As the Mid-season Contemporary Art sales scheduled for the first week in March edge closer, there are a host of provocative lots leading interest around the middle-market auctions at Christies, Sotheby’s and Phillips. Typically, these mid-season contemporary auctions hold lower estimates than both Day and Evening sales. For veteran collectors, these sales can signal which upcoming artists’ works have the potential to perform in the secondary market Day and Evening sales slated with higher estimates.

The top lots in Sotheby’s sale include Wayne Thiebaud’s urban landscape Civic Center (1986), estimated at $2.5 to 3.5m, and Lee Bontecou’s untitled metal and fiberglass work estimated at $900,000 to $1.2m. Last year, the March Contemporary Curated sale achieved a total of $36.8m, surpassing the sale volume in the London Contemporary Day sales. Last year Sotheby’s was able to sell Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Painter) for a sum far in excess of its high estimate. The work sold for $7.3m over a $2.5m high estimate; that would be an impressive price in any Evening sale.

Christie’s Postwar to Present sale on March 5^th will feature 217 middle-market pieces by 20^th Century icons including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana, as well as emerging artists such as Julie Curtiss and Eddie Martinez, who have found recent success in the winter season London Evening sales. In the top echelon of estimates are two of Robert Indiana’s classic LOVE paintings sourced from the artist’s estate—each estimated at $1-1.5m—and Alma Thomas’s Flash of Spring estimated at $450,000-$650,000. Warhol’s Jackie (1964), a blue silkscreen carries an estimate of $600,000-800,000, following the sale of a trove of Warhol portraits of celebrity athletes from the collection of Richard L. Weisman that surged the market in the February Christie’s London Evening sale. Additionally, Agnes Gund donated Donald Judd’s Untitled (1978), reasonably estimated between $50,000-70,000, to be sold for the benefit of BOMB Magazine’s Endowment Fund.

A painting by Eddie Martinez titled Keys to a Defunct Castle (2015) will also be offered at an estimate of $480,000-680,000. In 2015, the work was sold to a Chinese collector at Art Basel Hong Kong by Mitchell-Innes & Nash around $80,000.

Keith Haring’s Untitled (1984) from the collection of Warhol confidant Jon Gould will also being offered at $200,000-300,000 at Christie’s. This follows the £3.2m sale of a massive Haring tarp that opened the Phillips February Evening auction. A glass sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, who enjoyed a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. last year, will be offered at an estimate of $70,000 to $90,000 in the Postwar to Present sale.

In a move led by Pace’s Marc Glimcher, three galleries have beat out the auction houses to sell works from the collection of Donald B. Marron, the prominent collector and financier who died in December. Ahead of the sale of the collection, the galleries—Pace, Gagosian, and Acquavella, each of which had close ties with Marron—will organize private selling exhibitions that will put the Marron collection on view in late April, just ahead of May auctions in New York.

Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips received word late on Tuesday, February 18, that the three galleries would handle the sale of the Marron collection privately. In January, it was widely reported that the Marron collection would head to auction, making up a major component of the May sales and carrying a valuation with a whisper number in the range of $450 million.

All three auction houses had offered guarantees of just over $300 million for the 300-work collection. The tripartite deal between the galleries would have to have been for a bigger number. How much higher the galleries were willing to bid and how they divided the overall guarantee is closely held information. Market participants will see how the works were divided when the exhibitions start on Friday, April 24.

Among the works in the collection are Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Femme au beret et la collerette (Woman with Beret and Collar) and his 1962 Femme assise (Jacqueline), Mark Rothko’s 1957 Number 22 (reds), Cy Twombly’s 2011 Untitled (Camino Real), and several pieces by Brice Marden, including his Complements (2004–2007), as well as paintings by Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, and Laura Owens.

The move is undoubtedly a blow to the auction houses whose sales volume in the current market depends far more on securing sufficient supply than in generating demand from collectors. But it is not without risks for the galleries in a market where pricing is well established and the lack of competition may blunt margins.

The announcement also intensifies the competition for the collection of Harry and Linda Macklowe, which the auction houses are said to be pitching this week. The size and importance of the Macklowe collection—valued at $700 million and made up of the couple’s most valuable 65 works that they were ordered to sell by a judge as part of their divorce proceedings—may also have played a role in the guarantee level all three houses were able to offer. The auction houses would have been cautious about over-committing in advance of the Macklowe deal.

The loss of the Marron works also makes Sotheby’s acquisition of the estate of Colorado collector Virginia Williams—with works by Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois for around $100 million in a deal brokered by Bank of America’s Dana Prussian—seem all the more prescient.

 

 

The restructuring of Sotheby’s under its new owner, Patrick Drahi, is having a cascading effect on the legal community that underpins the art market. Late last year, the long-serving General Counsel of the auction house, Jonathan Olsoff, left along with John Cahill, former General Counsel of Phillips who was in private practice for a number of years before taking a commercial role as Sotheby’s top deal maker.

