Art Market Monitor

On Thursday, Phillips staged its marquee contemporary evening sale with a night of superior results led by staple talents like Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale comes on the heels of a five-hour-long global evening sale livestreamed at Sotheby’s three days earlier that garnered a total in excess of $360 million, securing the market long-awaited reassurance following the pandemic’s overhaul of the traditional auction schedule. The evening’s hour-long sale brought 25 lots led by auctioneer Henry Highley, and saw an overall 100 percent sell-through; the auction realized a total of $41 million, meeting the high estimate. The day sale total rang in at $10.2 million, sold 87 percent by lot.

The leading lot of the night was Joan Mitchell’s canvas Noël, featuring the artist’s thick, impasto drip field scheme from the early 1960s, consigned from an American collection. The painting met its reserve at $8 million quickly, but drew only six bids to meet its estimate of $9.5 million at the hammer ($11.1 million with buyer’s premium). In a press conference following the auction, Robert Manley dubbed the work “an auctioneer’s dream.” He noted that two bidders ultimately competed for the work, calling the end result a “knockout painting, for a knockout price.” The historic work came to market after nearly three decades in the same hands. The seller bought it in 1995 and the Phillips sale marks its auction debut. The painting’s outstanding result follows the sale of the storied Ginny Williams collection at Sotheby’s that reopened the market with aggressive remote bidding on Monday, bringing in new records for female postwar stars like Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, who have long been undervalued compared to their male contemporaries.Continue Reading

Sotheby’s jump-started the market this week with a highly successful live-streamed night of marquee sales that brought new artist records and $362.3 million in total revenue. Sotheby’s will continue with the new format in another London evening sale that will combine offerings across Impressionist and Modern art, Old Masters and 19^th Century European art scheduled to take place on July 28.

For this sale, alongside a widely anticipated $15 million Rembrandt self-portrait Sotheby’s has secured a trove of works together valued at around £40 million by leading European modernists sourced from a private collection that has been out of the public eye for almost four decades. The eighteen works coming up for sale from the major consignment include leading names such as Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky. An additional 24 lots from the private collection will go up for auction in an online impressionist & modern session, which open to bidders from 20–27 July.

“This private collection encapsulates exactly what collectors long for – quality and rarity” said Helena Newman, Worldwide Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, adding that the coveted collection “offers seldom seen works from the pinnacle of the Avant-Garde, from the figurative to the abstract.”

Among the highlights of the hybrid evening sale will be Picasso’s drawing Femme endormie from 1931, depicting his sleeping muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter estimated with a value between £6 million and £9 million. The sale marks the work’s debut at auction, unseen in public since the the drawing was initially purchased by the seller in 1986 at Basel’s Galerie Beyeler. An abstract oil on burlap by Fernand Léger hailing from Contrastes de formes series completed in his seminal Cubist period dated 1913 and 1914 will go up for auction at an estimated value of £8 million to £12 million. Another work never before seen at auction, Alberto Giacometti’s bronze black standing figure from 1956 Femme debout will also feature in the London evening sale and is expected to fetch £4 million and £6 million. Other variants from the artist’s seminal series of eight are included in museum collections like Paris’ Centre Pompidou.

Marc Chagall’s gouache on paper work La branche de gui or Le rêve from 1928, featuring a depiction of the artist and his wife in his signature dream-like scheme will also be on offer. The work carries an estimated value of £700,000–£900,000 and was last publicly exhibited in 1985. Among the other high value lots by avant-garde modernists is Wassily Kandinsky’s landscape Murnau, Schloss und Kirche II (Murnau – Castle and Church II) dated 1909 slated with an pre-sale estimate of £1 million to £1.5 million; and Cubo-Futurist Lyonel Feininger’s canvas Zottelstedt II (Town Hall II) from 1927 carries a value of £2 to £3 million.

In addition to two major lots slated for Phillips marquee evening sales—one by Jean-Michel Basquiat and one by Joan Mitchell—each valued in excess of $10 million, the firm will also offer a number of works by young primary market darlings, who have seen recent market spikes at auction in their Contemporary day sale, which will be open to bidders across two sessions starting at 11am on July 2.

Irish painter, Genieve Figgis, whose Sunday ladies will be on offer at an estimate valued of $50,000 to $70,000, is among those darlings. Figgis has gained traction for her works that reek of the macabre. New to the market, Sunday ladies, a picture completed between 2016 and 2017 was purchased by the seller in the artist’s solo survey What we do in the shadows at Almine Rech’s Brussel’s location in June 2017.Continue Reading

Christie’s has announced it will stage a new online series this summer via the firm’s private sales department titled “Dream Big”. The auction house will offer a total of fifty works of large-scale sculpture across a series of digital sales by contemporary names like Ai Wei Wei, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, and Fernando Botero among others carrying values between $100,000 to $10 million. The selling exhibition will run online from 25 June through August.

The sale—the first initiative of its kind to bring monumental sculpture to private sales— is meant “to bridge the gap between a real and a virtual exhibition” offering works under themes surrounding human and natural forms.

The series comes on the heels of a new era of innovation with novel sale formats reaching outside of the traditional constraints of modern and contemporary auctions. The private sale show brings this new kind of selling to art on an industrial scale; with the majority of works intended  to be display outdoors, these works typically present logistical challenges that prohibit their installation in the urban locations in which auction houses are typically found.

One of the stand-out works on offer in the exhibition is an interior sculpture, Paul McCartney’s Tomato Head from 1990. McCarthy’s hybrid sculptures have been compared to that of postwar assemblage artists as well as surrealists. The same work, Tomato Head (Green) from 1994 sold at Christie’s in a contemporary evening sale for from the collection of Peter Norton after a bidding war going for for $4.6 million, a record for the artist. According to the work’s catalogue, two remaining variants of the piece are in the collection of Athens-based Dimitris Daskalopolous, (Burgundy) and the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto (Black).Continue Reading