Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
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This round-up of the reporting on the November Contemporary Evening sales at Christie’s and Phillips is available to AMMpro subscribers. We will have a detailed report on the sales based on lot data next week.
Last Thursday’s dual Evening auctions starting with Phillips’s $88m curtain raiser and culminating with Christie’s dramatic will-it-won’t-it $90m auction of David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was a fitting close to the New York auction season where $1.8bn in art was sold in six days. Christie’s dominated the top of the market with two $90m works and three evening sales coming in around $300m. Sotheby’s proved a strong performer besting its rivals in Contemporary art when counting by sale title. Phillips had some unexpected failures that interrupted the house’s momentum toward establishing a third-way alternative to the big money duopoly.
Phillips did well with its white Joan Miró Femme dan la nuit which made $22.6m, Andy Warhol’s Gun which made $9.54m, Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde which made $2.66m and kept Phillips streak of setting annual Carmen Herrera records alive and KAWS’s Untitled (Fatal Group) riff on Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert which sold for $3.5m and Mark Rothko’s Black Blue Painting which made $4.2m. The house did poorly with Alberto Burri and the Jackson Pollock painting being de-accessioned from Brazil that was bought in despite strong bids to $15.6m.
The failures at Phillips were somewhat surprising and the mood at Phillips wasn’t helped by the tone of the auctioneer who seemed over-matched by the stress of a tough sale. The source of Phillips’s troubles may not have been apparent, but they were glaringly obvious compared to the opaque comments Kenny Schachter offered The Art Newspaper about the sale of the $90m Hockney.
Yet the art dealer, collector and journalist Kenny Schachter says that “like an Egyptian statue with hands extended both front and back”, a deal like this Hockney painting is never quite what it appears to be. “If no fees are exchanged—Christie’s all but agreed to forego a commission—self buying has ends in itself. Money coming money going, propping up your painting price has ends of its own,” he says.
It’s not clear on what evidence Schachter is accusing the consignor of buying the work himself which would be illegal and foolish to expose to Christie’s which has a duty to prevent. Nor is it clear how the consignor could benefit from buying the work back himself. His ownership would have to be kept a secret for many years after. There’s little or no reason to believe a resale could be accomplished any time soon at any price that wasn’t a major loss. Continue Reading
The New York Times reveals today that the Met Museum in New York is about embark upon a thorough renovation of its African, Oceanic and Americas galleries where tribal and primitive art are displayed. The 40,000 square foot wing will focus more distinctly on each region rather than allowing the presentations to run into each other. At the same time, Sotheby’s Paris has revealed that the estate of one of the great collectors of African and Oceanic art, Murray Frum, has consigned two African works to lead their December 12 auction.
The two works come from recognized masters. The first is a Luba Shankadi, the Master of the Cascading Hairstyle; the second, a reliquary figure Kota Obamba by the Master of the Sebe (above). Here’s Sotheby’s description of the works:
In 2014, Sotheby’s sold Murray Frum’s outstanding collection, built over half a century, distinguished by Polynesian works of great rarity, remarkable quality and historical provenances.
The Master of the Cascading Hairstyle
It is exceptional to be able to attribute an African work of art to an identified artist. The hand of a sculptor Luba Shankadi, nicknamed the ‘Master of Cascade Hairstyle’, was identified around 1960 by the great specialist William Fagg. The first neck support of this hand was collected in 1901 by Brissoni and is now part of the collections of the Museo di Antropologia ed Etnologia in Florence. Only eighteen works of this kind are known to date, most of them in the collections of the most prestigious institutions – from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the British Museum in London.
This masterpiece from the Frum collection is arguably the most emblematic and sophisticated sculpture of the Master of Cascade Hairstyle because of its deep patina that testifies to a continuous and privileged use, the rarity of its iconography, and especially the visual dynamism of his form and his character. For the third time since 2006, Sotheby’s will have the privilege of selling in Paris one of the rare works of this master sculptor.
Figure of Reliquary, Kota Obamba, by the Master of the Sébé Gabon
With less than a dozen works now known, the corpus created by the Master of the Sebé is one of the rarest of African art but also one of the most archaic.
While respecting Expressionist norms specific to Kota sculpture, this Master has gone beyond classical canons by creating a unique set of works. Preserved for almost a quarter of a century in the Frum collection, this reliquary figure brilliantly illustrates both the exceptional technical know-how of the Master of the Sebe Valley and his individual artistic genius.
This artist, active between 1750 and 1800, fed on the artistic currents of the region that he knew how to transcend in order to contain in a motionless form the imperious presence of the ancestor. Then there is the virtuoso composition juxtaposing the extremely thin plates of metal with very narrow slats in a subtle play of chromatic nuances accentuating the visual power of the work.
Sotheby’s has two landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich — Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen (Landscape with Mountain Lake, Morning) (£2-3m) and Sonnenblick im Riesengebirge (Sunburst in the Giant Mountains)(£500-700k) — with distinguished provenance in its December 12th sale. The first comes from the collection of the late Dr Erika Pohl-Ströher and, the second, by descent through the family of the preeminent German-Swiss art dealer Dr Fritz Nathan. It’s rare to see Friedrich paintings come up at auction. These two are the first to appear at Sotheby’s in a dozen years.
