Art Market Monitor

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Christie’s Makes It Official: Hockney Masterwork Looking for $80m in New York This November

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Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972 (~$80m)

It hasn’t really been a secret that Christie’s has one of the most important David Hockney dual portraits to sell this Autumn. Katya Kazakina was the first to report that Joe Lewis would be selling his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972 for a princely sum that is three times the record price paid for the artist. We’ll have more detail on the progression of the Hockney market in a post for AMMpro subscribers. But here let’s simply say that two years ago, a small sketch for this work was sold for twice the high estimate of $1m. The last time a portrait from this era sold was nine years ago. The estate of collector Betty Freeman, who was the subject of a massive 12-foot-wide 1967 portrait, realized $7.9m then. It was followed six months later by the smaller California Art Collector (1964) which made $5.4m.

How much a collector will be willing to pay for this work is one of the great market questions. Nothing like it has come up for auction since 2003 when the artist’s Portrait of Nick Wilder was sold. The Contemporary art market has seen values rise by many multiples since 2003. The question that will be revealed in November is how that multiplication can be applied to the Hockney market. Until then, here’s Christie’s press release on the painting:Continue Reading

Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Basquiat Show Puts Owners on Display

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One of the unexpected benefits of Bernard Arnault’s new Jean-Michel Basquiat show opening at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in October is the way the show is bringing together a group of far-flung works. Some 120 paintings will be in the show and a number of collectors like Yusaku Maezawa and Laurent Asscher have taken to Instagram to announce the works from their collections that will be making the journey. Curiously, as Carol Vogel reveals in her WSJ magazine preview of the show, Bernard Arnault is going to great lengths to keep his Basquiats anonymous:

Over the past 30 years he has amassed a world-class Basquiat collection. Asked just how big his holdings are, he would only admit that they total more than a dozen works and hang in all his homes, including his apartment in Paris, his house in the south of France and another place in the French countryside.

Arnault is lending a number of his paintings and drawings to the upcoming show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, although neither he nor anyone involved in the show’s creation will say which ones. Contemporary art experts familiar with Basquiat’s work believe that among the loans from Arnault’s personal collection is the 1982 painting Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict. He is said to be lending a number of drawings as well. Arnault was so committed to making this show different from any preceding Basquiat exhibition that he wrote personal notes to collectors asking for loans and allowed the curators free rein to select from his own holdings.

The WSJ story also reveals at least one other new owner of a Basquiat joining the company of Larry Gagosian and Peter Brant, who will host the show at the opening of his Brant Foundation’s New York outpost in the Spring of 2019. Brant is the biggest lender to the Basquiat show:

Fifteen works from his holdings will be in the show, making him its biggest lender. Others contributing works include the philanthropists Lenore and Herbert Schorr, who were some of Basquiat’s earliest collectors; the Los Angeles philanthropists Eli S. and Edythe L. Broad; the Mugrabi family, who are New York–based dealers; the fashion designer Valentino Garavani and his longtime partner, Giancarlo Giammetti; and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Many labels in the show will read “private collection,’’ but according to several contemporary art experts, two of these mystery lenders are the Greek shipping magnate Philip Niarchos and Lorenzo Fertitta, the Las Vegas casino owner.

A New Exhibition in Paris Explores Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Work (WSJ. Magazine)

Grand Thiebaud Landscape Leads DiCaprio Foundation Auction

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s foundation is gearing up for its annual charity auction this weekend. The 20th anniversary celebration is going to be quite different this year. In the first place, it takes place at a Sonoma Winery—Jackson Family Wines—that has a sustainability program. The fundraiser will be a zero waste event where everything created for the event will be repurposed for another use.

More important for the art market, Lisa Schiff, who organizes the auction for the foundation, has taken a new approach to the event. Opening the bidding to anyone, whether they attend the gala or not, via Invaluable, Schiff has cut the number of lots on offer dramatically and focused on works that will retain their value.

“We have tightened up our offerings,” Schiff says, “so we are not bringing just the usual suspects; we’re not hyping speculative works; and the things we sell will have lasting value well beyond the auction.”

Bids have already started at Invaluable. Among the works offered in the sale is a large Wayne Thiebaud landscape (above) donated by the artist and Acquavella gallery. Bids on the six-foot-tall painting begin at $3m but Schiff points out the market value is $4.5m.

“Getting a work of this caliber is unprecedented, Schiff says. “There are also major works by Ai Weiwei, Jack Goldstein, Deborah Butterfield and Fred Wilson, among others.”

