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Christie’s Ebsworth Scores with $317m Evening Sale

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This round-up of the reporting on the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. The first month of a monthly subscription is free which makes it easy to subscribe and cancel before you pay.

There’s a market impression forming that the combination of high expectations and the armature of third-party guarantees is creating a successful but muted art market. With so much effort going into pre-selling works at auction to meet the estimate demands of sellers, the auctions this week themselves have begun to feel anti-climactic.

The Ebsworth sale at Christie’s is a case in point. The $317m total made the sale a solid success but the room felt muted with a fair number of empty seats, hardly the gala evening event befitting a collection of Ebsworth’s reputation. Maybe it was the shadow of the Rockefeller sale or the market hangover or simply the spreading presumption of a tougher macroeconomic environment in the future. Whatever the underlying cause, the numbers told a different story from the bidding where most works sold without excitement.

The New York Times’s Scott Reyburn got this quote from one dealer who has been on both sides of the equation:

“It didn’t fly, but it was pretty solid,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private art dealer based in New York, referring to the auction.

The Wall Street Journal had a different take that might need a grain of salt to be taken with it:

“The fact that so many of these evening-sale lots are now guaranteed gives people the misleading impression that big auctions are riskless propositions, but that’s clearly not the case,” said art lawyer Thomas Danziger.

It’s hard to believe anyone thinks auctions are riskless. But a single-owner collection with a global guarantee is a substantially different market proposition than individually guaranteed lots.

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Christie’s to Hold Sugimoto Sale at Paris Photo

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Christie’s is celebrating 160 years of diplomatic relations with Japan by holding a sale of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs alongside two other sales. The main sale will have a 105 lots, led by works by Irving Penn.

As part of Paris Photo, Christie’s France will organize three events around photography. The department will present for the first time, on November 8, a monographic sale dedicated to the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. This sale, part of this 160th anniversary celebrating the diplomatic and artistic relations between Japan and France, will also coincide with Sugimoto’s current exhibition at the Château de Versailles, from 16 October 2018 to 17 February 2019.

In addition, a general sale turned this year towards contemporary photography and composed of 105 lots will be offered on the same day. The public will also have the opportunity to discover a fashion photography exhibition featuring nearly fifty photographs by F.C. Gundlach as well as works from his personal collection.

The sale dedicated to Hiroshi Sugimoto is a retrospective of his work, bringing together twenty-nine photographs with a global estimate of €1.5 to 2 million, representing the different themes he explored. One of the highlights of the sale, Sea of Japan, Rebun Island, estimated at €200,000-300,000, is part of the artist’s most famous series “Seascapes” which he began in the 1980’s.

Always looking to the past, Sugimoto had a great admiration for William Henri Fox Talbot‘s works which he has been collecting for several years. One of his series brings back Talbot’s paper negatives to life, copying and enlarging them to the point where the grain of the calotype becomes visible. Transforming the negative into a positive in a ten times larger format, in addition to hand-colored it, gives life to some of Talbot’s prints he never reproduced, such as Bust of Venus, November 26, 1840, 2007, estimated at €30,000-40,000.

One of his other famous series, “Lightning fields” will be offered through a 2009 snapshot, Lightning Fields #128, estimated at €50,000-70,000.

For each sale, the Photography department directed by Elodie Morel, selects high quality corpus including a series of 7 ethnographic portraits by Irving Penn, in which the aesthetics and the care taken to stage the scene, prevail over the historical and sociological character of the indigenous populations. In 1970, Penn traveled to Papua New Guinea. He first visited the tribal village of Bena, not far from the city of Goroka, where he took pictures of the natives and their traditional accessories: bilas (shell ornaments) as in Seated Warrior, Sitting Girl (€20,000- 25,000), or feathers and fur decorations. In the Asaro Valley, Penn immortalized naked men with clay masks, performers of a tribal dance organised by the Australian colonizers in 1957, as in Three Asaro Mudmen (€50,000-70,000).

Christie’s $18m Diebenkorn Ocean Park Looks for a Record

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Christie’s announced this morning a major Richard Diebenkorn work Ocean Park #137 on offer during the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The work is estimated at $18-22m. That pricing is the result of Christie’s own impressive work last May selling a large collection of Diebenkorn’s work. During that sale Ocean Park #126 was sold for $23.9m, setting a record for the artist. The last time we saw anything like that quantity or material by the artist come to market was during the 2014 Bunny Mellon sale at Sotheby’s where eight works were sold, four of them were from the Ocean Park series. The top lot made almost $10m with others from the series selling for $6m and $8m. None of those works were at the scale of Ocean Park #137, which is 100 inches tall.

