Art Market Monitor

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.

A rare photo album made by Ed van der Elsken sold for $21,250 at an auction in New York, setting a new record the Dutch photographer and filmmaker.

Made ca. 1951, the untitled album comprises 27 black and white photographs depicting Parisian street scenes, as well as portraits of Dutch photographers Emmy Andriesse and Ata Kando (who was married to Elsken). Five bidders competed for the work during a photography sale on March 11 at Swann Galleries in New York, where it was estimated at $10,000–$15,000. Curator Hans Rooseboom at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam purchased it on behalf of the museum.

This is the first time the work has ever been sold on the market. It has been in the Elsken family’s hands for seven decades. The result surpasses the last record for an Elsken photo album at auction, set by his 1962 book of 99 photographs titled Crazy World. That work sold in Haarlem, Netherlands, in November 2013 for $16,300.

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The London-based Reuben family has been revealed as the buyer of a $15.4 million Vincent van Gogh landscape purchased during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale in Paris on Thursday. Scène de rue à Montmartre (Impasse des deux frères et le Moulin à Poivre), from 1887, made its auction debut there after more than a century in private hands. A representative for the Reubens confirmed that the family had purchased the work.

The Reuben family collection, which comprises modern and contemporary art, including works by Picasso, Modigliani, Warhol and Basquiat, is jointly owned by British billionaire Simon Reuben, his brother David and daughter Lisa. Lisa, who ranks on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, manages the collection and has previously worked as a specialist in Sotheby’s contemporary art department in London.

In Thursday’s Paris evening sale, the van Gogh was offered twice. When it was initially offered, Lisa Reuben believed she had won the picture, which was estimated at €5 million–€8 million, but was outgunned by an online bidder, whose winning bid was received as the auctioneer let the hammer down. This brought the final price to €14 million ($16.5 million).

Later in the sale, auctioneer Aurélie Vandevoorde, Sotheby’s Paris director of the Impressionist and modern art, announced to the audience’s surprise that the van Gogh would be re-offered at the very end of the auction, without any explanation. The second time round, two bidders from Hong Kong, represented by Sotheby’s Asia chairmen Patti Wong and Nicolas Chow, competed for the work against London’s Sam Valette in increasing increments. Eventually, the Asian bidder backed down after Valette’s winning bid of €11.25 million ($15.4 million), which finally secured the painting for Reuben, and earned a big round of applause in the sale room.

In this case, the issue with the initial hammer bid made for the van Gogh was a matter of timing. In pre-pandemic times, it was easier for auctioneers to respond immediately to live bids in the sale room. Now, with the increase in telephone and internet bidding, and with the split-second difference in timing between those channels, simultaneous “with the hammer” bids, made as the gavel falls, have increased.

On Thursday in Paris, ahead of a marquee cross-category auction, Sotheby’s held an Impressionist and modern art evening sale that brought in a total of €36.5 million with premium ($43 million). Led by auctioneer Aurélie Vandevoorde, Sotheby’s Paris director of the Impressionist and modern art, the auction realized a sell-through rate of 88 percent across 31 lots sold.

Forty-two percent of the lots sold above the high estimate, 39 percent sold within their estimates, and just 6 percent landed below expectations. Four lots went unsold and two were withdrawn before the sale’s start.

The result surpasses last year’s equivalent sale in Paris that was pushed to June because of the pandemic and brought in a much lower total of €10 million ($11.8 million). This sale also brought in more than the house’s October Paris-based “Modernités” evening auction, which generated €28 million ($33 million).

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