Today, the pair announced the formation of Olsoff | Cahill | Cossu LLP, a boutique art law firm that unites Olsoff and Cahill with Cahill’s former colleague in private practice, Paul Cossu, most recently a partner at Pryor Cashman. The new firm will operate in New York, Los Angeles, London and Zurich.

That last city offers a clue to some big news here. The three lawyers are forming a strategic alliance with London law firm Joseph Hage Aronson which is led by Joseph Hage. JHA Is active in commercial litigation, arbitration and tax disputes. Joe Hage is a significant but rarely discussed force behind the scenes in the art world. He has deep ties to the phenomenally successful Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon markets. Hage also acts as an advisor to artists, artist estates, and collectors in the art world.

The new firm plans to address some of the needs troubling the art market as the UK adopts new anti-money laundering protocols that may affect that art market by launching an ancillary company to supply a number of services around due diligence research, insurance, shipping, copyright clearance, escrow services, transaction structuring and financing. “OCC’s focus is to make it secure and efficient for its clients to engage in the full range of art-related services,” John Cahill explained.

Joining the firm in Los Angeles as a partner is Aimée Scala, who left a longtime editorial position at Artforum and began her legal career in New York with Cahill Cossu before building a fine art, entertainment, and intellectual property practice in Los Angeles. Focusing on tax, estate planning, nonprofits, philanthropic and artistic legacies, Pamela L. Grutman will be based in New York, where she earned her LLM in Taxation from NYU School of Law. Pamela, who also has a degree in architecture, is a member of the bars in New York, Florida, and New Jersey.

Christie’s London Evening sale of Contemporary art had few star lots—but only one that failed to find a buyer—yet it managed to pull in a total £56.2 million ($72.8 million), down little more than a quarter from the previous year’s comparable sale. Two lots, one by Christopher Wool and one by Glenn Ligon, were withdrawn before the sale, leaving nevertheless an outsize number of lots—56—for the time and venue. Christie’s managed the sale exceptionally well, including convincing the consignor of a Gerhard Richter constellation painting to accept a price two-thirds of the low estimate.

Overall, the sale continues to reinforce the impression that the Contemporary art market has compressed toward works in the so-called middle market price band, below $5 million.

The night’s top lots were the late West Coast collector Richard L. Weisman’s commissioned portrait of Muhammad Ali by Andy Warhol, which made £4.97 million. It was the lead lot among the ten sports figures depicted by the artist at Mr. Weisman’s request. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jack Nicklaus, and O.J. Simpson were also legendary personalities from the series who sold better than their estimates. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Mosque sold for £3.9 million, falling below its low estimate but still ranking among the most valuable lots of the evening. The same was true of Sigmar Polke’s untitled work, which reached £3.13 million while also failing to reach the low estimate. David Hockney’s 2006 landscape Walnut Trees sold well at £3.25 million, to come fourth among the lots sold by value.

Albert Oehlen’s Mission Rohrfrei (Down Periscope) from 1996 continued the artist’s market run, being the first of the top ten lots to achieve its price through aggressive bidding. The final price of £3.19 million reflected a hammer price of £2.65 million that edged slightly above its £2.5 million high estimate.

Several other lots that enjoyed aggressive bidding began the sale with strong momentum; they were all by painters now familiar to the market. Jordan Casteel’s Mom (2013) set a record price for the artist at £515,250, reflecting a hammer price well over the £250,000 high estimate. Another young female artist, Tschabalala Self, surfaced at the start of the sale with lively interest from potential buyers. Six telephone bidders jumped in early, overwhelming the three bidders in the order book held by Jussi Pylkkänen. The initial frenzy raised anticipation but the bidding for Spare Moment petered out over the £120,000 high estimate to sell eventually for a solid but perhaps less-than-hoped-for £170,000 on the hammer, or £212,500 premium. Self’s auction record, set in October 2019, remains substantially higher at $486,461 which in that case reached about five times the low estimate.

Later in the sale, an untitled work by Gotthard Graubner went for £491,250, following the artist’s success last year in a Day sale of a similar monochrome work (that one in gold) that sold for £150,000. In the year prior, another Graubner work sold in a Sotheby’s Evening sale was the first of the artist’s work to come to auction in nearly a decade.

Günther Förg’s untitled series of paintings on lead and wood sold for £1.33 million, increasing his auction record by several hundred thousand dollars. Earlier in the sale, one of Förg’s decorative works a full 13 feet wide sold at the low estimate for £731,250.

Antoni Tàpies, the Spanish painter, achieved a record with his mixed-media assemblage, Pintura del Cubell, which sold for £851,250. The price reflected strong competition for a work that has been held in the same collection since 1988.

Grayson Perry did well with Emotional Landscape, which sold slightly better than his ceramic jar positioned similarly in the previous night’s sale. At Christie’s, the work made £187,500. Also following a strong sale from the previous night was Eddie Martinez, whose Cannibal Eyes made £347,250 over a £180,000 high estimate.