On November 15, Christie’s will offer A Masterpiece from the Collection of Mary Tyler Moore and Dr. S. Robert Levine: Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #137, 1985. At over eight feet tall, Ocean Park #137 was executed on the largest canvas that Diebenkorn could possibly fit through his studio doors. This monumental painting is one of the final works from Diebenkorn’s celebrated Ocean Park series and stands as a majestic example of the entirely new language of painting inspired as much by art historical traditions as by the light and landscape of California.

An iconic figure in the history of American entertainment, Mary Tyler Moore was the very embodiment of her beloved public persona. Charming, intelligent, and imbued with an indomitable spirit, she touched the lives of all who knew her and the millions who watched her on screen. Moore forged a legendary career with television hits The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and in films such as Thoroughly Modern Millie and Ordinary People. Celebrated for her unforgettable onscreen charisma and trailblazing female characters, the actress is also remembered as a leading advocate for finding a cure for type 1 diabetes and its complications, a model of creative innovation and personal perseverance, and a loving wife and partner.

In 1970, Moore forever changed the course of television history, as she starred in the groundbreaking CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The idea of a single career woman as the protagonist of a major network sitcom was a radical concept; only an actress as talented as Moore could have pulled off the feat. Yet it was not merely Moore’s acting chops that made her eponymous sitcom such a success. Rather, it was the actress’s insistence on surrounding herself with the very best in writing, production, and acting—a singular combination that paved the way for every women-focused show since.

In the same way that Moore the actress personified steadfast self-assurance and warmth, so did she dedicate herself to these principles in the public sphere. For more than four decades, Moore battled type 1 diabetes (T1D), and became the world’s leading voice for the fears and hopes of people and families affected by T1D and its complications and its most recognized champion for funding of research for a cure through the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). A noted lover of animals Moore was the co-founder, with Bernadette Peters, of Broadway Barks, an initiative which, with the help of Broadway stars and Broadway Cares, Equity Fights AIDS, raises awareness of the importance of shelter adoption and spay and neuter. Ms. Moore and her husband, Dr. S. Robert Levine, committed themselves to using her persona and success, and his medical background and other skills, for good purposes. As such, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Ocean Park #137 will benefit the Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine, MD Charitable Foundation to continue the couple’s longtime philanthropic mission.

November 15th will mark the first time that Ocean Park #137 has changed hands since Ms. Moore and Dr. Levine acquired the painting in 1988. They bought the painting together, 5 years into the loving marriage that lasted until Moore’s death in January of last year, at the age of 80. Ocean Park #137 arrived in New York shortly after it was completed to be included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Knoedler gallery. In his review of the show, New York Times art critic John Russell, described the Ocean Park paintings on view as “the single longest continuous exploration of a given motif in the work of any substantial living American painting…The Ocean Park chapter will never be closed.”

Diebenkorn began the Ocean Park series in 1967, soon after he moved down from San Francisco to Southern California to accept a teaching position at UCLA. His friend and fellow painter Sam Francis invited him to take over his studio in Ocean Park in the southwest corner of Santa Monica, which came with big windows that looked out over the roofs and buildings to bright strips of beach and sea and sky beyond. Diebenkorn was hardly alone in his new neighborhood. Ocean Park’s inexpensive rent attracted a wide range of artists including James Turrell, William Wegman, Robert Irwin, and John Baldessari. Diebenkorn was happy there and almost immediately began painting the large-format geometric abstractions that would seal his place in history.

At the time he moved in, Diebenkorn was best known for his sudden radical shift in style that occurred in the mid- fifties. Having first achieved fame after the war as an abstract painter, a West Coast answer to Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, Diebenkorn abruptly abandoned the popular manner and rose to prominence again as the leading member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement that included David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Wayne Theibaud. In both incarnations, his supple line and pitch-perfect sense of color set him apart, gifts of ease and fluidity that stood in contrast to his own reflective temperament, a natural inclination that made him prize revision as a working method.

