Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Sotheby’s Trawls for £6m with Schiele’s Fishing Boat in London

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Sotheby’s is touring an Egon Schiele painting of a fishing boat through Asia at the moment before they bring it back to sell in London on February 26th in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. It will be offered with an estimate of £6 – 8 million. The sale follows Schiele’s centenary year and a series of celebratory exhibitions all across Europe. These have coincided with some strong recent prices for Schiele, especially at Sotheby’s which sold his 1913 cityscape for $24.6 million in NY in November – the second highest price for the artist. That interest was echoed in the wider interest in German and Austrian art in the same sale (which saw records for Oskar Kokoschka and Ludwig Meidner, and an exceptional price for an oil by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.)

A square-format depiction of a fishing boat in Trieste painted in the pivotal year of 1912, it has never before been at auction, having remained in a private collection since 1962. Its first owner was the patron Heinrich Böhler, Schiele’s pupil who supplied the artist with paint, canvas and models. Böhler worked side by side with his teacher. He also became a dedicated collector of his work.

The painting is notable for its composition, sitting alongside Schiele’s townscapes with its flattened, closely-cropped perspective and bold colour. The painting holds a unique position in Schiele’s oeuvre. Schiele was imprisoned earlier that year. Outcast and shaken, he returned to Trieste where he could relive memories of earlier visits shared with his sister Gerti in 1907 and 1908. Here’s Sotheby’s release on the art work:Continue Reading

Phillips London Editions Has £2m Works Led by Judd

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 Untitled

Phillips editions sales in London later this month will feature prints by Donald Judd, Picasso ceramics, prints by Damien Hirst, Robert Indiana, Bridget Riley, Sam Francis, as well as editions by Jeff Koons. Here’s Phillips’s release:

Phillips’ Evening & Day Editions sale in London will unite Contemporary artists including Banksy, Gerhard Richter and Thomas Schütte alongside Modern icons of 20th century printmaking from Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Pablo Picasso and David Hockney. Exhibiting a variety of media, artists and fundamental stages of Modern and Contemporary art history this sale explores Editions in their many shapes and forms. Taking place at Phillips London on 24 January, the sale will feature 290 lots and is expected to realise in excess of £2,000,000.

Leading the sale is a set of 10 Donald Judd woodcuts. Printed in ultramarine, Untitled (illustrated above) comes to this sale from a Private London Collection. Judd first began to experiment with woodcuts in 1953 when he turned to his father, experienced wood worker Roy Judd, for assistance. Throughout the 1960s Judd explored methods by which abstract shapes and straight lines could be cut across the grain to create the sharp, clean lines demonstrated in this work.

Christie’s Has Richard Feigen Collection in May

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The dealer Richard Feigen has been quick to take on the auction houses in the press (over issues both serious and petty) but even quicker to go to them when selling his greatest treasures. Over the last decade he has auctioned, often taking risk off the table with various forms of guarantees, works by Max Beckmann, Orazio Gentilischi and J.M.W. Turner. These last two works were bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for substantial sums.

At the height of his career, Feigen would make these kinds of museum sales directly himself without needing the pressure of underbidders to achieve his price. Over the years he sold works to more than a hundred museums, including the Getty, the Louvre and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The paintings were by a broad range of artists from Rembrandt to Jasper Johns to James Rosenquist. That Feigen turned to the auction houses in his late seventies and early eighties to achieve top dollar for the works he bought over a lifetime tells us more about the changing shape of the art market than it does about Feigen’s skill or stature.

Feigen likes to call himself a collector dressed up as a dealer but that’s just what dealers used to say to try to take the sting out the profits they were making off their clients, especially museums. Everyone likes to buy works that seem like they will never be sold. What makes Feigen different isn’t his acting like a collector but his being the last of the dealers who bought strategically and opportunistically believing that, over time, art would out perform money.

Feigen’s approach was born in the inflation-cursed seventies. He often contrasted the limited number of great works of art against the profligate printing of money. With that in mind, Feigen bought what he thought best across a wide range of styles, regions and time periods. Although his most significant holdings have now been liquidated, Feigen still has work that must be sold. Today, Christie’s announced several of those—including a $800k John Constable, a $3m Guercino and $4m Carraci—are going to be sold in early May. Here’s the auction house’s release:Continue Reading

Solid Results at Lower Price Points, Paris Contemporary Analysis

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Jean-Paul Riopelle, Forestine (2.5-3.5m) €4.328m

This detailed analysis of the December Contemporary art sales in Paris was made possible with data from our friends at Live Auction Art. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

The Paris Contemporary art sales showed consistent strength this December even after the blowout results of last June when the combined sales reached €94m. The December sales were almost half that value at $47.5m reflecting not a decline in the Paris market so much as a return to the normal volumes.

On a percentage basis, the Parisian Contemporary art sales were in line on sell-through rates at around 80%. The top ten lots totaled €20m a number very similar to the top ten lots sold in June of 2017. Though in these sales, that €20m accounted for a much higher 42.5% of the overall value of the sales.

Perhaps most significantly, the average lot value for Contemporary art sold in Paris was €114k, a number lower that either in June of this year or June of last year.

Among the 79% of the lots that found buyers, the bulk (47%) were sold at prices within the estimate range. Only 36% of the sold lots made prices above the high estimate. A much smaller minority, 16%, were sold at prices below the seller's hopes and expectations.

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Phillips to Open “American African American” Selling Exhibition in New York

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New Year, new selling exhibition. Phillips starts the off season in New York with a selling exhibition of African American artists. During the November sales season at Phillips a steady stream of African Americans visited the pre-auction exhibition of works posing for selfies in front of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and KAWS. The KAWS painting Untitled (Fatal Group), which depicts characters inspired by Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert cartoon show, went on to surprise almost everyone when it set a record for the artist at $2.7m or three times the high estimate of $900k.

This new exhibition will feature works by Charles Alston, John Outterbridge, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, Fred Wilson and Cameron Welch. Kehinde Wiley’s Passing/Posing: Jean de Carodelet (2004) pictured above is among the paintings on offer. Here’s Phillips release on the show:

Phillips is pleased to announce the major exhibition AMERICAN AFRICAN AMERICAN. Open to the public from 10 January to 8 February, the exhibition will kick off 2019 at Phillips New York galleries. Curated by Arnold Lehman, Phillips’ Senior Advisor and Director Emeritus of the Brooklyn Museum, the 2019 exhibition in New York continues the important mission of a similar exhibition organized in 2017 by Lehman in London, which took a closer look at the art historical and social impact of the 26 African American artists featured. In conjunction with the exhibition, Phillips will host a panel discussion on 14 January with Arnold Lehman in conversation with Brooklyn curator Ashley James, writer, critic and artist Deborah Willis, and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, chair of education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and formerly of the Studio Museum. The discussion will focus on the artistic changes and social implications from the 1960s to today as seen through the lens of both the Tate’s exhibition Soul of a Nation, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, and AMERICAN AFRICAN AMERICAN.

Covering the period of 1950 to today with over 60 artists, “AMERICAN AFRICAN AMERICAN — likely the largest selling exhibition of African American artists to date — clearly articulates the increasing and exceptional importance of African American art and artists within the art historical canon. It gives proper recognition to these extraordinary artists of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries alongside their contemporaries,” said Arnold Lehman. “The considerably smaller 2017 exhibition in London was met with a great deal of enthusiasm from collectors and the general public alike, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to bring a much broader cross-section of these amazingly talented artists to collectors and exhibition visitors from New York and beyond.”

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