The final strong sale of the evening was Howard Hodgkin’s Like an Open Book from the collection of Jeremy Lancaster, which Christie’s has been selling over the course of several months. That work sold for £443,250, more than double the high estimate, with the buyer’s premium.

Sotheby’s London Contemporary Evening sale offered little excitement at the top of the market even as it made £92,488,659 ($119.2 million). Three of the 46 lots offered in the sale failed to find buyers (one, a Richter abstract in primary colors, was withdrawn before action began), giving the sale a strong and well-managed 93 percent sell-through rate. That doesn’t mean the sale lacked interest: A work by A.R. Penck set a new record for the German artist, and paintings by Eddie Martinez, Wayne Thiebaud, and Gunther Uecker were bid well above estimates. A sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan, newly notorious after the banana feeding frenzy at Art Basel in Miami, was also a surprise hit.

Of even greater interest is the fact that the total was almost exactly the same as the previous year—£93,205,800—which came from the sale of 19 more lots. Overall, making the same money with 30 percent fewer lots is worthy of notice.

Among the top 10 lots in the sale were works by David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Christopher Wool, and Yves Klein, each selling for £6 million, but none hammered for prices much beyond the low estimate. The top of the Contemporary art market remains well-priced, and some observers found the Hockney sale at a healthy £23,117,000 ($29,820,930) to be a disappointment. The guaranteed work had a few bids but saw no great competition.

Further down the lots were a painting by Adrian Ghenie that made £4,184,500 (with fees) over a £3.5 million high estimate; Marlene Dumas’s Cathedral sold for £3,135,000, which represented a price within the estimate range; and Bridget Riley’s 1963 Op Art black-and-white work Shift sold for a solid £2,715,000.

Another work from the same year, Wayne Thiebaud’s Fruit Stand, a small roadside landscape of, you guessed it, a fruit stand was sold for a mouth-watering £1,815,000, with fees. The hammer price was £300,000 above the £1.2 million high estimate.

Jean Dubuffet’s Épisode Champêtre was also chased by several bidders to £1,815,000 over the same high estimate level. Clearly, this was a significant price level for the evening because a Roy Lichtenstein painting of grapes estimated a bit higher also sold for £1,815,000.

A step or two down the price ladder, there were strong sales for a Günther Uecker White Field painting of a seemingly swaying mass of the artist’s signature large nails. The work carried a £750,000 high estimate but sold for £1,515,000, with fees.

At the same price point, Maurizio Cattelan’s untitled work of a female figure meant to be hung from a door frame, replicating a Francesca Woodman photograph, sold for a price 50 percent above the high estimate. This example of the editioned work seems to have been owned by collector Adam Lindemann, who sold it through his Venus Over Manhattan gallery to Thierry Gillier, founder of the Zadig & Voltaire French fashion brand. Gillier sold the work at Christie’s in May 2017 as part of the Zadig & Voltaire collection for $1,507,500.

Tonight the same work made £1,515,000 ($1,962,561), a gain for the auction house but only a slight profit for the consignor, who made a little more than $100,000 after holding it for less than three years.

Nonetheless, the small gain was part of a larger market victory. The work carried an irrevocable bid and an attractive £600,000 low estimate. The artist’s recent demonstration of his ability to attract media attention may have helped the consignor squeeze out a little higher price after risking a considerable loss.

The other artist in the sale with a knack for attracting publicity was Banksy, whose 2018 Brexit-themed work Vote to Love was bid up from a £400,000 low estimate to a £1,155,000 premium selling price early in the sale. It was one of the two (of three) warm-up lots that opened the sale exceeding their estimates. The other was Julie Curtiss’s Witch, a small 2017 painting that sold for £162,500 ($210,505) to extend her auction winning streak of the last two seasons.

A longer selling streak that began in London last October is held by Eddie Martinez, the New York abstract painter who seems to have recently developed a strong following among buyers in Asia. Martinez’s work has been selling London, New York, and Hong Kong, with the sales in South China punctuating his market rise. Tonight, Empirical Mind State came to the auction block with a £350,000 low estimate, substantially higher than the selling prices of several works in London last October. When the bidding was done, the painting had sold for £591,000 ($765,483). That is not quite the $2 million for which one work sold in Hong Kong, but markets are not made only from top prices. Strong sales below the peaks are signals that the market still has depth of demand.

A small Philip Guston painting of two hooded figures did not perform well compared to estimates, but considering that a composition of similar size, and with much more color, achieved last October almost the same price as tonight’s £1,095,000, it’s hard not to see that as evidence of continuing demand for the artist.

Finally, A.R. Penck quietly set a record price this evening when World of the Eagle I sold for £531,000. The price was within the estimate range, but the record showed the upward path of this artist’s market.