Art Market Monitor

A drawing by Vincent Van Gogh made during the artist’s final years will sell at Christie’s as part of the drawing collection sale titled “A Family Collection: Works on Paper, Van Gogh to Freud” on March 1 in New York. Estimated at $7 million–$10 million, the work is titled La Mousmé (1888).

The rare drawing comes from the family collection of London dealer Thomas Gibson and depicts an anonymous young female sitter. It is the last work of a group of 12 originally gifted by the artist to Australian painter John Russell that still remains in private hands. Other works from that gift, which include 9 landscapes and 2 portraits are held by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“The work is incredibly rare,” said Giovanna Bertazzoni, Christies co-head of 20th and 21st century art department, adding that pieces of this quality typically end up in museums. “When I saw it in the flesh for the first time, I was very moved.”

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most expensive contemporary artists, is set to continue his reign next month at Christie’s in Hong Kong. His 1982 painting Warrior will be auctioned on March 23 during a single-lot sale titled “We Are All Warriors.” The work, which carries a third-party guarantee, is expected to achieve a price between $31 million and $41 million (HKD 240 million–HKD 320 million). If the present lot meets its low estimate it will be among the top 10 Basquiats to ever sell at auction, surpassing the price of $30.7 million paid for Flesh and Spirit (1982), from the collection of Herbert Neumann, at Sotheby’s in 2018.

“It is simply a masterpiece,” Cristian Albu, Christie’s international director of postwar and contemporary art, said of Warrior.

The large-scale painting, made with acrylic, oilstick and spray paint on wood panel, features a sword-wielding figure with Basquiat’s signature skull-like head. Its subject is brutality, and Basquiat had the threat of state violence in mind when he made it.

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A rare 15th-century Renaissance portrait by artist Piero del Pollaiuolo is set to go under the hammer during a cross-category auction at Sotheby’s in London on March 25. Portrait of a Youth depicts a young male sitter set against a blue sky background and is expected to fetch £4 million–£6 million ($5.5 million–$8.2 million). It will hit the block alongside Old Masters works and contemporary art.

The painting—the only known portrait by Pollaiuolo left in private hands—was once held in the same private collection as the one that included Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, which sold for a record-breaking $92 million at Sotheby’s on January 28 during the house’s New York “Classic Week” series. The previous owner of the two works was Thomas Ralph Merton, a prominent scientist who worked with the British secret service in the 1930s and ’40s.

The painting was first recorded in the collection of Hertfordshire’s G. M. G. Wilshere. In October 1942, the work is said to have been sold to Mendelsohn Bartholdy, who purchased it at Sotheby’s when it was attributed to a painter in the Florentine School (Sotheby’s is still conducting research to confirm this record.) Eventually, the work passed onto Sir Thomas Merton in the 1950s. The last time it sold at auction was in 1985, when it left Merton’s collection and sold at Christie’s, which attributed it to another Italian artist, Cosimo Rosselli.

Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Youth and Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel once hung side by side in Merton’s study. His collection also included works by Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Bartolomeo Montagna, and other Italian and Northern Renaissance, some of which are now in U.K. museum collections.

Though lesser-known today than his contemporary Botticelli, Pollaiuolo was among the top artists working in the 15th century. Together with his brother Antonio, he ran one of the era’s most advanced Florentine studios, making commissions for elite Italian patrons such as the Medicis.

Piero, who despite having being less prolific than his brother, completed important projects independently, the most prestigious of which was the cycle of six paintings representing the Virtues for the audience chamber in the Tribunale di Mercanzia in Florence in 1469. The works are now at the Uffizi in Florence.

“In Renaissance Florence the Pollaiuolo brothers, Piero and Antonio, made important innovations across multiple art forms, not least in the field of portraiture, and their workshop rivaled that of Andrea del Verrochio for importance and prestige,” Cecilia Treves, Sotheby’s head of research on Old Master paintings, said in a statement.

Today, few major works by Pollaiulo remain in private collections; most are held by museums. (A 1480 profile of an elite woman, for example, is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) The last time a Piero portrait appeared on the open market was in 2012, when a 1470 drawing of a young man sold at Sotheby’s for $1.4 million, against an estimate of $300,000. The buyer was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Like the drawing purchased by the Getty, the present work depicts its sitter posed frontally—which is rare for the era, since most commissioning portraits were done in profile. According to Sotheby’s, the sitter’s young age is also rare, and “may have been intended as an affirmation of dynastic hope.”

This past November, the work was reviewed by the Art Council England, a body of the U.K. government which examines art objects that may be valuable to U.K. public collections.

In a statement to the Secretary of State, experts argued to keep the painting in the U.K. because of its potential significance for Renaissance scholarship. “It is the earliest painting in a British collection to illustrate a moment of change in Florentine portraiture—the movement from profile to full-frontal depictions of sitters,” said an expert adviser in the statement. Despite experts’ objections, the painting was approved for export.

In Sotheby’s forthcoming auction, the work will be sold alongside examples by David Hockney, Arshile Gorky, and Edvard Munch, among others.

Sotheby’s has unveiled two paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch to go up for auction during its cross-category evening sale at their London headquarters on March 25. Together, the two early 20th century works, a commissioned frieze and a self-portrait, are expected to fetch £13.5 million ($18.5 million).

Each of the works are coming to sale from the collection of Norwegian Munch patron, Thomas Olsen.

Completed in 1904, Summer Day or Embrace on the Beach (The Linde Frieze) depicts a couple against a bucolic shoreline; it was painted as part of a commission for a nursery room in the family home of Lübeck-based doctor, Max Linde. Estimated to sell for £9 million-£12 million ($12 million-$16 million), the Linde Frieze was based on Munch’s seminal 1890s project Frieze of Life, exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1902. In this series, the artist began developing his melancholic style, exploring love, jealously, anxiety and separation at the turn of the century.

According to Sotheby’s, Munch added the embracing figures on the left— a recurring motif of couples between union and rift—at a later date.

The later work set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, Self-Portrait with a Palette (1926), is an outdoor scene of the artist holding a set of brushes and painting palette. It was last exhibited in 2015-16 in the exhibition “Munch: Van Gogh” at the Munch Museet in Oslo and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The image is one Munch painted in several variations. Another paint of the artist Self Portrait with Brushes from 1904 resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Continue Reading

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While Christie’s does not stage Old Master paintings sales in New York in January, it does still go head-to-head with Sotheby’s for drawings. But the record shows them trailing. In 2019, it was $15 million to $2.7 million in favor of Sotheby’s, and again in 2020, $15.1 million (including a $11.7 million Mantegna) at Sotheby’s compared to $5.4 million at Christie’s.

Last week, Christie’s opened the latest round with a comfortable $3.9 million for a sale that was estimated at $2.3 million- $3.4 million (Prices include the buyer’s premium; estimates do not.)

This included a $724,000 to $1.1 million collection formed by the late Cornelia Bessie, an art book publisher, which sold for $1.5 million. Bessie’s main focus was on 18^th century French artists. Topping the bill was a red chalk drawing of a seated young woman by Fragonard which Bessie had been given by her mother, art dealer Kate Schaeffer, in 1982. The gift realised a double estimate $1.1 million. A further 13 Fragonards— all made for Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso– were from the collection of American patrons Nina R. and Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. and all sold, mostly above estimate for prices up to $56,253 each. Another top lot from the Bessie collection was crisply colored pastel portrait of Philip Cramer, also a publisher, by Jean-Etienne Liotard, which sold above estimate for $810,000.

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