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Sotheby’s Pulls in a $9m David Hockney for November

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Sotheby’s just announced a large David Hockney painting from the estate of television producer and writer Steven Bochco. The $9m interior image was painted in 1988.

Today Sotheby’s announces that David Hockney’s large scale painting Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs from 1988, a highly regarded period within the artist’s career, will highlight our Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York on 14 November 2018. The work comes to auction from the collection of legendary television producer and writer Steven Bochco, who acquired it in 1997, and appears at auction for the first time this fall with an estimate of $9/12 million.

Jacqueline Wachter, Sotheby’s Vice President of Private Sales, Contemporary Art, said: “We are thrilled to present this dynamic Los Angeles interior to collectors on the West Coast next week and to bring it to auction for the first time in November. Los Angeles has played a major role in Hockney’s life and work, and this painting is an excellent illustration of that relationship. This piece is also one of the greatest Hockney’s to be kept in a private California collection, out of public view for the last 20 years. It is a particular privilege to offer this painting from the collection of the late Steven Bochco – himself a legend of the entertainment industry and of the city of Los Angeles.”

Steven Bochco (1943 – 2018), a winner of ten Emmy Awards, was an iconic television writer and producer for over 50 years, best known for creating the groundbreaking television dramas “NYPD Blue,” “Hill Street Blues,” and “L.A. Law.”  Bochco was an avid enthusiast of Hockney’s work and he hung Montcalm Interior With 2 Dogs prominently in the salon of his Los Angeles home, denoting it as his personal favorite from his collection of art.

Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs will be exhibited publicly for the first time in over two decades in our Los Angeles galleries (2029 Century Park East, Suite 2950) on 16 & 17 October, alongside other highlights of our marquee autumn auctions in New York. In addition to the present painting, works by titans of the 20th and 21st centuries – including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Barkley Hendricks, Claude Monet, René Magritte and more – will be on view to the public.

Lit with the bright glow of California sunshine, Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs encapsulates Hockney’s evolution in the tradition of interior painting, while also displaying his unique interpretation of the genre. Painted in 1988 – the same year as his first, critically-acclaimed U.S. retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – the canvas captures a room within Hockney’s Montcalm Avenue home in Los Angeles, which he purchased in the summer of 1979. This home went on to inspire a number of the artist’s most iconic paintings of the late-1980s, including the sister painting to the present work, Large Interior, Los Angeles, which has been held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1989. Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs was featured prominently in the artist’s 1992-93 retrospective organized by Fundación Juan March, Madrid, which traveled to both the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels and the Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona. The work has not been exhibited publicly since.

At once highly personalized and deeply rooted in art historical tradition, Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs exemplifies Hockney’s ability to merge the painterly techniques of the past with his own distinctive, inventive, and remarkably intimate experience of reality. Painting with vivid brushstrokes and vibrant, raw colors that clearly evoke the post-Impressionist masters whom he greatly admired, Hockney flattens space to enhance the emotional and physical immediacy of the viewing experience. In this way, Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs showcases the rich, saturated color application and deft handling of space that are characteristic of Hockney’s greatest paintings.

Hauser + Wirth Returns to FIAC with Bourgeois & Bellmer Exhibition

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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (2005) © The Easton Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, and DACS, London Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth
Hauser + Wirth is showing at the Grand Palais in Paris next week for FIAC bringing the gallery back to the fair. Hauser has works by Philip Guston and Günther Förg at the booth but the main emphasis is a themed exhibition called Le Coeur est Là which is meant to be a dialogue between Louise Bougeois (above) and Hans Bellmer. He gallery’s press release explains:
Hauser & Wirth returns to FIAC this October with a selection of works on the theme of notions of desire and sexual ambiguity. Built around an intriguing dialogue between the works of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer, the concept of the booth takes as a point of departure the title, Le Cœur est Là, referencing a series of works which Louise Bourgeois returned to over the course of her career.
While Bourgeois and Bellmer lived in Paris in 1938, it is believed they never met. Their approaches have marked differences as well as shared themes – of the body as expressive material, a source of creativity and fertility, ambiguity and eroticism. The concept pays homage to the landmark exhibition ‘Double Sexus’ which was held in Berlin at the Nationalgalerie – Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in 2010, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus Ohio in 2011.
With the participation of Ubu Gallery – who loaned significant works by Hans Bellmer to ‘Double Sexus’ – the booth expands on the topic by creating compelling narratives. The presentation features important works by Franz West, Lee Lozano, Zoe Leonard and others. In two works by Paul McCarthy and Alina Szapocznikow, the human form suggests a trajectory from Hans Bellmer’s illustrated book, ‘Les Jeux de la Poupée’, a collaboration with Paul Éluard for the Surrealist journal Le Minotaure.