The event will further make the connection between art and environmentalism. “We are also launching our first Art and Environment award to Wayne Thiebaud for depiction of the landscape of Northern California throughout his career,” Schiff says.  “And we are launching our first lifetime achievement award for conservation to Arne Glimcher for his work in Africa.”

Arne Glimcher will receive an award for Lifetime Achievement in Conservation because of his decades of work through the African Environmental Film Foundation (AEFF). Wayne Thiebaud will receive the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s first Art and Environment award.

 

That Place in the Mind Where Abstract and Conceptual Art Excite Our Brains

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Paul Bloom has a review essay in the New Yorker where he looks at two books that seek to provide neurological evidence of how we understand and respond to abstract and conceptual art. Bloom has much praise for Nobel laureate Eric Kandel’s book on Reductionism in Art and Brain Science:

take Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt, whose works, Kandel tells us in a very interesting discussion, combine aggression and sexuality. But then Kandel goes on to explain that, in the hypothalamus, there is one population of neurons that regulates aggression and another that regulates mating, and it turns out that “about 20 percent of the neurons located on the border between the two population can be active during either mating or aggression. This suggests that the brain circuits regulating these two behaviors are intimately linked.” But presumably the reader is already aware that sex and aggression are linked.

Bloom goes on to combine Kandel’s insights with Ellen Winner’s How Art Works which seeks to do explain whether and how we experience conceptual art like Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made objects or Piero Manzoni’s famous little cans of “artist’s shit” as art:

Winner appreciates how our perception of abstract art is powerfully influenced by our understanding of the performance underlying the work’s creation, and particularly our beliefs about what’s going on in the head of the my own work artist. In my own work with the psychologist Susan Gelman, supported by more recent experiments from Winner’s laboratory, it turns out that even children are sensitive to the intentions of an artist: four-year-olds will see splotches of colored paint as a mess if they believe they were the result of a spill, but if they think the image was the product of intense concentration, they are far more likely to call it “a painting.”

This sort of focus on the artist’s intention is what goes on in the reaction to work such as Manzoni’s; you can appreciate it only if you know what it was intended to be. This understanding doesn’t mean that you will like the work of art; you might nd the idea uninteresting or the performance uninspired. Denis Dutton, for instance, talks about Duchamp’s “readymades”—such as his urinal turned into an art piece—as works of “incandescent genius,” but he sees this sort of artistic innovation (what Arthur Danto described as “the transfiguration of the commonplace”) as akin to a joke that can be laughed at only once. Dutton has a low opinion of “Artist’s Shit,” not because he doesn’t appreciate the idea but because he finds it boring and derivative.

What We Know About Art and the Mind (New Yorker)

Al-Thanis Negotiating Paris Space for Art Exhibitions

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The Al-Thani family is finalizing a deal to have an exhibition space for its art in Paris. Le Monde reports that the Al-Thani family are in negotiations with a private developer representing the French state which has plans to re-develop L’hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde into a retail-office-and-cultural space. The French government and the Qatari government have been looking for ways to solidify ties in the current global climate. Le Monde says the Al-Thani family plan to use the space, which will open in 2020, to have a rotating exhibition of their art holdings:

According to our information, the National Monuments Center (CMN), which is running the private property on behalf of the State, is in the process of signing an agreement with Qatar so that the emirate can present it on a rotating basis. for twenty years, paying 20 million euros, the Al-Thani art collection, named after the ruling family.

The project was presented on Tuesday, September 4th, before the board of CMN, which manages a hundred buildings some quite prestigious in Paris, the Arc de Triomphe or the Pantheon. Joined by telephone, its president, Philippe Bélaval, did not want to comment on this information: “I do not deny or confirm. “

Undoubtedly the millions paid by the Al Thani family to the National Monuments Center (MNC) to exhibit are at the heart of the latest discussions. The amount will not be negligible to run a site – the Center expects 600,000 entries a year – when the state lacks money to maintain its heritage. 

