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British Modernists Draw Deep Bidding in Christie’s $42 M. London Sales

March 5, 2021 by Colin Gleadell

Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth, Three Round Forms, 1971.
Christie's.

As they did last year, Christie’s set the pace for the Modern British art market in 2021 this week and it proved to be as healthy as it has ever been.

Included in the short family collection sale (that of London dealer Thomas Gibson) was a rare Henry Moore war time shelter drawing that sold above estimate for $3.15 million– just short of the record in dollars, but in pounds sterling, a new high for a Moore drawing at £2.7 million ($3.7 million) beating the previous £2.2 million ($3 million) set in London in 2015 for a similar subject.

Another Modern British work on paper record tumbled when a sensuous, old masterly Head of a Girl (Edie McNeil) by the bohemian society artist, Augustus John, sold for a double estimate $487,500 to a U.S. bidder. Gibson bought the work for a double estimate record £92,000 ($149,000) in 1997.


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$10 M. Picasso Portrait Unseen for Decades to Sell at Bonhams

February 25, 2021 by Angelica Villa

Picasso
Pablo Picasso,Femme au béret mauve, 1937.

A Pablo Picasso painting from 1937 that has been held in a private collection for more than three decades will be offered at Bonhams in an Impressionist and modern art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Femme au béret mauve, the work is scheduled to go on view in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, and Hong Kong before coming to its final location at the house’s New York headquarters. It is expected to fetch a price of $10 million–$15 million.

The painting depicts Picasso’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom the artist maintained a relationship alongside photographer Dora Maar, to whom he was still married at the time. The work was made in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, France in the year following the start of the Spanish Civil War, during this period that Picasso also painted his famed Guernica, housed at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Weeping Woman, a portrait of Maar now owned by Tate Modern in London.

“This bright, joyous portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter exudes stability and calm at a time when Picasso’s personal life was in turmoil and all of Europe was living under the shadow of impending war,” Molly Ott Ambler, Bonhams senior vice president and head of impressionist, modern, European and American Art, said in a statement. “Family life with Marie-Thérèse and their daughter Maya represented a refuge of serenity and sensuality so wonderfully captured in this work.”

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Long-Running Fairs Focused on African, Oceanic, and Indigenous Art Move Online

February 24, 2021 by Angelica Villa

Baule Mask

The Tribal Arts Show and the American Indian Art Show, two regional showcases of African, Oceanic, and Indigenous art that have taken place in San Francisco for over three decades, opened together this year as one online edition on Thursday. The fair runs until next week, with 130 exhibitors from nine countries. This iteration, like numerous others over the past year, went digital for the time as a result of the pandemic.

The art fair typically invites small and mid-size dealers—with a few high-end exceptions, like Pace and Belgian dealer Didier Claes—to offer their wares, which range from antiquities to contemporary art by Indigenous artists. Last February, just before the coronavirus pandemic brought the art world to a grinding halt, John Morris and Kim Martindale, the co-directors of both fairs, staged them together as one event. (The duo had purchased the Tribal Arts Show from its founders three years prior; Martindale, who formerly headed the LA Art Show, had produced the American Indian Art Show on his own before the merge.)

Over the summer, Morris and Martindale began to plan their 2021 edition. Though the pandemic had still limited large-scale in-person gatherings and nonessential travel at the time, they were optimistic about staging an in-person fair in February. As 2020 wound to a close, it became clear that they would also have to pivot to an online experience for their exhibitors and visitors. Typically, exhibitors from Europe and Australia are weary of traveling to San Francisco with their offerings. The move also meant boosting the profile of numerous dealers in this year’s edition who previously did not have an online footprint.

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Collection of Texas Heiress Anne Marion Expected to Fetch $150 M. at Sotheby’s

February 24, 2021 by Angelica Villa

Andy Warhol, Elvis 2 Times
Andy Warhol, Elvis 2 Times, 1964.

Sotheby’s has secured the vast collection of Texas heiress Anne Marion, who died last February at the age of 81. The collection, which is rich in work by American postwar artists like Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still, and Roy Lichtenstein, is expected to fetch a collective $150 million when it sells at auction in New York this spring. It will be sold across eight sales of work in various categories, including 20th century art, Old Masters, American art, and jewelry.

A fourth-generation heiress to the Four Sixes Ranch and the Burnett Oil company, founded by her great grandfather Samuel Burnett, Marion went on to expand her family’s ranching and oil empire, amassing a net worth of $1.1 billion that made her one of the country’s top arts patrons.

Many of the works in the Marion estate have been out of the public eye since the 1970s and 1980s, when she first began acquiring art. Among the top works to be sold are Warhol’s 1963 silver silkscreen painting Elvis 2 Times, featuring a double image of the rock ’n’ roll icon sourced from a 1960s movie still, an homage to Marion’s ranching roots. A similar work resides at the Whitney Museum, a gift from Leonard Lauder. Marion’s Elvis is expected to sell for $20 million–$30 million.

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