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Si Newhouse’s Francis Bacon Study Offered at Christie’s

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With comparisons to the Mona Lisa and Picasso’s Dora Maar, Christie’s is pulling out the stops for Si Newhouse’s Francis Bacon small portrait of Henrietta Moraes that the auction house just announced for the November sales. Newhouse played an important role as a collector launching the current contemporary art market with his aggressive buying in the late 1990s that established important prices and demand. Over the last two decades, many of his significant pieces have been sold and re-sold at stratospheric mark-ups. The power of the Newhouse provenance is not necessarily reflected in the $14m low estimate on the Bacon being offered here. Katya Kazakina spoke to Tobias Meyer, who is handling the dispersal of Newhouse’s art collection, about the original acquisition in 2007. Kazakina says Newhouse, who was not afraid to pay good prices for works of quality he wanted to own, paid $9m for the work.

Here’s Christie’s release on the painting:Continue Reading

Bacon, Richter Tangled Up in Phillips ‘Jet Fighter’ Crash

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Two significant art purchases—a Bacon diptych and Gerhard Richter’s Dusenjager—have caught Lin San in a terrible bind. But Lin San was not the buyer of either work. Still, he stands to lose a great deal of money because of a judge’s order.

Lin, a Chinese citizen, loaned another Chinese citizen, Zhang Chang, the money to pay for a Bacon work he purchased in the Summer of 2015 at Christie’s in London for £12m.

Zhang defaulted on the loan leaving Lin San no other option but to consign the Bacon to Gagosian to sell for ready cash.  Here’s the Courthouse News Service on the backstory:Continue Reading

Is David Martinez Realzing the Returns on that Bacon?

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Bacon, George Dyer Talking (30m GBP)

Scott Reyburn identifies David Martinez as the seller of the Bacon coming up in London at Christie’s:

“These sellers understand margins, and the uplift can be colossal,” Alan Hobart, a London-based private dealer, said in a telephone interview. “The auction houses have the buyers at the top end of the market. It’s globalized money. Bacon is now an auction commodity,” said Hobart, who paid 13.7 million euros ($18.7 million) on behalf of a client for the Irish-born artist’s 1961 “Seated Woman (Portrait of Muriel Belcher)” at Sotheby’s (BID) Paris in December 2007.

Reyburn also polls the flippers to find out the ideal holding period:

Five years is the recommended holding period for individual investors seeking to profitably trade contemporary art, according to dealers. In recent years, postwar and contemporary works, including those by Bacon, have been sold in shorter intervals, as prices rise to records and investors seek a quick profit by flipping art.

But that hasn’t stopped others in the Bacon market—including the sellers of the $142m work at Christie’s in November—from getting out quicker:

Another Bacon, “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait” from 1980, was sold on consignment by a London dealer to a private individual from Turkey in late 2012, the people said. That smaller-scale triptych was auctioned at Sotheby’s London for 13.8 million pounds in February 2013, netting the flipper a 2 million-pound profit within a few months.

And David Ganek thinks its a good way to make money these days now that his hedge fund has been side-lined:

“In my opinion art is an asset class with a growing amount of liquidity,” Ganek said in a telephone interview. “It’s a deep market that can be benchmarked against the performance of other investments,” said Ganek, who in addition to investing in artworks runs a family foundation that organizes educational exhibitions.

Martinez Is Said to Sell Bacon Estimated at $49 Million (Bloomberg)

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