Art Market Monitor

At its newly merged 20th/21st century art department’s first major evening sale this fall, Christie’s will sell Pablo Picasso’s Femme dans un fauteuil (1941) as the leading lot. Expected to fetch between $20 million–$30 million, the work will go up for sale at Christie’s New York location on October 6 alongside recently unveiled works by Paul Cézanne, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Joan Mitchell.

At 51⅛ inches by 38 inches, the work features one of Picasso’s three muses, the Surrealist photographer and artist Dora Maar, whom he met in 1936. The Christie’s sale marks its first time at auction.

The piece is a seminal example of Picassos’ wartime artistic developments, according to a statement from Conor Jordan, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art. Completed in 1941 following the Nazi regime’s occupation in Paris, it is from a series of works featuring Maar Picasso made in his Paris studio as the events of World War II unfolded across Europe and elsewhere.

Picasso’s portraits featuring Maar are among his most prized paintings. She famously inspired his “Weeping Woman” series, and the artist once said, “For years I painted her in tortured forms.” Works depicting Maar now command some of Picasso’s highest prices. His seated portrait titled Dora Maar au chat (1941) sold for $95.2 million at Sotheby’s in May 2006. More recently, Buste de femme (Femme à la résille), from 1938, sold for $67.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015.

“By turns anguished and lyrical, aggressive and despondent, the works all share an urgency, making them as much expressions of Picasso’s state of mind as portraits of Dora,” Jordan said of the series. “Sequestered in the cool light and pressing angles of the attic space, Dora is depicted on a grand scale as proud and unbending, an image of stately defiance, a modern Marianne.”

Comparable examples of Maar in similar dress from the 1940s series reside at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. A skilled artist in her own right, Maar found early success with her photography in Paris during the 1930s. She also documented Picasso’s month-long creation of his seminal work Guernica (1937), as well as the present work coming up for sale. Christie’s statement on the work notes Maar’s essential role in Picasso’s practice describes her as “an active participant in their intense artistic dialogue.” Long overshadowed by her relationship with Picasso, Maar’s work is now seeing critical attention, with a first a major traveling retrospective that first opened at the Centre Pompidou last year.

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New work by Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Garber-Maikovska will be shown at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles on September 12^th. The show, titled 4 from 3 dancers comprises the artist’s paintings, video installation and performance. This is Garber-Maikovska’s first exhibition since joining Blum & Poe’s stable. Part of the proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to Kindred Space LA Birth Center, a Black-owned Birth Center in Southern California.

Known for his abstract, gestural paintings and his wide-ranging use of media, Garber-Maikovska uses this group of works to extend on themes seen in recent exhibitions titled “Homebirth”, “POSTPARTUM”, and “Daughter.” Each of these featured autobiographical nods to parenthood. Video clips documenting the artist’s various performances in private and public settings will be displayed in the gallery separately from his painting series. Works in the showcase are priced between $35,000 to $120,000.

Much of the artist’s work references the body and movement. That has prompted critics to link him to various artists of the Japanese Gutai movement and abstract expressionists like Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

The 42-year-old artist’s work saw a peak in the auction market between 2015 and 2016 in the contemporary day sales when process-based abstraction was trending and young artists were experiencing intense speculation. That year, his highest prices were between $75,000 and $100,000. Later, a 2018 sale at Christie’s set the artist’s record price at $156,250 for an untitled painting.

Shows like “Daughter” staged at Massimo de Carlo in London in 2019 and “Homebirth” at High Art in Paris in 2018 were Garber-Maikovska’s last solo efforts. Prior to that he was included in a group survey at Brooklyn’s CLEARING in 2017. His works reside in museum collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Mozambique-born, Los Angeles–based painter Cassi Namoda is emerging as a sought after chronicler of every day life and post-colonial identity. Her paintings are selling as Black figurative artists see rising demand.

Namoda has gained traction following her inclusion in Stockholm gallery CFHILL’s Spring 2019 group exhibition “LA Dreams 2,” curated by Melanie Lum, in which four of Namoda’s paintings were placed with buyers. Later, she was included in the space’s acclaimed 2020 show “Black Voices/Black Microcosm,” which brought attention to various emerging Black artists such as Amoako Boafo, Otis Quaicoe and David Shrobe.

Her first solo show, at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in 2019, received positive notices from critics. Gan Uyeda, her gallerist and a director at Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly gallery, tries to capture some of what appeals to buyers. “There’s a plainspokenness to the narratives she unfurls, but at the same time she leaves space for the unknowable,” Uyeda said. “As someone with mixed Mozambican and American heritage and who has lived a somewhat nomadic life, she’s able to harmonize these very disparate ways of navigating, interpreting, and understanding the world.”Continue Reading

In October, Christie’s will auction works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and other Abstract-Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist artists from a private collection under the title “A New York State of Mind: An Important Private Collection.” Alongside a $25 million Cézanne watercolor, the works will go up for sale on October 6 at Christie’s New York headquarters.

Among the highest-priced lots in the newly merged category auction is a 1984 portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat titled MP. Estimated to sell for between $4 million–$6 million, the painting depicts Basquiat’s friend Michael Patterson standing against a stark neutral background flanked by Xeroxed text listing blues songs. The seller bought the work at Christie’s nearly three decades ago, in 1993, for just $77,300. Prior to that it was shown only once, in 1985 at Akira Ikeda Gallery in Tokyo, before going to a Japanese collector.

Figurative portraits of real-life sitters are rare in Basquiat’s oeuvre and only one other has ever been sold on the secondary market. The other 1984 comparable, also titled MP, which features a similar composition, last sold in 2011 during a Sotheby’s contemporary sale in Paris for $1.7 million. The Basquiat works that command the highest prices are from 1982 to 1984 and include the artist’s most recognizable emblems, such as skulls, crowns, and graffiti-like scrawled text. As the Basquiat market matures, auction houses are introducing works with less familiar imagery on the secondary market to potential buyers.

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Sotheby’s has announced that it will auction a group of unseen works of modern Indian art, including pieces by V. S. Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna, Mohan Samant and Piraji Sagaraon during its Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sale. The works will go up for sale in London on September 29.

Several works from the collection of the Gunnar Hansen, an executive of engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro, will go up for sale. Together with his wife Inger, Hansen acquired seminal pieces of modern Indian art throughout the 1960 and 1970s, during a two-decade stay in India. One of the couple’s first purchases—and the leading lot in the sale—is an untitled red and orange abstract painting by Gaitonde estimated at £1.5 million–£2 million ($1.9 million–$2.6 million). Hansen bought the work directly from the artist in 1969.

Gaitonde has long been the leader of the Indian modern art market. The artist recently saw a new record at Mumbai-based auction house Pundole last week during a sale of works from the collection of Glenbarra Art Museum in Japan. The 1974 untitled painting sold for $5 million. In March, Sotheby’s sold a 1963 untitled painting by the artist for $1.8 million, beating its high estimate of $1.5 million.

Ishrat Kanga, Head of Sotheby’s London Modern and Contemporary South Asia Art Sale, called the Hansen collection a “perfect time-capsule” in a statement, adding that the work “demonstrates the depth and quality of abstract and non-objective art which was being created in India at this extraordinary moment.”

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