Galerie Ropac Previews FIAC Stand with Carl Andre

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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has announced the works it is bringing to FIAC later next week. The fair held in Paris’s Grand Palais will feature works by Jack Pierson, Yan Pei-Ming, and Imi Knoebel, alongside recent works by Robert Longo, Georg Baselitz and Tony Cragg. Coinciding with the survey exhibition Monumental Minimal, on view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin during FIAC, Ropac’s stand will also present major pieces of Minimal art by Carl Andre (above) and Robert Mangold.

Carl Andre‘s Fifth Copper Square (2007) is the result of a life-long investigation into mathematical structures, geometric forms and seriality. Composed of 25 copper plates, this sculpture embodies the characteristic features of Andre’s work, such as the use of ready-made materials, the employment of modular units, and the articulation of three-dimensionality through a consideration of negative as well as positive space. Considered one of the most important figures of Minimal art, Andre has sought to reduce the vocabulary of 20th-century sculpture to basic forms such as the square.

With classical restraint, Robert Mangold translates the most basic of formal elements – shape, line, and colour – into paintings whose apparent simplicity expresses complex ideas. In his shaped panel paintings, of which Four Color Frame Painting (1985) is a distinctive example, he uses subtle modulations of colour and hand-drawn graphite lines to present the viewer with a meditative experience.

Untitled (X-Ray of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882, After Manet) (2017), a monumental charcoal drawing by Robert Longo, is a remarkable rendering of Édouard Manet’s last major work. Longo decided to tackle Manet’s masterpiece after seeing an X-ray of the work. The X-ray image offered a window into the past, revealing clues about Manet’s working process and, most intriguingly, the adjustments he made to the barmaid’s position in earlier stages of the composition. Both past and present versions are made visible in Longo’s intricately-detailed depiction, showing the viewer what usually remains unseen and revealing an alternate history.

Providing a preview of the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at the Musée Courbet, Ornans, Yan Pei-Ming’s Portrait de Gustave Courbet (2018) pays homage to the master of Realism. Ming’s monochromatic paintings of epic scale have redefined the traditional parameters of portraiture over the past three decades. The artist believes that portraits have the power to capture and transcend experience and thought. His exhibition at Musée Courbet will coincide with the celebration of the bicentenary of Courbet’s birth in June 2019, before it travels to the Petit Palais and to the Musée d’Orsay.

Sotheby’s Has Rare Complete Johns Cicada Print Set

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Starting on Sunday, October 14, Sotheby’s will have the highlights of its Prints and Multiples sales to be held in four auction sessions from October 18 to 22nd. The sales feature more than 450 works, including this rare complete set of Jasper Johns screenprints (above) from the collection of David Teiger. Cicada is estimated to sell for $300/500,000. The last time another example of this set was offered was 21 years ago during the Ganz Collection sale. Here’s what Sotheby’s has to say about the highlights:

The Collection of David Teiger

Ranging from works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Christopher Wool, David Hockney and Olafur Eliasson, the selection of 21 prints on offer from the Collection of David Teiger is led by a complete set of Jasper Johns’s beautiful Cicada (ULAE 215) from 1981 (estimate $300/500,000), which illustrates the artist’s iconic crosshatch motif across an array of complementary colors. In both its imagery and technique, the work demonstrates Johns’ passion for printmaking, with each screenprint employing 19 screens to achieve depth and texture – in the process exploring the boundaries of the medium. The present set is one of two printer’s proofs from an edition of only seven. A complete set of Cicada has not appeared at auction since 1997, when one sold from the famed Ganz Collection.

David Teiger had a strong commitment to collecting and supporting works by female artists, and the selection of prints from his collection features a group of figural nudes by Marlene Dumas as well as portraits by Elizabeth Peyton, including Flower Ben from 2003 (estimate $5/7,000).

Andy Warhol Icons

A strong selection of works by Andy Warhol are highlighted by three complete sets of the artist’s prints, highlighted by Ten Portraits of the Jews of the Twentieth Century (F. & S. II.226-235) from 1980 (estimate $250/350,000). The portraits are a testament to the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir, and Gertrude Stein. Other iconic subjects by Warhol include unique trial proofs of Paramount and Dracula, a screenprint of Superman from the Myths portfolio, and nine screenprints from the Flowers portfolio – each sold individually.

