Many will remember the controversy that surrounds the painter Balthus and particularly the works where he painted Thérèse Blanchad when she was a young girl between the ages of 10 and 14. There are nearly a dozen of these works. The Met in New York owns two (both bequests), one makes viewers uncomfortable because of its depiction of Blanchad with her skirt falling down her raised legs exposing her underwear which many now read as inappropriate considering the girl’s age.

Two years ago, a petition gathered more than 10,000 signatures demanding the works be removed from the museum. The Met refused for the obvious reasons the petition encroached upon the artist’s freedom of expression. Nevertheless, the paintings have a certain frisson in today’s culture.

With that in mind, it comes as a surprise that Christie’s has announced the Thérèse sur une banquette from the Dorothy and Richard Sherwood Collection will be offered for a record price of $12-18m. The work carries a guarantee, so it will sell and set a new record.

Here’s Christie’s release:

This May, Christie’s will offer The Dorothy and Richard Sherwood Collection across 20^th Century Week, with highlights featured in both its Evening Sales of Impressionist and Modern Art on 13 May, and Post-War and Contemporary Art on 15 May. Further examples from the collection will be offered in sales of American, Indian and South Asian and Japanese and Korean Art as well as Picasso Ceramics. The Sherwoods were admired within the collecting community for studying deeply and selecting paintings, drawings and sculptures that excited and challenged them. The result is a collection of discerning taste and exceptional quality. The works being offered reflect their profound connoisseurship, their appreciation of the creators and the creative process, and their great adventures of the heart and mind.

Max Carter, International Director, Head of Department, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York,remarked: “Dorothy and Richard Sherwood’s home was unlike any other, as much for the profound sense of thoughtfulness and purpose as the exceptional range and quality of its works of art.  Each room displayed a trove of treasures like Balthus’s 1939 masterpiece Thérèse sur une banquette. One of Balthus’s outstanding achievements, this remarkable painting hung in the Sherwoods’ living room for nearly sixty years, last seen publicly as the cover of the “Cats and Girls” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. No better Balthus has appeared at auction and none is likely to again. We are honored to offer these unique works this spring at Christie’s.”

The fine art collection of Dorothy and Richard Sherwood represents a lifetime of travel and discovery, an embrace of global art and artists—and erudition reaching across categories and continents. As pioneering civic leaders in Los Angeles, the Sherwoods were visionary thinkers and leaders who made an indelible impact on some of the finest arts institutions in the world.

Leading the collection is the tour de force by Balthus, Thérèse sur une banquette, 1939 (estimate: $12-18 million), which will be offered in the 13 May Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art. The present picture is the last of the artist’s renowned series of portraits featuring his muse, Thérèse Blanchard. In late 1935 Balthus became acquainted with Thérèse, a girl from a large family that lived a few blocks from the artist’s new studio. She was fourteen years old when she posed in 1939 for Thérèse sur une banquette. Between 1936 and 1939, Thérèse featured in “a series of ten paintings that must be regarded as [Balthus’s] most perceptive and sensitive portrayals of a young sitter and among his finest works,” Sabine Rewald has written. “The portraits of Thérèse, showing her reading or doing nothing but dreaming, inaugurated what would be the leitmotif of Balthus’s oeuvre.” In Thérèse sur une banquette, Balthus showcased his primarily professional, compositional concerns — aiming to depict his model in a novel, unique posture, with neither a familiar nor apparent precedent. He moreover sought to evoke her inner world with a sense of presence that was outwardly and convincingly grounded in the mechanics of movement, while exalting the sublime architecture of her youthful figure. Balthus established the complex lineaments of her extended posture, and every telling nuance in her expression, as she appears completely absorbed in a moment of play.

Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art, Asia, gave us some bullet points on KAWS works causing a stir in Hong Kong this weekend ahead of Monday’s sale at Sotheby’s. 

Update: The KAWS Album sold for HKD115m ($14.7m) in Hong Kong on April 1st, a huge new record.

The KAWS market has been moving quickly over the last year. Nigo’s early relationship with KAWS means your sale has an injection of work from early in KAWS career onto a market suddenly craving KAWS. There’s talk among KAWS collectors that the top item in the sale, The KAWS Album, has the potential to significantly reset his market upwards. Why does this work have that potential?

• THE KAWS ALBUM is an early piece with one of the most complex compositions that the artist ever created on canvas. KAWS’s practice spans sculpture, street art, graphic and product design, and it is important to remember his formal grounding in traditional canvas work.

• This piece is particularly special not only because it is a painting commissioned by NIGO®. As the artist’s take on The Simpson’s The Yellow Album, this piece manifests as a ‘family portrait’ of KAWS’s whole host of Kimpsons characters.

• It is also interesting to note that The Simpson’s The Yellow Album was itself a parody of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt. Pepper was lauded by critics for its bridging of popular music, high art and contemporary counterculture, and THE KAWS ALBUM follows in these legendary footsteps.