Christie’s Has $28m in Two Giacometti’s for New York

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In June, an example of Giacometti’s Cat was sold at Sotheby’s for $16.5m. The work originally came from the collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody whose 2010 sale did much to re-ignite the art market after the global financial crisis. During that sale, the cat was sold for $20.8m. Christie’s now brings another example of the cat from a famous collector, Johanna Lambert, with an estimate at $14m. Alongside the cat is another work by Giacometti that has never been at auction before. Femme assise from 1949-50 is also estimated at $14m.

In its November 11 Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s will present two consummate examples by Alberto Giacometti: Femme assise, conceived in 1949-1950 and cast in 1957 ($14-18 million) from a Distinguished Private Collection, and Le Chat – “The Lambert Cat” – conceived in 1951 and cast in 1955 ($14-18 million), which was Formerly In The Johanna Lambert Collection. These works come to auction on the heels of Giacometti’s widely celebrated retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Adrien Meyer, Co-Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s, remarked: “Giacometti created Femme assise during 1949-1950, at the height of a breakthrough period of astonishing productivity. The subject is anchored to the ground on her throne-like chair, vulnerable yet not weak, echoing the grace of Egyptian antiquity. The present work has been in the same collection for decades and will be sold at auction for the first time ever; this cast is one of only three left in private hands.”

Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman and International Director Impressionist & Modern Art, continued: “Alberto Giacometti had one of the most intense and penetrative gazes in all 20th century art; always fighting hard to capture the essence of reality around him. In this beautifully black patinated bronze cat – one of his rare animal sculptures, (conceived in 1951, cast in 1955 and which has never left the Lambert family since), Giacometti powerfully captures the feline nature of a domestic cat.”

Giacometti created Femme assise during 1949-1950, at the height of a breakthrough period of astonishing productivity, in which he brought forth definitive masterworks, one after another, in his newly attenuated, weightless, and visionary post-war mode. In three exhibitions, his first solo shows in nearly fifteen years—at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1948 and 1950, and at Galerie Maeght, Paris, in 1951—Giacometti unveiledL’homme au doigt, Homme qui marche, La Main, Trois hommes qui marchent, La Place II, La Cage, Le Chariot, L’homme qui chavire, La Clairière, and La Forêt, among other works.

Embodied within the unprecedented, radical, and extreme filiform configuration of Femme assise, thin and light, is the classic subject of the artist and his model—this full-length seated woman is nude. Giacometti could neither conceive nor sculpt her in any other way. Never before has a nude been so bare, exposed, and fleshless as she is here. Having been cast in bronze affords her figure some tensile strength; the original model—preserved today in the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris—is a most precious, fragile object.

An early owner of the present Femme assise was a woman whose own life was an “astonishing adventure”—the dealer and gallerist Erica Brausen. Brausen became friends with Giacometti in the early 1930s, when they were neighbors in Montparnasse; after a stint in Majorca during the Spanish Civil War, during which she assisted numerous Jewish and socialist friends in escaping from Franco’s forces, she arrived penniless in London at the start of the Second World War. In 1947, she established the Hanover Gallery, which quickly rose to prominence as one of the most influential showcases of advanced art in Europe. Brausen gave Giacometti an exhibition in 1955 and thereafter served as his principal dealer in London.

Femme assise is being presented at auction for the very first time.

The present cast of Le Chat comes from the legendary Lambert Collection. A Belgian banking dynasty renowned for its eponymous Banque Lambert, the Lambert family has also become famed for its esteemed collection, with a love of art passed down through generations. The family’s collection was started in the late 19th Century by Baron Léon Lambert, who, with his wife, Baroness Lucie Lambert, the granddaughter of James de Rothschild, began to acquire and inherit a notable array of artworks from their families. This passion was continued by their son, Baron Henri Lambert and his Viennese wife, Baroness Johanna ‘Hansi’ Lambert. In 1956, she visited Giacometti’s studio in Paris. It was soon after this meeting that she purchased Le Chat, which has remained in the family’s collection ever since.

“In a burning building,” Alberto Giacometti declared, “I would save a cat before a Rembrandt”. There is good reason to believe the sculptor’s empathy for creatures great and small, especially on the evidence of the four sculptures that he created in 1951 of three different species of animal—two horses, a dog, and the cat offered here. As Valerie Fletcher has noted, all three were reputedly executed in plaster during a single day. Each of the sculptures is life-size or even larger—Le Chat has an exceptionally long neck. For lack of space in his cramped studio, Giacometti had to leave the huge Deux chevaux outdoors in his courtyard, where the plaster eventually broke down and dissolved in the rain. The smaller dog and cat were thankfully preserved and cast in bronze.

