The report is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

A portrait of Flemish artist Cornelis de Vos and his family made by another painter in his circle, Anthony van Dyck, when he was just emerging at 20 years old from the studio of his teacher Peter Paul Rubens achieved $3.4 million, one of the artist’s top results, in Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale in London last week. The sale came after the painting was held for four decades in a private collection on the island of Jersey. The work had been recovered by the famed World War II team of art sleuths known as the Monuments Men and returned to its original Jewish-Dutch owners in 1948. The sale came in at more than double the $1.4 million estimate. It now ranks as the sixth highest price paid for a van Dyck at auction, surpassing the $3.3 million paid for his royal portrait of the young Prince of Wales sold at Sotheby’s in February 2018. That work came to auction after more than a century in private hands.

The Flemish Baroque painter van Dyck had a prolific career as a British royal court painter in the 17^th century. Known for his commanding depictions of high-status sitters, he has become one of the top sellers in the old masters category. The bulk of his most expensive auction sales include museum acquisitions, rediscoveries or paintings long unseen by scholars. When they surface at auction, they have fueled the momentum behind the artist’s market.Continue Reading

The report is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Lévy Gorvy, is mounting an exhibition of Mickalene Thomas’s works in all four of its galleries. The shows in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong that will open at each location between September and October. The global expansion of the artists representation matches the international interest in her art at auction and the growing scope of her market.

The show, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” will focus on Thomas’s interest in the Black female body, including paintings, installations, and video. Her imagery draws from her personal archives and the media of the 1970s, the decade she came of age.

The show comes after auction prices for her work passed new milestones. Last month, her painting Racquel Reclining Wearing Purple Jumpsuit (2016), a collaged and glittered portrait of a woman reclining across a couch, sold for $1.8 million at a Christie’s evening sale, triple its $600,000 high estimate. The result set a new record for the artist and became the first lot by Thomas to reach seven-figures at auction.

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The report is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Following a period of experimentation with new sale formats and technological upgrades, the top auction houses—Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips—have now found their footing in a post-pandemic era. In an attempt to make up for the lost revenue of the first months of the pandemic and the constrained Summer sales, the houses staged a series of smaller cross-category sales from October to December 2020. Still, during those smaller sales the portion held in New York and London lagged behind buying volume in Hong Kong by a noticeable margin, a shift in the usual dynamic that plays out across global sale centers.

In response, the three houses invested even deeper in creating thematic cross-category auctions combining trophy lots from old masters to the ultra-contemporary. The London- and Paris-based sales staged between March and April this year saw fewer ultra-high value works (+$40 million.) This despite evidence that demand for top tier works has remained undiminished throughout the pandemic. Even at a lower price point, the top lots of the London and Paris evening auctions were works made by art historical giants like Jean Michael Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh.

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