Art Market Monitor

Last month, a prized David Hockney portrait from the holdings of the financially strapped London Royal Opera House brought in £12.8 million ($16.9 million) when it sold at Christie’s. Some mourned the fact that the work would now disappear from public view, but it now seems those concerns were misplaced.

A new Art Newspaper report reveals that the buyer of Hockney’s Portrait of Sir David Webster (1971) is David Ross, the cofounder of Carphone Warehouse—and the chair of the Royal Opera House’s board of trustees. According to the report, he will return the work to the opera house once the purchase is finalized. He also has plans to loan it to the reopening exhibition of London’s National Portrait Gallery, where Ross is a trustee, in 2023.

At the Christie’s London contemporary auction, which generated $65 million total, there were only two bidders competing for the work: its third-party guarantor, a private collector abroad, and Ross, who won the painting at a bid of £11 million ($14.4 million) at the low estimate, and £12.8 million with buyer’s fees ($16.9 million), in the process keeping it from leaving the U.K. The expensive save marks the sixth-highest price paid for a Hockney at auction.Continue Reading

Following a night of sales that generated a collective $283 million on October 28, Sotheby’s has added a final evening sale to its fall calendar. The cross-category auction, which will include Impressionist, modern, and contemporary works, will take place on December 8 and will be live-streamed from the house’s New York headquarters. Bids will come in from specialists in New York, London, and Hong Kong, as well through the house’s online platforms.

Leading the sale will be Pablo Picasso’s 1962 painting Buste de Femme Assise. Expected to fetch a price between $8 million–$12 million, the portrait depicts the artist’s second wife and last muse, Jacqueline Roque, a woman more than 40 years his junior, whom he married the year before the painting was made and remained with until his death in 1973. In 1986, Roque died by suicide.

Elsewhere in the sale works by Chaim Soutine, Jean Dubuffet, and Glenn Ligon will go on offer, though Sotheby’s has not released full details on those works.

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Phillips has announced it will sell a rare Clyfford Still painting that go up for auction during the house’s modern and contemporary art evening sale on December 7 in New York, where it will hit the block alongside a $35 million David Hockney landscape. Still’s large-scale crimson and black abstract canvas PH-407 (1964) is expected to achieve a price of $17 million.

The seller, a private West Coast collector, purchased the work from Mitchell-Innes Nash in New York. Prior to that it resided at the namesake museum of German art collector and publishing heir Frieder Burda, where it was exhibited extensively, most recently in the museum’s “Gerhard Richter. Birkenau (& Grosse Abstraktion)” showcase in 2016.

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Last week, a rare set of seven glass Tiffany Studios windows sold at Philadelphia’s Freeman auction $705,000, more than double its pre-sale high estimate of $250,000.

After online and phone bidding, the set was won by a Philadelphia-based philanthropist, who plans to display the windows in a museum, according to Freeman’s statement on the sale.

Commissioned from Tiffany Studios in 1902 for the New Jerusalem Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, Angels Representing Seven Churches comprises a set of eight-foot-high glass panels each depicting a winged angel, the title and imagery of which refers to an episode from the Bible’s Book of Revelation.

Churches accounted for a majority of Tiffany’s commissions. By the early 20th century the design studio, headed by Louis Comfort Tiffany was a leading producer of painted glass, following recognition for the studio’s presentation of a chapel interior of leaded glass windows at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

A similar example of the Tiffany glass window pane design resides at the the Richard H. Dreihaus Museum in Chicago.

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Last week, with highlights by leading modernists in the category: Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Fernando Botero, Matta and Wifredo Lam, Christie’s held its seasonal Latin American Art sale. Realizing a total of $9 million, across 53 lots, the sale’s performance fell below expectations, placing only 63 percent of lots with new buyers and reaching a collective price 27 percent below the pre-sale low estimate of $12.3 million.

Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s Card Players (1985) sold for $2 million, against an estimate of $1 million-$1.5 million, making it the leading lot of the group. An untitled abstraction from 1959 by Matta sold for $231,250, against an estimate of $100,000. Each of those works were new to the market, coming from private collections to which they were acquired from Marlborough gallery in the 1980s. The sale also realized a new record for Haitian Surrealist Hector Hyppolite, whose portrait of a reclining woman, La Dame en vert – La Sirène, sold from the estate of Jamaican collector Wallace Campbell completed around the year 1947 made $100,000, against an estimate of $70,000. The price surpassed Hyppolite’s last record of $75,000 paid for his Portrait of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 2017 at Christie’s New York. This was also the work’s debut on the market. Another from the Campbell collection, Manuel Mendive’s 1992 canvas The Eyes of the Snail went for $68,750, doubling the $30,000 low estimate, but still around half of the artist’s record price of $125,000 paid for Energías para el amor y la bondad at Christie’s New York in 2017.

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