The plaster version of Alberto Giacometti’s Le Chat was first shown publicly in the artist’s premiere solo exhibition in Europe, at the Galerie Maeght, Paris, in 1951; it remains in the collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris. Casts from the bronze edition are located in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence; the Museum Berggruen, Berlin; and the Stiftung Alberto Giacometti, Zürich.

Albada Jelgersma Collection ‘A Seminal Moment’ for Old Master Market, Says Christie’s

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In what Christie’s is calling a “seminal moment for the Old Master market,” the December sales of Old Master paintings in London will feature two sales comprising the collection of Eric Albada Jelgersma and his wife, Marie-Louise. The Albada Jelgersma paintings will get their own Evening sale. The rest of the collection of furniture, drawings, silver and the like will fill a a 350-lot day sale. These sales will take place December 6 & 7. The Evening sale will feature a pair of Frans Hals portraits, above, estimated at between £8-12m, and works by Judith Leyster and Anthony van Dyck.

Here’s Christie’s release:

Christie’s will offer a landmark, two-part sale of The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection in London on 6 & 7 December. This is one of the most important private collections of Golden Age Dutch and Flemish pictures to have been formed in living memory, revealing the unerring eye of Eric Albada Jelgersma and his wife Marie-Louise Albada Jelgersma for outstanding quality.

Christie’s will devote a special, stand-alone Old Masters Evening Sale to The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection comprising over 40 paintings, including works by the greatest artists from the 17th century, notably Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck, Jan Breughel the Elder, Judith Leyster and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.

This sale is led by the finest pair of portraits by Frans Hals to remain together in private hands: Portrait of a gentleman, aged 37 and Portrait of a lady, aged 36 (estimate: £8-12 million) and includes arguably the most important Golden Age painting by a female artist left in private ownership, Merry Company by Judith Leyster (estimate: £1.5-2.5 million).

The Collection Sale will take place the following day and will comprise over 350 lots of furniture, decorative objects, sculpture, antiquities, silver, Asian works of art and a selection of the Old Master paintings. The quality and range of the Old Master paintings and works of art within the collection is extraordinary, and their appearance together at auction will constitute an historic pair of sales. Highlights will be on public view at Christie’s New York from 26 to 30 October and in Hong Kong from 23 to 26 November, ahead of the pre-sale exhibition opening in London on 30 November.

Christie’s Has $35m Rothko + 4 Cornell Boxes from de Menils

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Christie’s has a dark Rothko from the de Menil family estimated at between $35 and $45m. The work was displayed in Rothko’s own home, shown alongside Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock in an exhibit curated by Dominique de Menil in the 1960s. It was later a featured work in the 1978 Guggenheim retrospective held the same year it was bought by François de Menil. Along with the Rothko, four boxes by Joseph Cornell will also be sold:

On 15 November, Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art will be highlighted by Works from the Collection of François and Susan de Menil. Encompassing five lots, this grouping encapsulates the impeccable tastes of architect and filmmaker François de Menil, and his wife and business colleague Susan. Leading the selection is a consummate painting by post-war master, Mark Rothko, who is represented by Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) (estimate: $35-45 million). Painted in a period of creative ferment between his two greatest series, the present work was executed shortly after the completion of the Seagram Murals in 1960. During this time, he began to contemplate the shimmering dark plums, blacks, and purples that became the predominant palette in the panels at the Rothko Chapel commission that was soon to follow. Completing the selection, is an exemplary group of four works by Joseph Cornell, made between the 1930’s and 1948.

Ana Maria Celis, Senior Specialist and Head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, remarked: “It is a privilege to offer five exquisite examples from the distinguished collection of François and Susan de Menil. This group presents a wonderful opportunity to juxtapose the brilliant work of two markedly different artists, Mark Rothko and Joseph Cornell. Although their styles varied dramatically, through the eyes of farsighted collectors, one can see the interconnectedness of two visionary artists who not only worked at the same time, but were inspired by one another’s passions.”

The painting first came into the possession of its current owner in 1978, the same year as Rothko’s stunningly successful retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. However, the history between the de Menil family and Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) dates back much further. Dominique and John de Menil, the legendary collectors who founded the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel, both located in Houston, Texas, had first visited Rothko in his studio in 1960, where the painter showed them the Seagram Murals. The series had originally been commissioned for the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, designed by Mies Van der Rohe, but when Rothko discovered that they had been slated to hang not in the lobby but in the building’s Four Seasons restaurant, he returned the commission and kept the paintings himself. This notorious fit of pique did not deter the de Menils from returning in 1964 and offering him a commission of their own, to paint a series of his own devising that would hang in a chapel in Houston. During the frequent visits that ensued as the couple consulted with the artist and followed his progress, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) caught the eye of Dominique.

As the construction of the chapel neared completion, Dominique de Menil, then Chairman of the Art History Department of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, proposed arranging an exhibition, “Six Painters,” at the University, which was near the site of the forthcoming Chapel. She requested five works by Rothko, including Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which she had seen on the walls of the artist’s personal sitting room in his 69th street studio.

The paintings were exhibited with works by the five other midcentury masters, Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. When the show concluded at the end of the year, the painting returned to Rothko, who possessed it until his death.

Growing up in the environment that he did, François formed a natural affinity for the mysterious and mystical qualities of Rothko’s darker canvases. Some months before the Guggenheim Exhibition, François de Menil approached Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace gallery who represented the Rothko estate, to express interest in purchasing a painting featuring Rothko’s darker palette. Glimcher offered de Menil, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which would grace the Guggenheim retrospective later that year.

In his review of the Rothko retrospective, the art critic for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, took the unusual step of describing the museum goers attending the show before turning to the works on display: the crowds were “hushed” “awestruck,” “transfixed,” and they tended to linger, “often turning away from the paintings in front of them to look across the great open space of the Guggenheim spiral at paintings in the distance.”

The Christie’s sale on November 11th will present the second instance that Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) has ever changed hands.

Accompanying the Rothko offering from the collection of François and Susan de Menil, is a quartet of examples by Joseph Cornell. The works are exquisite, speaking fluently in an imagistic language that feels just beyond grasp. The intangible mystery possessed by Cornell’s work runs parallel to a similar quality inhabited by the enigmatic paintings of his close friend Mark Rothko. The two were born just three months apart in 1903, Rothko in Dvinsk, Russia and Cornell in Nyack, New York. They first met by chance in 1949, at the Horn & Hardart automat on 57th Street, where they struck up a friendship that seems to have lasted throughout their lives. In 1957, Cornell sent Rothko’s daughter Kate a book on Fra Angelico, and Rothko’s wife sent back a thank you note with a hand-colored angel that Kate had made for the family Christmas tree. Rothko, despite a reputation as a formidable and imperious figure, was notably gregarious. Nevertheless, he envied the ease and generosity that Cornell displayed around other artists. “I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and what they do,” he wrote to Cornell in 1959. Then, he gave a wonderful example of his own brand of artistic appraisal: “I do want to tell you that I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make.”

Leading the selection of examples by Cornell is Untitled (Medici Slot Machine), 1942. Executed in 1942, Untitled (Medici Slot Machine) comes from
the celebrated eponymous series and emerges as an archaeology of poetry. In this body of works, Cornell adapts three different Renaissance portraits as their
sources. Here Cornell reproduces a painting by Sofonisba Anguissola, titled Portrait of Marquess Massimiliano Stampa in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Although Cornell was known to have almost never traveled beyond the bounds of New York, he was an inveterate traveler of the mind. He was enchanted and obsessed by ideas of the travel of bygone years, in the same way that he was obsessed by the ballerinas of prior centuries. In this sense, his accumulation of materials for his boxes
resembled the souvenir-gathering of the Grand Tour. Here in the present work, Cornell himself brings the magpie tendency of the romantic imaginary traveler of yesteryear to his box, filling it with snippets of different works and maps, subliminal and seemingly random scatterings of thought, interrelation, memory and association. This is a very personal museum of the mind.

$10m Kerry James Marshall Work Announced by Christie’s to Benefit Chicago Libraries

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Christie’s announced today that they will have a $10m Kerry James Marshall work for the Contemporary art sales in New York. The work has been in hanging in a Chicago public library for the last 23 years.

On October 1, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, announced that Kerry James Marshall’s tour de force, Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (estimate: $10,000,000-15,000,000) will be sold to benefit the City of Chicago’s public art fund and libraries program. One of the largest and most expansive paintings in the artist’s oeuvre, this work will be a centerpiece of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in November in New York.

