two parties reached a settlement, with undisclosed terms, to bring the work to auction. The di Cione work is not the first work from the Mayer collection to be repatriated; in 2015, a 17th-century portrait by Giovanni Battista Moroni, held for decades by the Louvre Museum was returned to Angelika Mayer. In 2016, the Munich-based Bayerische Staatsbibliothek returned three books seized from Mayer to his daughter; she subsequently donated the titles to the library and in 2010, the Bavarian State Paintings Collection returned four works originally in Mayer’s collection to his daughter.

Sotheby’s has recently seen a string of restituted lots outperform, which could be the case with this di Cione work. In July, during the houses hybrid live-streamed “Rembrandt to Richter” sale, a recovered 16th-century cassone panel depicting a battle scene by Italian renaissance painter Paolo Uccello went for £2.4 million ($3.3 million), against an estimate of £600,000-$800,000—setting a new benchmark price for the artist. Like the present work, the Uccello was sold under a settlement between the owners and the heirs of Fritz Gutmann.

In October, Sotheby’s announced plans to sell Diamond’s collection of Old Master and contemporary art, estimated at a total value of $30 million. Diamond, along with her husband Harold, originally started out as collector of modern and  contemporary art, but she switched focus to Old Masters following Harold’s death in 1982. A longtime benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the di Cione painting is one of several Diamond loaned to the Met during her lifetime. During an extended trip to China in 2006, Diamond loaned the present work along with a selection of others from her holdings to the museum, according to Maryan Ainsworth, curator emerita of The Met’s European paintings department.

If di Cione altarpiece once owned by Hester Diamond meets its high estimate of $500,000, it will be among the top three works by the Renaissance artist to ever sell at auction. The current record price for the artist is $965,000, when a similar Madonna and child panel, from the collection of fashion designer Fabrizio Moretti, sold in January 2015 at Sotheby’s New York.

Other works in the January 29 sale at Sotheby’s include Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s painting Autumn (1616), estimated at $8 million and $12 million and poised to break the artists’ record; a 16th-century triptych by the Flemish master Pieter Coecke van Aelst, estimated at $2.5 million–$3.5 million; and two 16th-century paintings by Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni di Niccolò de Lutero (also known as Dosso Dossi) that were commissioned for an Italian noble, and are also being sold from the Diamond collection. Both are estimated at $3 million–$5 million.

The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, has announced the acquisition of seven works by emerging and mid-career artists to its permanent collection, including works by well-known artists Shinique Smith and Ellen Lesperance, as well as pieces from local artists. The newly acquired works will be featured in the museum’s upcoming exhibition “Who What When Where” scheduled to open in March.

This tranche of purchases follows the museum’s controversial decision to deaccession a Jackson Pollock 1946 painting, Red Composition (Painting 1946), from its collection in an effort to address historical gaps in its holdings. The Pollock, which the museum says was donated by its original owners at a value of $800,000, sold for a hammer price of $12 million ($13 million with buyer’s premium, which goes to the auction house) at a Christie’s New York evening sale last October to an anonymous buyer.

The proceeds of the sale went to establishing a fund devoted to purchasing works by artists of color, women, and under-represented, emerging and mid-career artists. (An additional bulk of the funds has been allocated to the direct care of the museum’s more than 10,000-item collection.)

“The Everson’s collection has been steadily evolving in recent years,” Elizabeth Dunbar, the Everson’s director, said in a statement, “and this new group of purchases—the first of many more to come—signals an institutional commitment to building a collection that not only reflects the rich diversity of our community, but embodies the potential for exploring new and multiple narratives within the trajectory of art past, present, and future.”

Among the new works purchased by the Everson Museum is Bale Variant No. 0021 (Christmas) (2011-2017), a sculpture by Los Angeles–based artist Shinique Smith, whose practice incorporates use of clothing and textiles and found objects. The museum also purchased a painted gouache and graphite work on paper, titled Black Gloves Gods Eyes (2019), by Ellen Lesperance, a Portland-based artist and 2020 Guggenheim fellow. 

Works by two Syracuse-based artists are also entering the collection as part of the latest round of acquisitions. Ceramic artist Sharif Bey’s Protest Shield #2 (2020), one from a series of shields that draw on references from African, Oceanic, and African-American sources, and a quilt, titled Bang Bang, You Dead! (2018), by Ellen Blalock, whose practice focuses on depicting the experience of Black people in the United States, are now both in the museum’s holdings.

Another purchase includes a ceramic sculpture by Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock), whose works respond to environmental issues. Additionally, an 6.6-foot by 4.7-foot mixed-media piece, titled Waiting For Medgar, Jackson, MS 1963 (2004), by Atlanta-based artist Dawn Williams Boyd shows white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith holding a shotgun. De La Beckwith killed Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963 outside the latter’s home.

In her statement, Dunbar added, “These works, in particular, speak directly to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the perpetuation of racist ideologies and violence against people of color, the global impact of climate change, and systemic inequities related to race and gender, among others.”

The Everson Museum was one of several U.S. institutions, which also included the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Palm Springs Art Museum, to take advantage of a temporary relaxation of deaccessioning guidelines in April by the American Association of Museum Directors in order to provide financial relief to museums during the pandemic.

Critics decried the Everson Museum’s plan to sell the Pollock, arguing that, despite the intention to address inequities represented in the permanent collection, selling off the historically significant work—it is the artist’s second work in his famed drip technique—was a shaky solution. In defense of the sale, the president of Everson’s board of trustees, Jessica Arb Danial, subsequently responded to those opposed of the plan in an article published by The Art Newspaper, writing, “These voices are echoing decades of status quo art history textbook and gallery etiquette, rather than the realities we are living today.”

The Everson Museum is one of a few institutions that has aimed to diversify its collection in recent years, selling off works by blue-chip white male artists as part of the process. In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art set a precedent when it made headlines by selling works by blue-chip artists, like Andy Warhol and Franz Kline, at auction, generating more than $8 million. The proceeds were used to acquired works by Senga Nengudi, Melvin Edwards, Meleko Mokgosi, and Carrie Mae Weems. (The BMA’s own plans to sell three works by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol, together valued at some $60 million, was scuttled hours before two of them were to hit the auction block after weeks of immense public outcry.) In June 2019, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sold a Mark Rothko painting for $50.1 million at Sotheby’s, using the funds generated from the sale to acquire works by artists such as Mickalene Thomas, Alma Thomas, Kay Sage, and Leonora Carrington.

In an annual report, the Arts Council England confirmed a record total of £64.5 million worth of art was allocated to U.K. public institutions through the British government’s Acceptance in Lieu (AIL) tax scheme. The total tax settlement from those acquisitions amounts to £40 million across 52 cases.

Through the program, which exists as a provision under U.K. tax law, owners of valuable artworks can offer them to the country in exchange for credit used to offset estate taxes. According to the organization’s 2019 report, the government committee placed 46 objects totaling a value of £58.6 million in public museum collections. The tax settlements from those works totaled £33.6 million. Since 2010, the panel has reported a total £423 million worth of art allocated to museums through the government program and £264.1 million in tax settlements. Museums incur no cost for acquisitions made through the tax plan.Continue Reading