Your sale has a number of small Kimpson works that are grouped into in lots of two to five paintings. Is this how the works were originally bought or grouped? Do you think these groups will remain intact after this sale?

• The groupings were a curatorial decision that involved NIGO® and the Sotheby’s team, so we do hope that the buyers of these works will respect this special collaborative decision.

Everyone involved in the KAWS market says that the buyers in Asia are central to the rise in his market recently. What happened in the last two years that caused KAWS’s market to take off?

• Street art is currently undergoing the same transition that Pop Art made in the 1960s and 1970s. Originally at the fringes of mainstream culture, both genres gained recognition in the wider socio-cultural landscape and earned their positions within the art historical narrative. 

• KAWS’s market started to take off in the last few years. In 2014, Sotheby’s NIGO® ONLY LIVES TWICE auction featured KAWS’s paintings, sculptures as well as toys alongside design and fashion pieces. Curated by NIGO® from his personal collection, the auction played an important role in bridging street art and culture with high art, fashion and design, and also opened up the market for KAWS.

• 3 years after that, KAWS’s survey exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2017, which travelled to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, helped to further boost the artist’s critical acclaim and popularity.

• Also worth noting is that KAWS’s creative career first began in Tokyo in the early 2000s with NIGO®’s help. So KAWS’s surging popularity in the region is less of an ‘Asian moment’ than a homecoming of sorts.

Petzel Gallery is putting on a show of Asger Jorn’s altered thrift store paintings and they’re putting them in the context of other artists who altered found objects to make art. Here’s how Petzel’s press release puts it:

Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings (through April 13) is situated in the context of the first thrift store paintings altered by Danish artist Asger Jorn. This group show features 30 prominent international artists and investigates multifarious appropriation methods spanning from the mid-1960s to the flourishing techniques of the 1980s, up to the present day.

But flashback to Paris, 1959: Asger Jorn exhibits a group of paintings at the prominent Galerie Rive Gauche. Not only has he re-worked these found paintings with his own brush, modifying their respective surfaces, but he also writes a text describing his technique as a recovery of certain iconographic archetypes. Instead of making a mockery of these kitsch paintings, he articulates some of their inherent folk-art values. The exhibition is not well received. However, it has since become legendary. Jorn’s modifications have long been a neglected chapter in the Danish artist’s biography. Yet from today’s perspective these high/low hermaphrodites are recognized by keen-eyed viewers as mirrors reflecting the historicity of modern painting.

Such “Modifications” are a painterly version of “détournement,” a Situationist technique, described in 1956 by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman as the systematic revaluation of “prefabricated aesthetic products.” For Jorn, who co-founded and financially supported the Situationist International, the 1959 Galerie Rive Gauche exhibition, showcased his implementation of a fundamental aesthetic critique in which he appropriates a relatively discredited artistic source as “his” own material, then applies his iconography, and his language to that particular prefabricated model.

Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings features works by Enrico Baj, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Vidya Gastaldon, Wade Guyton/Stephen Prina, Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Lee Krasner, Albert Oehlen, Francis Picabia, Stephen Prina, R.H. Quaytman, Arnulf Rainer, Julian Schnabel, Jim Shaw, Gedi Sibony, Alexis Smith, Daniel Spoerri, John Stezaker, Betty Tompkins, and David Wojnarowicz.

A comprehensive book on Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings is forthcoming with texts written and edited by the curators, Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt, as well as reprinted articles on the subjects of détournement, vandalism, and the relationship between modifications and appropriation art in the late 1970s.

Christie’s is still cataloguing the Mayer collection and there are likely to be a number of interesting works among the lots, including an early Larry Rivers painting  The Last Civil War Veteran, 1959-1960 ($300-500k), but along side the Rauschenberg announced this morning is Kiss III, a Roy Lichtenstein painting from 1962 that carries a $30m estimate.

In 1990, a companion painting to this work, Kiss II (1962), set a record for the artist when it sold for $6m at Christie’s to a representative of Fuji Gallery in Japan who was said to be buying the work for Mr. Wanibuchi. At the time, the $6m was a record price for the artist. Here’s Christie’s on the painting:

Painted by one of the foremost figures of American Pop Art, Kiss III, 1962 (in the region of $30 million) is a pivotal work from one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most lauded bodies of work. Painted the same year as the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, works such as this began pulling from the pages of comic books and enlarging the sampled imagery with meticulous detail. While effectively reproducing extant imagery, Lichtenstein was clear that his works should be viewed for their formal qualities rather than their enticing subject matter. Clearly depicted with bold black outlines, on the surface Kiss III depicts a man and woman sharing a close embrace. Both figures have their eyes closed as the man’s large hand presses down on the woman’s shoulder. Their lips are planted in a passionate kiss that is echoed in the energetic shapes making up the explosive background. In 1961, Lichtenstein broke with his earlier practice and began to reproduce the visual qualities of printed ephemera. Among his subjects were works based on advertisements and comics that featured war stories and romantic themes
(of which Kiss III is a prime example). “At that time,” Lichtenstein later recounted, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques.