Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Christie’s to Hold Sugimoto Sale at Paris Photo

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Christie’s is celebrating 160 years of diplomatic relations with Japan by holding a sale of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs alongside two other sales. The main sale will have a 105 lots, led by works by Irving Penn.

As part of Paris Photo, Christie’s France will organize three events around photography. The department will present for the first time, on November 8, a monographic sale dedicated to the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. This sale, part of this 160th anniversary celebrating the diplomatic and artistic relations between Japan and France, will also coincide with Sugimoto’s current exhibition at the Château de Versailles, from 16 October 2018 to 17 February 2019.

In addition, a general sale turned this year towards contemporary photography and composed of 105 lots will be offered on the same day. The public will also have the opportunity to discover a fashion photography exhibition featuring nearly fifty photographs by F.C. Gundlach as well as works from his personal collection.

The sale dedicated to Hiroshi Sugimoto is a retrospective of his work, bringing together twenty-nine photographs with a global estimate of €1.5 to 2 million, representing the different themes he explored. One of the highlights of the sale, Sea of Japan, Rebun Island, estimated at €200,000-300,000, is part of the artist’s most famous series “Seascapes” which he began in the 1980’s.

Always looking to the past, Sugimoto had a great admiration for William Henri Fox Talbot‘s works which he has been collecting for several years. One of his series brings back Talbot’s paper negatives to life, copying and enlarging them to the point where the grain of the calotype becomes visible. Transforming the negative into a positive in a ten times larger format, in addition to hand-colored it, gives life to some of Talbot’s prints he never reproduced, such as Bust of Venus, November 26, 1840, 2007, estimated at €30,000-40,000.

One of his other famous series, “Lightning fields” will be offered through a 2009 snapshot, Lightning Fields #128, estimated at €50,000-70,000.

For each sale, the Photography department directed by Elodie Morel, selects high quality corpus including a series of 7 ethnographic portraits by Irving Penn, in which the aesthetics and the care taken to stage the scene, prevail over the historical and sociological character of the indigenous populations. In 1970, Penn traveled to Papua New Guinea. He first visited the tribal village of Bena, not far from the city of Goroka, where he took pictures of the natives and their traditional accessories: bilas (shell ornaments) as in Seated Warrior, Sitting Girl (€20,000- 25,000), or feathers and fur decorations. In the Asaro Valley, Penn immortalized naked men with clay masks, performers of a tribal dance organised by the Australian colonizers in 1957, as in Three Asaro Mudmen (€50,000-70,000).

When Pricing Art (and Photographs) The Details Stand Out

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James Tarmy gets to the heart of the art market’s sublime (and infuriating) fixation on subtle details with his examination of the wide range of estimates on the same image by Alfred Stieglitz that will be auctioned in New York next week:

April’s coming New York photo auctions will feature a nearly unprecedented confluence of five Steerages up for sale: Copies of the work will be sold at Christie’s (April 6), Phillips (April 9), Sotheby’s (April 10), and Swann’s (April 19). Stranger still, each auction house has placed a different valuation on its image. At Christie’s, The Steerage is estimated to sell for $15,000 to $25,000; at Sotheby’s, $12,000 to $18,000; and at Phillips, the work is expected to fetch from $60,000 to $80,000. Swann Auction Galleries will sell two copies—one is estimated at $12,000 to $18,000, while the other, which is being offered with another Stieglitz image, is estimated at $5,000 to $7,000.

Each of the images was printed by Stieglitz from 1907 to 1916, and each (obviously) depicts the same thing. The price differential between the images boils down to minute differences in chronology, dimension, provenance, and signatures; in other words, it’s about connoisseurship and collectibility rather than artistry. “I think that photo collectors take these issues, which might seem like small differences, quite seriously,” says Christopher Mahoney, the senior international specialist for photographs at Phillips.

Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (€1-1.5m) Offered at Christie’s France in November

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After a long torpor, the photography market has suddenly become a hotbed of activity. Into this building interest, Christie’s brings Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche estimated at €1m-1.5m. The well-known image of Kiki de Montparnasse was first published in the Paris edition of Vogue in 1926:

Christie’s France is pleased to announce that it will offer “Stripped Bare: Photographs from the Thomas Koerfer Collection,” comprising 73 lots and led by the emblematic Man Ray masterpiece, Noire et Blanche, formerly in the collection of Jacques Doucet, on November 9, while collectors are gathered for the Paris Photo Fair.