Here’s Sotheby’s press release:
Today more perhaps than at any time since Caspar David Friedrich’s death almost 180 years ago, his sublime and timeless landscapes are being appreciated by artists and public alike. The artistic embodiment of landscape painting of the Romantic era, Friedrich strove to express mood and meaning through nature, his aesthetic informed by his Protestant upbringing and the idea of divine creation manifesting itself in the natural world.
Claude Piening, Head of Sotheby’s 19th Century European Paintings in London, said: “It is enormously exciting and virtually unprecedented to see not one, but two, oil paintings by Friedrich, from completely separate sources, appear on the market at once. Friedrich was the father of German Romanticism and of modern German art, not to mention one of the defining European artists of the nineteenth-century. His legacy was so powerful, and his immediately recognisable, timeless style even today captures the imaginations of artists and the public alike. The rarity, museum quality, and exceptional provenance of both of these paintings is sure to generate great excitement among private and institutional buyers alike.”
While Friedrich was an exacting student of the landscape, and though his paintings give the impression of the greatest appearance of actuality, his landscapes were, in fact, contructs of his own design. Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen depicts a lone wanderer in a frock coat, dwarfed by the expanse of lake and mountains beyond, pausing for a moment to take in the vista. Painted circa 1823-25, the work can be seen as the culmination of the artist’s developing thoughts on, and ambitions for, an Alpine landscape. While it has been suggested that the subject could be the Königssee in the Bavarian Alps, or the Eiger and Mönch peaks in the Bernese Alps, the exact reproduction of a Swiss Apline view was never Friedrich’s objective. He rarely delivered a topographically realistic view of a subject, preferring instead to give free reign to his imagination, an extraordinary feat considering Friedrich himself never visited the Alps.
Friedrich approached landscape painting with quiet introspection, building meaning out of the spatial structure itself. In Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen, a dramatic sense of depth is achieved by three distinct planes: the meadow with trees, figure and animals in the foreground, in which every blade of grass and field flower is observed in minute detail; the mirror-like surface of the lake below, and the majestic framing mountains, receding into a purple mist in the background. Each band is distinguished through differences in atmospheric rendering, to intimate its symbolic meaning: the grass, flowers, firs, cattle, and the wandering figure symbolising the transience of life; the lake death; the mountains salvation and the life eternal.
Though the exact dating of the work remains open to debate, the painting abounds with references to Friedrich’s life’s work, and it is tempting to see the lone figure, in frock coat and top hat, as the artist himself – and certainly a version in microcosm of the frock-coated Rückenfigur in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer(Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) of 1818 (Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle). The figure of a wanderer leading the viewer into the mood of the painting is certainly one of the artist’s trademarks. Friedrich believed he could achieve a truly spiritual, religious communication by transcribing his inner vision using landscape imagery and a vocabulary of symbols.
Sonnenblick im Riesengebirge belongs to the seven hitherto unrecorded oils discovered by lawyer and art historian Carl von Lorck between 1941 and 1943 during his cultural survey of East Prussian noble houses. For over a century lost in obscurity in the von Hahn family seat of Schloss Basedow until at least 1949, the painting’s next owner was Fritz Nathan, in whose possession it remained until his death.
Both in date of execution and compositionally, particularly in its symbolic vocabulary, it comes close to Friedrich’s Landschaft mit Gebirgssee am Morgen. The rocky tumbling foreground symbolises the transience of earthly life (the dead tree a memento mori), the upright firs the faithful who will inherit eternal life, denoted by the sun-illuminated uplands in the beyond.
Friedrich’s art fell into obscurity for much of the nineteenth century before being rediscovered by the avant-garde in the 1890s and by many living artists today, including Gerhard Richter.
All eyes will be on lot number 9 tonight at Christie’s to see if one of the many potential buyers will meet consignor Joe Lewis’s $100m price ambition. With the no reserve announced, the real question is where the bidding opens. Will there be bids in the book? At what level? Could the painting possibly start at $1?
There’s no denying the artist’s work had a strong night at Sotheby’s last night with two later works—the domestic Montcalm Interior with 2 Dogs and the landscape Moving Wisp—performing near or above the high estimates to make $12.7m and $8.5m respectively. Sotheby’s has been leading the way in the Hockney market lately with strong sales for the later works. In May, the firm pulled off a major sale with the Piscine de Medianoche (Paper Pool 30) making nearly $12m over a $5-7m estimate range.
No matter what happens with Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)—and AMMpro subscribers can read our data analysis on the Hockney market here—Christie’s has a paper pool from the same year, 1978, with an estimate almost as low, $6-8m, and a massive provenance. Hunk and Moo Anderson built a legendary collection of 20th Century art. The masterpieces went to found a museum at Stanford University but Moo and her daughter are selling their equally impressive collection of works on paper at Christie’s.
Add to this the sunnier composition on Sprungbrett mit Schatten (Paper Pool 14) and the work’s position in Christie’s sale five lots after Lewis’s lot. Whether bidders take the bait and drive the big lot to $80 or $100m or someone gets it at a steal of $40 or $50m, the paper pool is positioned to benefit.
In other words, no matter what happens to Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the Hockney market remains strong and the paper pool offers one of the artist’s best images at a price most collectors can swallow.
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On November 19, Artcurial gives collectors of urban art 64 lots including works by Dondi White, Richard Hambleton with a Shadow Head from 1982-85 (€45,000 – 55,000) or Keith Haring, contemporaries Kaws, Shepard Fairey with Bob Marley slave driver, 2015, (€25,000 – 35,000), JonOne, DRAN and Invader.
Leading the sale is a unique work by Banksy, Kill Mom ?, a stencil and aerosol on cardboard made in 2003, and estimated between €250,000 and €350,000).
This round-up of the reporting on the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. The first month of a monthly subscription is free which makes it easy to subscribe and cancel before you pay.
There’s a market impression forming that the combination of high expectations and the armature of third-party guarantees is creating a successful but muted art market. With so much effort going into pre-selling works at auction to meet the estimate demands of sellers, the auctions this week themselves have begun to feel anti-climactic.
The Ebsworth sale at Christie’s is a case in point. The $317m total made the sale a solid success but the room felt muted with a fair number of empty seats, hardly the gala evening event befitting a collection of Ebsworth’s reputation. Maybe it was the shadow of the Rockefeller sale or the market hangover or simply the spreading presumption of a tougher macroeconomic environment in the future. Whatever the underlying cause, the numbers told a different story from the bidding where most works sold without excitement.
The New York Times’s Scott Reyburn got this quote from one dealer who has been on both sides of the equation:
“It didn’t fly, but it was pretty solid,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private art dealer based in New York, referring to the auction.
The Wall Street Journal had a different take that might need a grain of salt to be taken with it:
“The fact that so many of these evening-sale lots are now guaranteed gives people the misleading impression that big auctions are riskless propositions, but that’s clearly not the case,” said art lawyer Thomas Danziger.
It’s hard to believe anyone thinks auctions are riskless. But a single-owner collection with a global guarantee is a substantially different market proposition than individually guaranteed lots.
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Sotheby’s will hold its first Boundless India sale on Thursday 29 November at The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel with 60 lots spanning Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art, photography and design estimated to make INR 43.1- 62.9 crores / US$ 6-8.7 million. The lead lot is Tyeb Mehta’s Durga Mahisasura Mardini, 1993 ($2.7-4.1m) which was commissioned directly from Mehta in 1993 and has remained in the same family since then. Along with that significant painting is Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Little Girl in Blue from 1934 ($ 1.2-1.7m) painted when the artist was 21 years old. This work would be the seventh work of Sher-Gil’s ever brought to auction. It has remained in the same collection for 80 years, since it was chosen by the artist for her first solo show in 1937.
Arpita Singh’s Men Sitting, Men Standing, 2004 ($164-245k) and Francis Newton Souza’s Untitled (St. Paul’s Cathedral), 1961 ($123-150k) painted when Souza had moved to London are also featured works in the sale.
The sale is also distinguished by nine lots belonging to Balkrishna. V. Doshi, one of the world’s greatest architects and the only Indian to be awarded the highly prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. The sale includes paintings, drawings and furniture created by B.V. Doshi himself, alongside a selection of works from his prized collection.
Gaurav Bhatia, Managing Director of Sotheby’s India, said: “Balkrishna V. Doshi built his collection with the same delight, passion and inquisitiveness that marks out all great collectors. Like his buildings, the collection presented here is supremely refined, stylishly theatrical, and forward-looking. One might draw a parallel between the huge influence of Amrita Sher-Gi and B.V. Doshi on the Indian aesthetic – both brought fresh thought and style to the Indian artistic landscape. With this auction, Mumbai will become Sotheby’s tenth sale location in the world. As the global footprint of Indian artists, curators and collectors continues to expand, we are affirming our commitment to the future of the art market in South Asia. Boundless offers the best of art created in, and inspired by, India, providing a snapshot of a century of artistic production. Suitably, the sale will be led by one of the most valuable works of South Asian art ever to come to auction. Tyeb Mehta’s
landmark depiction of Durga truly evokes India’s spirit, even down to the symbolism of its saffron, white and jeweled green colours. ”Yamini Mehta, International Head of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art at Sotheby’s: “With Boundless: India we celebrate the storied past and bountiful future of Indian art through the 20 th centuries. We look at the onset of independence in 1947 and how it brought about a
veritable renaissance in the art scene, as well as acknowledging exceptional works by leading Contemporary artists practicing today. This pantheon includes Amrita Sher-Gil, a rebellious libertine well ahead of her time, and portentously trying to make the most of her short time on earth” The carefully chosen works to appear in this auction have many interwoven connections between the influences of Europe and between the worlds of design, architecture and photography. The works by leading international photographers are prime examples of the dynamism and inspiration that artists from across the world received from India. Boundless is ultimately about opening the eyes to the
beauty of Indian art and the culture inspired by the Subcontinent in all of its manifestations.”