Richard Diebenkorn’s Monumental Green

Considered an icon of postwar printmaking in America, Richard Diebenkorn’s Green is a showcase of the artist’s achievement in the field (estimate $400/600,000). Its monumental size – measuring 45 inches tall – balanced composition, layers of abstraction and brilliant color all factor into this work’s label as the artist’s largest and most important print.

A Survey of Pablo Picasso Prints

Next week’s sale includes an extensive range of over 60 prints by Pablo Picasso. Spanning the artist’s career and mastery of nearly every print medium, highlights range from an impression of the artist’s first masterwork in etching, Le Repas frugal (B. 1; BA. 2) (estimate $50/70,000), to some of the strongest images from the Vollard Suite and numerous linoleum cuts from the 1960s – including Portrait de Jacqueline de face, II (Tête de femme) (B. 1063; BA. 1280) (estimate $80/120,000), one of three portraits of the artist’s wife and muse, Jacqueline Roque.

Lincoln Center Editions

The Prints & Multiples auction will close on 22 October with a session dedicated to a selection of 79 prints from Lincoln Center Editions, with works by a diverse group of artists including Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Jim Dine and Karen Kilimnik. The Proceeds from their sale of these prints continue to benefit Lincoln Center’s innovative cultural programming and education.

Lincoln Center Editions is a component of the Vera List Art Project, which was launched at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962 by philanthropist and art collector, Vera List. A pioneer in the fields of contemporary patronage and art education, Vera was committed to helping develop Lincoln Center into an intersection of the visual and performing arts.

Her vision was realized in a publishing program that commissioned artists to create images inspired by Lincoln Center and published in limited editions to commemorate its events, from film screenings to operas. Cultural icons such as Chuck Close, Helen Frankenthaler, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt and Andy Warhol each created stellar editions that were offered for sale to benefit education and performance programs at Lincoln Center. To date, the highly-respected program has published more than 150 limited edition prints. Today, Lincoln Center Editions continues to collaborate with contemporary artists in the spirit of Vera List. Artists such as John Baldessari, Angel Otero, Robin Rhode and Carlos Rolón/Dzine have most recently contributed editions.

Phillips Wants to Make a New Carmen Herrera Record for the Fourth Year in a Row

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Phillips is seeking a record price for Carmen Herrara next month with Blanco y Verde, a work that has not been exhibited in five decades. Each November for the last three years, Phillips has set a new auction record price for Carmen Herrera. In 2015, they scored with Basque, a 1965 work that made $437k over a much lower estimate. In 2016, Cerulean from the same year was sold for $970k. Last year, it was Untitled (Orange and Black) from 1956 that pushed the record to $1.179m. If Blanco y Verde follows the previous pattern of selling near the high estimate (here it’s $1-1.5m) we will see yet another record fall for Herrera.

Here’s Phillips’s release on the painting:Continue Reading

Si Newhouse’s Francis Bacon Study Offered at Christie’s

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With comparisons to the Mona Lisa and Picasso’s Dora Maar, Christie’s is pulling out the stops for Si Newhouse’s Francis Bacon small portrait of Henrietta Moraes that the auction house just announced for the November sales. Newhouse played an important role as a collector launching the current contemporary art market with his aggressive buying in the late 1990s that established important prices and demand. Over the last two decades, many of his significant pieces have been sold and re-sold at stratospheric mark-ups. The power of the Newhouse provenance is not necessarily reflected in the $14m low estimate on the Bacon being offered here. Katya Kazakina spoke to Tobias Meyer, who is handling the dispersal of Newhouse’s art collection, about the original acquisition in 2007. Kazakina says Newhouse, who was not afraid to pay good prices for works of quality he wanted to own, paid $9m for the work.

Here’s Christie’s release on the painting:Continue Reading

Christie’s $40m Fresh-to-Auction Van Gogh

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On view now in Japan, this van Gogh from 1887 will appear at auction for the first time in November during the Impressionist and Modern Evening sale at Christie’s. The work has an unpublished estimate but the whisper number the auction house hopes to achieve is in the region of $40m:

On 11 November Christie’s will offer the painting that marked the moment Vincent Van Gogh ‘crossed the divide into contemporary art,’ Coin de jardin avec papillons, 1887 (estimate on request).

Presented at auction for the first time, Coin de jardin avec papillons possesses a sweeping exhibition history. Most recently, it was exhibited as a focal point of ‘Van Gogh & Japan,’ a travelling exhibition that explored the artist’s fascination with Japonism, and the significant impact it had on his work. ‘Van Gogh and Japan’ was made possible by a collaborative effort between Hokkaido Shimbun Press and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, traveling to all four museums throughout 2017 and 2018. Van Gogh’s Coin de jardin avec papillons will return to Japan once again for a pre-sale exhibition at Christie’s Tokyo from 10-11 October.

