Art Market Monitor

Getting a large Keith Haring mural off the walls of a staircase at Grace House, a Catholic Youth Organization, turns out to be a very complicated task. But it is one that was undertaken over two years for this work by Keith Haring that is now coming to auction at Bonhams on November 13th. The low estimate on the work is $3m. Ascension Church is selling the work to fund capital projects. Here’s Bonhams’s release

On November 13, Bonhams will offer the first Keith Haring mural ever to come to auction. It has an estimate of $3-5 million and will be presented at Bonhams Post-War & Contemporary Art sale in New York.

The monumental 85ft The Grace House Mural was painted by the artist circa 1983/1984 up three-stories of the five-story stairwell of Grace House, a former convent and home of the Catholic Youth Organization in Upper Manhattan. He painted it in a single night without a preparatory sketch or underpainting. The 13 figures, preserved in 15 separate sections, have been described as a “lexicon of Haring’s vocabulary”. It contains his iconic figures such as the Radiant Baby, the Barking Dog, and the figures dancing. The mural is being sold on behalf of Ascension Church to fund major capital projects at the parish, including significant accessibility upgrades.

One evening, Haring met two members of the Catholic Youth Organization, Benny Soto and David Almodovar, and they formed a tight friendship. Both went to work for Haring, Soto as an art assistant and Almodovar later managing Haring’s Pop Shop in SoHo.

This friendship led to an invitation to Grace House, where Haring agreed to paint its stairwell. He knew exactly what he wanted to do: impressively, he completed the mural without working out the composition in a sketch or an underpainting in advance. The spontaneous mural begins with the Radiant Baby and ends at the third-floor landing with a figure that seems to dive into a doorway, with only its lower half visible.

Throughout his career, Haring led art workshops for children in museums and schools around the world and devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages.

Rev. Daniel S. Kearney, Pastor of Ascension Church, said: “The Grace House Mural not only reveals Keith Haring’s innate humanity, but also the strong charitable commitment in his art and his dedication to young people. Ascension Church has been great stewards of this mural since it was first painted, and intentionally partnered with world class art conservation and logistics experts to save and preserve the integrity of the art, so that it can continue to serve as a powerful legacy of Keith Haring’s work and the way in which he reached out to communities outside of the art world.”

“The leadership of Ascension Church went above and beyond in stewarding these remarkable murals. At their direction, we explored all options to ensure the individual figures were extracted and stabilized in exceptional condition,” said Jeff Greene, Chairman and Founder of EverGreene Architectural Arts. “Through two years of planning, analysis, and proofs-of-concept, EverGreene ensured the removals maintained the mural’s contextual integrity within the building and their relationship to the architecture. In some cases, this included retrieving and incorporating architectural elements, such as plaques, which contributed to the original design intent.”

Sotheby’s announced this morning that Charles F. Stewart, a former investment banker and cable executive, is now the CEO of the auction house. Tad Smith, the former CEO, will remain a shareholder of the company and act as a Senior Advisor to the firm. Here’s Sotheby’s release:

Sotheby’s today announced the appointment of Charles F. Stewart as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately.

Mr. Stewart joins Sotheby’s from Altice USA, where he has served as Co-President and Chief Financial Officer since 2016.  He assumed the role at Altice USA following more than two decades of operations, financial and corporate leadership experience in the U.S., Latin America and Europe, most recently as CEO of Itau BBA International plc.  Prior to that, he spent 19 years at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker in various leadership and client-facing roles, based in New York, Brazil and London.

Mr. Stewart succeeds Tad Smith, who served as CEO of Sotheby’s since 2015.  Underscoring his confidence in Sotheby’s long-term success, Mr. Smith will become a shareholder of the company and act as a senior advisor to Mr. Stewart.

Patrick Drahi, owner of Sotheby’s, commented, “Charlie is a talented executive who brings years of international experience to Sotheby’s.  I have known him for many years and have been impressed by his appetite for innovation, taking smart risks, and challenging the status quo.  He has a proven record of driving growth and is ideally positioned to create value for Sotheby’s clients and our outstanding team.  I also want to thank Tad Smith for his leadership over the past four and a half years. Sotheby’s reached a new level of success during his tenure and I am delighted we will continue to benefit from his experience in an advisory capacity.”

Mr. Stewart said, “I am thrilled to be joining such a successful and storied organization. Sotheby’s is renowned throughout the world for deep expertise, trusted relationships, and a long history of innovation.  I look forward to adding my expertise to the talented global team and building on the success that has been established over nearly three centuries.”

About Charles F. Stewart

Charles Stewart most recently served as Co-President and Chief Financial Officer of Altice USA.

During his tenure at Altice USA, Mr. Stewart helped establish the Company as one of the leading technology, telecommunications and entertainment providers in the U.S. during a time of unprecedented change in the industry. In his role, he drove numerous operational and financial activities that integrated and transformed the Company, refocusing it for innovation and growth. Notably, in 2017, he helped lead the Company’s successful $2.1 billion initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, the largest telecom IPO in 15 years. Additionally, Mr. Stewart spearheaded the expansion of Altice USA’s Advertising and News businesses. This included the launch of a4, Altice’s advanced advertising platform, and numerous strategic acquisitions, as well as the growth of Altice News through the acquisition of Cheddar, integration of i24NEWS, and continued investment in hyperlocal news network News 12 Networks.