Artelligence for September 7, 2018

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Glenstone Contractor Sues for Cost Overruns: Hitt Contracting is suing Glenstone over their recent completion of the private museum in Bethesday, MD, according to the Washington Business Journal:

  • The Falls Church-based contractor sued Glenstone Foundation Inc. Aug. 30 in the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, blaming the foundation’s “disorganized” approach for the millions of dollars in time and cost overruns it took to complete the $200 million expansion. The foundation delayed making crucial decisions, requested more than 2,400 changes and refused to acknowledge the financial implications of its actions, according to the complaint. …

Maecenas Says It Has Sold Its Warhol, But …: The blockchain-based fractional ownership gambit Maecenas has declared victory in its sale of Andy Warhol’s reversal series 14 Small Electric Chairs (1980). We’re quoting from this blog post in broken English because it contains more detail than the blockchain news outlets:

  • “For the first time ever, Maecenas has successfully tokenised a multi-million dollar artwork, a portray by way of Andy Warhol named “14 Small Electric Chairs (1980)”. The beta public sale raised US$1.7m for 31.5% of the artwork at a valuation of US$5.6m. 100 members have been hand-picked to take part in the public sale out of greater than 800+ sign-u.s.from 56 nations. Mostly primarily based in Asia and Europe. Criteria to select members used to be to have a illustration from other geographies and investor profiles. The major purpose of this personal beta used to be to validate the end-to-end strategy of the Dutch public sale and artwork tokenisation the usage of blockchain era. Not simplest we completed that, we successfully reached the investment goal for the public sale. During the public sale length, 36 bids have been gained, out of which, 34 have been a success being perfect bid of $6.5M. 2 bids have been unsuccessful as they have been beneath the reserve worth.”

What Maecenas doesn’t say is that sale was under subscribed. The original intention was to sell 49% of the painting. At 31.5%, the sale fell short by more than a third. That doesn’t bode well for share holders who might want to be able to trade their shares in the works on the perception of a changed value. How the value of a work majority owned by another will change in the future, remains a mystery. …

Ticolat’s Attempts to Regain His $1.4m Don’t Seem to be Going Well: Judging from the fact that the battle between Hong Kong dealer Mathieu Ticolat and Angela Gulbenkian has moved to the pages of the South China Morning Post, Ticolat’s moves in the UK courts haven’t yielded his $1.4m deposit for a Yayoi Kusama sculpture that was never received. …

Sean Kelly Launches a Podcast with Tom Hill Interview:  Sean Kelly launched a new podcast, Collect Wisely, a few months ago which he says he hopes will focus on ‘people who care deeply about art to discuss their passion for collecting.’ The first episode was a discussion with Tom Hill whose private museum is planned for The Getty on West 24th St. in Manhattan. …

Andrew Wyeth Documentary on PBS: The documentary debuts tonight on PBS in the US. It will be available to others later through a variety fo distribution channels:

  • WYETH is a documentary film telling the story of one of America’s most popular, but least understood, artists. While his exhibitions routinely broke attendance records, art world critics continually assaulted his work. Through unprecedented access to Wyeth family members, archival materials, and his work, WYETH presents the most complete portrait of the artist ever – bearing witness to a legacy just at the moment it is evolving.

Tom Sachs to Open Swiss Passport Office at Ropac for One Day During Frieze

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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has announced that his London gallery will host an installation by artist Tom Sachs during Frieze Week. Starting on October 5th, Sachs’s studio will issue its own version of Swiss passports to anyone who is willing to pay €20. Oddly, the installation will not accept British pounds or Swiss Francs. Nonetheless, recipients will receive a bespoke Sachs document within an actual Swiss passport cover:

“With this project we break down the borders and eliminate the concept of nationality. This comes at a time where our liberal democracies are being threatened, and oppressed people all over the world live in danger and without refuge. Borders are artificial. They are artificially created by governments and the corporations who control them. Swiss Passport Office represents enforcement of their artificiality, the antithesis of freedom and the movement of people and goods. With Swiss Passport Office every man and woman may be Swiss. “ Tom Sachs

To coincide with London’s Frieze Week, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London will remain open for 24 hours on 5th October 2018 for the issuing of Swiss passports at American artist Tom Sachs’s Swiss Passport Office installation. Between 6pm on Friday 5th October and 6pm on Saturday 6th October, visitors can be issued with a Swiss passport at a cost of €20 (no British pounds will be accepted). Those wishing to purchase a passport will be photographed and have their name hand typed onto a serial-numbered Tom Sachs Studio passport, stamped with a studio endorsement and entered into the permanent database by the Tom Sachs Studio team. Following this 24-hour period, the Swiss Passport Office installation will remain on view at the gallery until 10th November, but closed for the issuing of passports.

An installation of international significance, Swiss Passport Office encompasses contemporary concerns relating to Brexit, Syria and Trump’s immigration policies and their challenge to the notion of global citizenship. “To effect change, we must first imagine the world not the way it is, but the way we want it to be.“ Sachs says.

Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Unveils Massive $45m Zao Wou-ki for Hong Kong

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Zao Wou-Ki’s triptych Juin-Octobre 1985

The Zao Wou-ki market goes from strength to strength with new record prices having been set in recent years after a strong new player entered the market by acquiring a substantial number of paintings from the family. A work from that cache set the record a year ago in Hong Kong when it was sold for 202mHKD ($25.9m). There have been two confirming prices since then; one price in a similar range was achieved earlier in 2017 setting up the record sale.

AMMpro subscribers can see the market trends for Zao’s work here.

Now Sotheby’s is trying to take advantage of the new price levels and out-do them with the announcement of a massive work from the 1980s. Estimated at 350m HKD or $45m, such a price were it achieved would shatter that record and put Zao Wou-ki in a totally new category of Chinese and European painters. The work was last on the market 13 years ago when it sold for a fraction of what Sotheby’s is hoping to achieve which is testimony to how far the Zao Wou-ki market has come in the last decade. The 2005 price paid for this work is no longer among the top 100 prices paid at auction for a Zao Wou-ki painting.

As always, there are several Zao Wou-ki works in the sale. Another carries a very significant 80-120m HKD estimate. Here’s Sotheby’s release for the work:Continue Reading

How the Zao Wou-ki Market Took Off

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This look at Zao Wou-ki market over the past 12 years—based upon data from our friends at Pi-eX—is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. **The original version of this post contained some charts with erroneous data. We have since had the data cleaned and corrected. The substance of the analysis has not changed.

In late May we published a brief post about the Zao Wou-ki market prompted by some claims on Instagram that the Chinese artist's market had been jump-started by a joint show of his work alongside the work of Willem de Kooning organized by Lévy Gorvy in January 2017 before it traveled to Hong Kong. This prompted a bit of angry email from some readers. They stated, rightly, that the Zao Wou-ki market was not the product of a show comparing the artist to one of the West's great abstract artists.

We promised, at the time, to offer a more detailed analysis of the Zao Wou-ki market that would continue to make clear that Asian buyers were not taking their cues from New York gallerists. Before we get to some charts, let's examine the boldest claim on Instagram. Brett Gorvy used the post hoc prompter hoc fallacy to suggest that his January 2017 show had provoked the successive sales of four works just below or above $20m. In his post, Gorvy described it in this way:

  • This show was followed with a succession of record prices at auction, with Zao Wou-Ki consistently breaking the US$20 million mark over the past year especially

The word consistently is misused here. Used properly, consistently would mean that all of the Zao Wou-ki works sold in the year after the show would have achieved prices above $20m. What Gorvy means is that Zao's work has continually or regularly been able to break the $20m barrier.

Was that caused by Lévy Gorvy's masterly presentation of Zao as a peer of Willem de Kooning? There's no evidence to support such a claim.

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Who Is Stealing China’s Cultural Patrimony from Western Museums?

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Of the 10 million objects estimated to have been looted from China during the Century of Humiliation from 1840-1949, only a fraction have been recovered through the art and auction trade. Some extremely notable works like the 12 heads from the Zodiac clock designed for the Chinese Emperor’s Summer palace by a Jesuit priest became celebrated standoffs. A Chinese dealer bid for the two heads included in the Yves St. Laurent-Pierre Bergé collection sale and won. But the dealer refused to pay on principle that the works were stolen. Bergé refused to donate the works to China citing human rights violations by the current regime.

Artist Ai Weiwei picked up on the cultural importance of these objects by creating his own series of Zodiac heads, pictured above.

Christie’s parent company eventually broke the impasse by acquiring the heads and giving them as a gift in 2013. GQ magazine suggests that China might have embarked on a global initiative in 2010 to repatriate looted works with their own extra-legal campaign. According to GQ, a series of robberies at museums in Norway, France and Sweden seem to have been connected and highly targeted:

They often seem to be working from a shopping list—and appear content to leave behind high-value objects that aren’t on it. In each case, the robbers focused their efforts on art and antiquities from China, especially items that had been looted by foreign armies. Many of these objects are well documented and publicly known, making them very hard to sell and difficult to display. In most cases the pieces have not been recovered; they seem to simply vanish. After that first robbery, in Stockholm, a police official told the press that “all experience says this is an ordered job.” As the heists mounted, so did the suspicion that they were being carried out on instructions from abroad. But if that was true, an obvious question loomed: Who was doing the ordering?

The Great Chinese Art Heist (Gentleman’s Quarterly)

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