David Kleiweg de Zwaan, Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s, remarked: “The two years that Van Gogh spent in Paris, from March 1886 until February 1888, represent a pivotal period in his career, during which he assimilated a host of diverse artistic currents and forged a deeply personal style. With its range of creative influences, from pointillism to Japanese prints, the present painting exemplifies the experimental zeal of the era. Van Gogh’s Coin de jardin avec papillons is a key example of his innovative and radical style.”

‘What people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity,’ wrote an exhilarated Van Gogh to his sister Wil in the summer of 1887. The cause of the Dutch painter’s excitement was the discovery of a groundbreaking new art movement that had exploded onto the Parisian art scene in the 1870s. ‘In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Now I have seen them and though not being one of their club yet I have admired certain Impressionist pictures.’

Out went the earthy tones and studied gravity and in came a series of richly-coloured landscapes and still lifes alive with the spontaneity of plein air painting, and the stylistic influence of Japanese wood block prints. As he studied the colour theories and gestures promoted by artists like Georges Seurat, his brushstrokes became looser and his palette became brighter.

Executed between May and June 1887, Coin de jardin avec papillons marks this crucial turning point in the artist’s career. Painted at a time when experiments in photography were pushing the boundaries of pictorial conventions, it is nature in close-up — a profound departure from the traditional landscape. At its centre, six butterflies dart between the foliage, their wings iridescent spots of white and red.

Interestingly, the park Van Gogh used for Coin de jardin avec papillons was in Asnières, a small Paris suburb on the banks of the Seine, which in the mid-1800s became a popular destination with day-trippers. Here, Van Gogh became acquainted with many of the younger Impressionists, including Emile Bernard and Paul Signac. They inspired him to adopt some of their experimental techniques, particularly Pointillism, which Van Gogh had first encountered at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886.

Yet Van Gogh was never one for structure or rules. Under his brush, Seurat’s neatly ordered dots were willfully slackened and applied with a furious intensity. What Seurat thought of Van Gogh’s very personal twist on his invention is not known, but it did not seem to bother Signac, who became a friend of Van Gogh’s and was intrigued by his feverish passions.

As the summer came to an end, Van Gogh’s attention turned south, toward Arles. Coin de jardin avec papillons anticipates the garden paintings he would make in the asylum at St Rémy in 1888 following a mental breakdown, and the butterflies are a fitting metaphor for the fragility of his own life.

In the Van Gogh & Japan exhibition catalogue, art historian Cornelia Homburg describes Coin de jardin avec papillons, stating: “There are no other fully fledged works from Paris that show a similarly concentrated focus and attention to detail as in this extraordinary canvas.”

Originally held in the collections of Theo van Gogh and his descendants, Coin de jardin avec papillons also belonged to Joseph Reinach, the 19th-century French journalist and politician best known as the public champion of artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus.

Sotheby’s Is Restituting $12m Schiele in November Sale

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Sotheby’s announced late last week that it would be offering an Egon Schiele work being sold as part of a private restitution discovered by Sotheby’s own researchers. The $12m work will be sold in the Impressionist and Modern Evening sale on November 12th:

Sotheby’s is honored to announce that Egon Schiele’s masterwork landscape Dämmernde Stadt (Die Kleine Stadt II) (City in  Twilight (The Small City II)) will highlight our Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 12 November 2018.

Painted in 1913, Dämmernde Stadt is one of Schiele’s finest landscapes remaining in private hands, with comparable works now principally found in museum collections. The dreamlike view above the city of Krumau – birthplace of the artist’s mother – documents the pivotal period during which Schiele established his singular and now-iconic visual language, after years of shadowing his mentor Gustav Klimt.

Independent of its art historical importance, the work is distinguished by the remarkable family history it has brought to life. Dämmernde Stadt was purchased in 1928 by Elsa Koditschek, a young Jewish widow living in Vienna. During the course of her harrowing persecution by the Nazis following the annexation of Austria in 1938, the work was forcibly sold in payment of alleged debts to the very person who helped Elsa survive. Sotheby’s will present the work this November as the resolution of a joint and private restitution between the present owners and Elsa’s heirs.

Elsa’s story is told today through an extensive and incredibly rare family archive of correspondence she wrote throughout the war and for years after. However, her heirs had remained unaware of the landscape until recent years, when Sotheby’s research on an unrelated picture uncovered reference to the Koditschek name. Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Restitution, and Andrea Jungmann, Managing Director of Sotheby’s Austria, initiated a dialogue between the family and the present owners that has ultimately resulted in the present offering.