Thomas Koerfer is a highly-regarded film director, writer as well as producer, whose films include TheDeath of the Flea Circus Director, Henry’s Romance, The Passionate and Embers. From childhood Koerfer was surrounded by the art collection of his parents and in 1992 he established his own collection by concentrating on modern and contemporary photography, and some years later he added paintings and sculptures from the same era. The entire collection focuses on the body and human form as well as the various aspects of sensuality and sexuality and represents the most comprehensive and nuanced group of works on this theme. Ten years after starting to collect photography, Thomas Koerfer was elected President of the Board of the Foundation of the Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2002 and also became a member of the board of the Kunsthalle Zurich, a position he held for ten years. His collection was exhibited in 2007 at CO Berlin, followed by a show at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2015.

548-Image Trove of Edward Weston Prints Made by His Son to Be Offered at Sotheby’s for $2-3m

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Cole Weston print

Sotheby’s September 30th photography sale contains one massive lot of Edward Weston photographs—548, to be exact—that were printed by his son, Cole. Weston Sr. famously taught his two photographer sons, Cole and Brett, how he printed his works before succumbing to Parkinson’s Disease. After his death, Cole was give the sole right to print from his father’s negatives which were eventually donated in 1981 with the restriction that no prints could be made.

The New York Times’s Randy Kennedy explains how the 1400 images that Edward Weston left behind have fared on the market:

Because of the quality of Weston’s works, combined with the limitations he put on their printing, his works have commanded high prices at auction. Sotheby’s sold Weston’s own prints of “Nude” (1925) for $1.6 million in 2008, and “Nautilus” (1927) for $1.1 million in 2010. Prints by Cole Weston have typically sold for between $3,000 and $20,000. The collection going up for sale in September is owned by the Cole Weston Trust, and is said to be the largest collection of Cole Weston prints of his father’s work in private hands.

The interesting thing is that Sotheby’s is offering the works as a single lot. At the high estimate of $3m, the average price for the prints would be around $5500. Surely breaking up this collection would yield the trust a greater return. So perhaps the hope is that an institution will pick up the entire lot and keep it together. Could a photography dealer see the profit in breaking it up?

Sotheby’s online catalogue also makes this observation of the lot:

A surprising number of the images offered here are not represented by prints in the Edward Weston archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson: the Center has no prints—neither early prints by Edward, nor Project Prints by his son Brett—of over 140 of the images that comprise the present lot.

Edward Weston Photos to Be Auctioned  (NYTimes.com)

548 Photographs: In Context  (Sotheby’s)

Cole Weston print (2)

Vivian Maier’s Stardom Brings Out Claimants, Stifles Sales of Work

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Vivian Maier Self Portrait

The New York Times’s Randy Kennedy tries to untangle the scrum of claimants surrounding the work of previously unknown photographer, Vivian Maier.  What began as a fascinating story of an important artist rescued from obscurity has turned into a free-for-all of claimants and lawyers. Kennedy explains how a former commercial photographer took it upon himself to find an alternative heir to the one already paid for Maier’s copyright.

Meanwhile, Chicago has put its own claims into the mix leaving John Maloof, the Chicagoan who found the initial trove of Maier’s work–and promoted her–in a state of limbo:

The state public administrator’s office for Cook County, in Chicago, which is charged with overseeing estates until relatives or others are approved by the courts to do so, created an estate for Maier on July 1 and has sent letters to Mr. Maloof and others who sell her work — prints can cost more than $2,000 apiece — warning them of possible lawsuits over Maier’s assets. The Stephen Bulger Gallery, in Toronto, which lists dozens of Maier prints on its website, received a letter on Aug. 19 from a Chicago law firm, Marshall, Gerstein & Borun, representing the estate, asking it to preserve all documents related to her work and its sale.

“We are investigating the potential misuse and infringement of copyrighted works whose rights are held by the estate,” the letter said, adding that the firm anticipated “filing litigation against the responsible parties upon completion of our investigation.” An exhibition of her work is on view at the Toronto gallery.

A Legal Battle Over Vivian Maier’s Work   (NYTimes.com)

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