Art Market Monitor

A 1917 watercolor by Egon Schiele that was recently restituted by Colonge’s Museum Ludwig will be sold during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12 in New York. It is expected to fetch a price of $2.5 million–$3.5 million and is being offered with a guarantee.

Schiele’s Kauernder weiblicher Akt (Crouching Female Nude) depicts a kneeling nude woman, and had been in the collection of the Museum Ludwig since 1976. It was returned to the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, the work’s original owner, last month. A German commission issued a formal recommendation for the work’s restitution after Rieger’s heirs made a claim for it.

“We are now grateful to the Commission for this unanimously adopted recommendation. We also thank the heirs of Dr. Heinrich Rieger for their patience and are relieved that with the return of the work to the family a just and fair solution has now been found,” said the museum’s director, Yilmaz Dziewior, in a statement to ARTnews.

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Christie’s has unveiled a 1983 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that the house will offer for sale in its New York contemporary art evening sale on May 11. Titled In any case (1983), the painting is expected to fetch a price of $50 million and is being sold by Italian collector Giancarlo Giammetti, the cofounder of fashion label Valentino.

If the work reaches its low estimate, it will be among the most expensive works by the artist ever sold at auction. The painting will go on view at Christie’s outpost in Hong Kong on April 28 and then travel to New York ahead of its sale.

Measuring at more than 6-by-6-feet, the painting is one of three from a series of large-scale skull works that Basquiat completed in 1983. The piece bears reference to the 1983 police killing of Michael Stewart, a young Black street artist in New York. (Similar works formed the basis of a 2019 Guggenheim Museum survey curated by Chaédria LaBouvier.) It comprises some of the artist’s signature motifs prized among collectors—a skeletal head bearing a wide grin and scrawled signs in the background.

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An 1888 Vincent van Gogh painting will be offered at Christie’s in a 20th century art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Le Pont de Trinquetaille (1888), the work is estimated to sell for $25 million–$35 million.

Measuring at 25 inches by 31 inches, the painting was made a year before his suicide at the age of 37 in 1890. It is one of the few landscapes from his coveted Arles period, and it offers a street scene showing the Trinquetaille bridge rendered using the artist’s signature expressive brushwork and warm color palette.

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Sotheby’s three live-streamed evening sales of modern and contemporary art held on Sunday and Monday night in Hong Kong brought in a hammer total of HKD 1.46 billion, or HKD 2.1 billion with premium ($269.8 million), exceeding the collective pre-sale low estimate of HKD 1.4 billion ($179 million), across 91 works sold. Seventeen of those lots were guaranteed at a collected low estimate of HKD 661.5 million ($85.2 million).

The results from this series further indicate the ascendance of the Asian market. The restructuring of the global evening sales, which now include cross-category offerings, seems to have benefited Asia most compared to other sale centers, with this spring season seeing the house’s highest estimated Hong Kong season to date.

The three evening sales devoted to modern and contemporary art featured works by staples like Picasso, Yoshitomo Nara, and Zao Wou-Ki, and Sanyu, as well as Clyfford Still and Gerhard Richter, whose works have seen heightened success on the block in Asia in recent months.

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In a dramatic close to Sotheby’s modern art evening sale in Hong Kong on Sunday, vice chairman Brooke Lampley unveiled a large-scale Claude Monet water lilies painting to the live-streamed auction’s audience. That work, titled Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, is itself now going to be sold by the house. It will hit the block at Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12, where it is expected to fetch $40 million.

Monet completed the work between 1917 and 1919, during the last decade of his life. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s Giverny garden, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas is part of a series that commands the artist’s top auction prices. Another work from the series sold at Christie’s in 2008 for £40.9 million ($80.5 million); it had come from the estate of Indiana philanthropists Irwin and Xenia Miller. And in 2018, one from the David Rockefeller collection sold at Christie’s for $84 million.

The last work by Monet of this caliber to sell at auction was Meules, a landscape scene depicting haystacks, which was bought by Hasso Plattner at Sotheby’s in May 2019 for $110 million. If the present work reaches its high estimate, it will be among the top 10 works by the Impressionist ever to be sold at auction.

This is not the first time the work has appeared in a public sale. The seller purchased the work 17 years ago, during a Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale, for $16.8 million, against an estimate of $9 million. At the time, it was being sold from the holdings of Los Angeles collectors Fran and Ray Stark. Prior to that, it also passed through the hands of renowned New York Old Masters dealer Richard L. Feigen.