Dämmernde Stadt is estimated to sell for $12/18 million in the 12 November auction.

DÄMMERNDE STADT (DIE KLEINE STADT II)

The series of large-scale townscapes painted by Egon Schiele between 1913 and 1917 show him working at the apex of his artistic powers, experimenting with elements of composition, color and form that would eventually lead him to Abstraction.

Dämmernde Stadt depicts the small, medieval town of Krumau, the birthplace of Schiele’s mother and one of only two locations that are the subjects of his celebrated landscapes. Referred to by Schiele as the “dead city”, Krumau’s compact configuration was intriguing to the artist, who captured its winding streets and crumbling buildings from perched atop the high left bank of the Moldau river – known today as the Vltava in the Czech Republic.  The result of this radical approach to perspective is a flat pictorial dreamscape that reflects both his highly-personalized interpretation, as well as his emotional and psychological response to the storied town.

These stylistic elements manifest in myriad characteristics throughout the canvas: the boldly-delineated shapes of buildings’ rooftops; twilight cast in a muted palette; and windows aglow with brilliant, jewel-like colors reminiscent of Gothic stained-glass. In looking to a Medieval past, Schiele was aligned with a contemporary strain of Gothic revivalism. However he was also attuned with the artistic movements developing concurrently across Europe at the time. His adoption of the high viewpoint and his growing sensitivity to formal relations suggest that he was looking at the work of Post-Impressionist artists, such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. The influence of Klimt’s experiments with form, and the square format in particular, are also apparent in the present work.

Bonhams Africa Now = £1.8m

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It’s African art season in London with Bonhams holding its sale last week and Sotheby’s coming up next week. The market for African art has turned slightly in the direction of Ben Enonwu who dominated Bonhams top ten list (above) with all but one of the sales. The top lot was another re-discovered version of the Tutu portrait that made £1.2m earlier this year at Bonhams. Below is Bonhams post-sale release:

Bonhams Africa Now 121-lot sale achieved an impressive £1,802,625 in London yesterday, 4 October. The sale offered a significant collection of works by Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu. His painting, Tutu, 1974, the second rediscovered portrait of Enwonwu’s famous sitter, the Ife royal, Princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, led the sale, selling for an impressive £320,750.

Nine of the top ten lots were by Ben Enwonwu, while works by Congolese artists Freddy Tsimba and Patrick Bongoy also performed well. Tsimba’s Centre fermé, rêve ouvert, achieved £12,500 and Patrick Bongoy’s,Revenants III, sold for £12,500.

The proceeds of the Congolese works were donated to the Malaika Foundation, a charity founded by the supermodel and philanthropist Noella Coursaris Musunka to empower Congolese girls and their communities; and AMADE, which provides help for vulnerable children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. AMADE is supported by Her Royal Highness Caroline, The Princess of Hanover.

Other top lots include:

Rhapsody in Blue, by Ben Enwonwu sold for £112,500 (estimate £60,000-90,000).

Enwonwu’s Ogolo, signed and dated 1992 sold for £112,500 (estimate £100,000-150,000).

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou (Benin, born 1965) Untitled triptych, ‘Demoiselles de Porto-Novo’ seriesmore than doubled its estimate and sold for £37,500 (estimate £12,000 – 18,000).

Demas Nwoko’s Rickshaw Ride, sold for £81,250. (estimate £60,000-90,000).

Works by Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, performed well with Untitled, 2016, achieving £ 25,000 (estimate £10,000-15,000) and ‘Gri Gri II’ (2016) £32,500 (estimate £18,000-25,000).

Christie’s Warms Up to Pierre Soulages Record Price

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Pierre Soulages, Peinture 186 x 143 cm, 23 décembre 1959 ($10-15m)

There are a number of undervalued artists receiving more attention in the market these days. The demand for abstract work from the middle of the 20th Century that might not have been as valued because of the shift from European to American artists has been particularly acute. That backdrop makes the appearance of this Pierre Soulages painting from 1959 such a potential market mover. Peinture 186 x 143 cm, 23 décembre 1959 will be offered at Christie’s this November with an estimate of $10-15m.

That low estimate would put the painting’s sale more than 50% higher than Soulages’s current record price of $6.9m set last year. That record work had a distinctive blue tinge. Chalk up the aggressive pricing to this work’s distinctive coal-hearth red glow and the fact the work was bought directly from the artist before being sold to the current owner. That’s about as ‘fresh-to-market’ as one could hope nearly sixty years later.

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