Mr. Stewart joined Altice USA after two decades of banking and finance experience spanning the U.S., Latin America and Europe. During his seven years based in London, he served as CEO of Itau BBA International plc, the international holding company for Itau-Unibanco, the largest bank in Latin America.  In that role, he oversaw Itau-Unibanco’s wholesale and private banking activities across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the U.S. Prior to that, he spent 19 years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in various client and leadership roles, including as Deputy Head of Investment Banking for EMEA, Head of Latin America Investment Banking, and member of the global investment banking management committee.

Mr. Stewart is a graduate of Yale University and lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

This morning Sotheby’s announced  Mark Rothko’s Blue Over Red as a featured lot in their Contemporary Art Evening Auction on November 14^th. From his critical year of 1953, this is the first work from that era to appear at auction in over a decade (since 2006), the painting will be offered with an estimate of $25/35 million.

Here’s Sotheby’s release:

Blue Over Red was acquired directly from the artist by legendary dealer and collector Harold Diamond, who owned seven Rothko works during his lifetime. The painting subsequently spent decades with Baltimore collectors Israel and Selma Rosen, who offered the work at auction in 2005, when it sold for $5.6 million. It has remained in the same private collection since 2007.

Just in time for MoMa’s re-opening, the work also has an interesting tie to the museum, as Rothko moved his studio to 106 West 53rd Street a year prior to creating the painting – just down the street from MoMa. The selection of works by Matisse in the museum’s collection would prove influential to Rothko’s artistic development – he spent hours in front of Matisse’s The Red Studio, which went on permanent display there in 1949. Works like Blue Window and Red Studio changed the way Rothko perceived color and the way he structured his paintings, which is directly articulated in Blue Over Red.

Blue Over Red marks the apex of the Rothko’s most critical period of development in the first half of the 1950s, during which the artist pioneered his signature style of abstraction. Testifying to the importance of this period in Rothko’s career, half of the 16 paintings the artist executed in 1953 reside in permanent museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and more.

Christie’s is including a late cast of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a work prominently featured at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for many years as a pivotal work in the story of Modernism. That bronze was cast in 1931. Later casts were made in 1949, 51, 63 and 72. Christie’ will offer an example of the 1972 cast—a cast from another edition made that year is in the Tate museum in London—this November with a $3.8m low estimate.

Here is Christie’s press release:

On November 11, Christie’s will offer Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, conceived in 1913 and cast in 1972 ($3,800,000-4,500,000) marking the first time in nearly 50 years that one of the artist’s revolutionary sculptures has been offered at auction, since Christie’s sold another cast from the edition in 1975. That example now resides in the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Max Carter, International Director, Head of Department, Impressionist and Modern Art, remarked: “In his brief life, Boccioni reimagined time, space and movement in three dimensions. Where other works of art are rooted in the past, Unique Forms of Continuity of Space—Boccioni’s greatest achievement and one of the most important sculptures of the 20th century—was, is and will always be the future.”

An icon of Modernism, Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space stands not only as the culmination of the artist’s pioneering form of Futurist sculpture, but also serves as a powerful visual embodiment of the Futurists’ iconoclastic and revolutionary artistic aims. Conceived in plaster in 1913, in this, the artist’s largest surviving sculpture, Boccioni has taken one of the most revered subjects in the Western tradition of art—the human figure—and split it apart before reconstructing it in a complex, abstract structure of dynamic, interlocking facets and graceful planes that penetrate and activate the space surrounding it. Striding boldly forward in a pose of powerful and continuous motion, this seemingly indomitable figure presents a new conception of man, as well as sculpture, in the 20th-century: mechanical, forward moving and entirely modern.

The original plaster of the present sculpture is located at the Museo d’arte moderna, São Paolo. All of the bronze examples are posthumous. The two 1931 casts are at the Museo del Novecento, Milan and Museum of Modern Art, New York. The 1949 cast is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The 1951 cast was in the collection of Count Paolo Marinotti. The 1963 cast resides at Museo d’arte moderna, São Paolo. A single 1972 cast is located at The Tate Gallery, London. The present sculpture is from an edition of ten numbered bronzes, cast in 1972 from the 1951 Marinotti example, six of which are in public institutions, including The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; New Orleans Museum of Art; Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim; Kröller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; and Hakone Open-Air Museum, Ninotaira.

Boccioni’s aim in these works was not simply to depict or transcribe the image of a figure in motion, but to convey the sensation of this movement, “the throbbing of its soul” (J. Golding, Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Newcastle, 1972, p. 8), capturing in visual form the range of simultaneous forces exerting themselves upon a body at the same time. As he wrote in the introduction to his first sculpture exhibition held at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris in June-July 1913—where Unique Forms was shown for the first time—he was seeking to depict, “not pure form, but pure plastic rhythm; not the construction of bodies, but the construction of the action of bodies.”

It was with the fourth and final of this group of striding figures, the present Unique Forms, that Boccioni successfully achieved this aim, creating a work that embodied the concept of “continuity in space”. The figure is so fluid, elegant and motion-filled it almost appears as if it could be leaping of the earth to become airborne.