Sotheby’s has unveiled a painting by prominent Iranian contemporary artist Bahman Mohasses titled Personaggio I (1968) that will be offered at auction this fall. The painting will be sold during the house’s upcoming online modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sale with bidding open from October 20 to 27. It is expected to achieve a price between £60,000-£90,000 ($90,000-$117,000).

First owned by former U.S. vice president Nelson Rockefeller, who acquired it in the mid-1970s, the piece is now being sold by its second private owner, East coast collectors Emily and Richard Spaulding.

Mohasses’s provocative style takes cues from Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti;  his anthropomorphic figures have been compared to Francis Bacon’s. Long known as a recluse, he moved to Rome in the 1950s following an American-backed coup ousting Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In Italy, exposure to 20th-century modern art movements such as Cubism and Surrealism would come to influence his practice.Continue Reading

Ahead of its Paris and London Impressionist and modern evening sale tomorrow, Sotheby’s has announced it will sell two works by Jean-Michael Basquiat from the estate of dealer Enrico Navarra, who died in July at age 67. Both were completed in 1986, two years before the artist’s death. Titled Black and Jazz, the works will go up for sale during Sotheby’s New York contemporary art evening sale next week on October 28, alongside deaccessioned pieces from the Brooklyn Museum and Baltimore Museums of Art collections. Both works are estimated at $4 million–$6 million.

The paintings on wood panel comprise some of Basquiat’s most recognizable motifs. Jazz features a Xerox drawing referencing musician Charles Parker’s song “Now’s the Time,” as well as Basquiat’s copyright symbol, a reference to his graffiti artist alter-ego ©SAMO, alongside anatomical drawings and written scrawls. Navarra acquired the work in 1996 from the artist’s early dealer, Akira Ikeda Gallery in Japan.

The painting’s counterpart, Black, also displays Basquiat’s reference to another prominent Black musician: Louis Armstrong. Elsewhere in the piece, Basquiat’s three-point crown and a skull-like head appear. Navarra acquired the work a year prior to Jazz, in 1995. Both last appeared publicly at a Museo delle Culture di Milano (MUDEC) Basquiat survey in 2016.

Although the works have been in the Navarra collection since the mid-1990s, this is not the first time they have been offered for sale at the auction house. In April 2015, Sotheby’s included the works in a private selling exhibition co-organized with Drake, alongside works by Theaster Gates, David Hammons, and Barkley L. Hendricks. Both works went unsold.

A prominent collector of Basquiat with close ties to mega-collecting family the Mugrabis, Navarra co-authored a comprehensive three-volume catalogue of Basquiat’s work in 1996 with dealer Tony Shafrazi.  His work amplifying Basquiat’s legacy has helped result in the expansion of the artist’s market. In 2017, Sotheby’s sold a 1982 untitled skull painting by Basquiat for $110.5 million.

“Through his exhibitions, scholarship and beyond, Navarra had a profound role in developing the international market for Basquiat’s work that we see today,” Grégoire Billault, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York, said in a statement.

Navarra was also instrumental in securing loans for the 2005 Basquiat retrospective curated by Fred Hoffman that went to the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston.

The New Hampshire Institute of Art is selling a complete volume of photographer, publisher and dealer Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1909-17), formerly in the collection of German-American photographer and painter Edward Steichen. The work comes from the 2,000-item John Teti rare photography book collection. The piece is expected to achieve a price between $250,000-$350,000 and will sell during Massachusetts-based Skinner Auctioneer’s online Fine Books & Manuscripts sale, which is open to bidders from November 2-12.

Published between 1903-1917, Camera Work was a photography-focused independent quarterly printed magazine conceived and edited by Stieglitz. The artist founded the Photo-Secessionist group in 1902, and the publication marked a seminal move for Stieglitz, as he sought to solidify photography’s status at high art. Featuring an Art Nouveau cover designed by Steichen, the journal published photogravures and halftones, with works by artists in the dealer’s circle, including Frank Eugene, Gertrude Käsebier, Frederick Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Clarence White, among others.

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At a major sale of Impressionist and modern art on October 28 at Sotheby’s New York, two works by Giorgio de Chirico and Man Ray from a private collection will head to auction. Both works have never come to auction before, and both could bring new artist records. The works, which will go on view at Sotheby’s on October 21, will hit the block in the same auction as seven deaccessioned pieces from the Brooklyn Museum that were announced last week.

Giorgio de Chirico’s large-scale vertical canvas Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon), 1913, depicts the story of Ariadne and Theseus from Greek mythology, and is painted to make the heroine appear as a monument. The painting is estimated at $10 million–$15 million. Il Pomeriggio di Arianna is part of an eight-work series, five works of which reside in prominent museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The other three, including the present work, are privately owned. Widely exhibited, the work was included in the artist’s traveling 1982 survey at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London. The seller acquired the work in 2001.

The second major work from the consignment is Man Ray’s Black Widow (Nativity), 1915. Standing at 70⅛ inches by 34 inches, the vertical large-scale canvas depicts an abstract black figure with arms raised against a similarly flat geometric composition. The work is estimated at $5 million–$7 million. Completed the same year the artist met the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, the work was held in Man Ray’s personal collection until 1953. It was first in the collection of William N. Copley, who acquired it from the artist in 1953, and then went to the collection of Paris-based art historian and Man Ray expert Marion Meyer in the 1970s. It changed hands several times again before the current owner bought it in 2001.

“Both masterpieces are the epitome of museum-quality painting and provide a unique glimpse into the profound early output of these two visionary artist,” said Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s Americas chairman.

De Chirico’s current auction record was set in 2009 by Il ritornante (ca. 1919), which came from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge and sold at Christie’s for $14.1 million. Man Ray’s geometric canvas Promenade (1916) sold for $5.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York against an estimate of $4 million–$6 million in November 2013. Like the present work, Promenade was completed after the 1913 Armory Show, where the artist drew inspiration from new European styles. It marked a critical shift in Man Ray’s development of a flat planar surface in his paintings.

“Both works stand apart from their contemporaries and the prevailing Cubo-Futurist style of the time, and were forging new artistic boundaries that would deeply influence the Surrealist movement– underscored by their preoccupation with dream-like visuals and hard-edged geometry,” said Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art evening sales in New York.

A portion of the collection of New York collector, art dealer, and interior designer Hester Diamond, who died in February, is coming to auction. The heirs of Diamond’s estate, one of whom is her son Michael Diamond (a founding member of the formative hip hop group the Beastie Boys), are selling their late mother’s collection at Sotheby’s in January during the auction house’s Classic Week sales.

Diamond’s collection includes modern and contemporary art, as well as work by Old Masters, which she began collecting after her husband Harold’s death in 1982. The collection will be offered across a single-owner live and online sale tilted “Fearless: The Collection of Hester Diamond.” The evening sale will be comprised of 60 lots total valued at an estimated $30 million.Continue Reading