Commissioned by the City of Chicago in 1995, Knowledge and Wonder has been exhibited at Chicago’s Legler Branch Library ever since and, with its sale, this extraordinary work will enrich the future of its original home for generations to come. The auction proceeds will be used to expand the Legler Library from a branch location to a West Side regional library with major upgrades in capabilities akin to current regional libraries. Additionally, proceeds will be used to augment the public art fund for the acquisition and development of new work.

“Kerry James Marshall’s iconic works are part and parcel of Chicago’s public art portfolio, and we will always honor the home Knowledge & Wonder had on the West Side,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “I want to thank Christie’s Auction House for handling the sale of this remarkable piece of contemporary art, which will in turn help transform the lives of residents across Chicago for generations to come.”

Knowledge and Wonder is from a key period of Marshall’s widely celebrated body of work including the Garden Project series of 1994-1995. This exemplary painting speaks to the artist’s cultural and art historical narrative, which has made him one of the leading American artists working today. His figurative paintings have become some of the most powerful images in a generation. Measuring nearly 10 feet in height by over 23 feet in length, Knowledge and Wonder is a monumental achievement from a prime moment in the artist’s career. Marshall depicts a community of people not normally represented in art history as more than a dozen African American children and adults are shown looking up in awe at the universe, its elements and the world beyond.

Alexis Klein, Senior Specialist, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s: “It is an honor for us to share in this uniquely Chicago story and to have the opportunity to offer Knowledge and Wonder, a stunning painting by Kerry James Marshall, to benefit the people of the City of Chicago. In Knowledge and Wonder, Kerry James Marshall realizes an iconic modern-day history painting rife with layered meaning and symbols of inspiration. In this seminal masterpiece, the artist opens up the art historical canon to a new generation, promoting knowledge and learning as the tools necessary for social change. It is truly a painting for our time.”

Working on such a significant scale, Marshall places Knowledge and Wonder in a tradition of history painting and in the process, gives a voice to those who have often gone unheard. “I think it’s important for a black artist to create black figure paintings in the grand tradition,” the artist has said. “Artworks you encounter in museums by black people are often modest in scale. They don’t immediately call attention to themselves. I started out using history painting as a model because I wanted to claim the right to operate at that level.” Marshall’s skillful execution of Knowledge and Wonder in ambitious proportions immediately brings to mind the large scale figurative work of French Post-Impressionist masters such as Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse or the revered oversized murals of Diego Rivera.

The City of Chicago has a long-standing history of deep engagement in education and the arts. Christie’s sale of Knowledge and Wonder represents the City’s commitment to future generations of Chicago citizens by ensuring their access to lifelong learning and the art of their time. This sentiment is paralleled by Kerry James Marshall’s longtime dedication to Chicago, his chosen city of over three decades. Marshall’s influence can be seen throughout Chicago. This is perhaps most notable at the Chicago Cultural Center, where in 2017 Marshall unveiled his 132 by 100-foot mural, Rushmore, which honors 20 women who have shaped the city’s cultural landscape.

Works by Kerry James Marshall are in the collections of major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Picasso’s Guitar Leads Christie’s Avant-Garde Sale for FIAC

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Christie’s wants to remind us all that they’ve got a special FIAC auction coming up in mid-October. We’re all used to the international auctions in London to take advantage of the art collector presence around the Frieze fairs. Christie’s wants to see if something similar can happen around FIAC even though it is so close to Frieze. Featured in the Avant-Garde sale is a work by Pablo Picasso, Guitar (above) offered with a €2m low estimate:

Christie’s is pleased to present an exceptional work of art by Picasso in the upcoming Avant-Garde auction which will be organised on 17 October. Guitare, bouteille et compotier (€2,000,000-3,000,000) realised by the Spanish master in 1922 represents the peak of Picasso’s pursuit of purity and modernity which characterised his own contribution to the prevailing movement of the time: the Rappel à l’ordre.

Adrien Meyer, Co-Chairman, Impressionist and Modern art department: “Formerly in the personal collection of Marina Picasso, this monumental painting, the largest of the series, is a statement in Picasso’s oeuvre, re-exploring cubism and flirting with abstraction. It will be presented at auction for the very first time alongside the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC)”.

This movement was born at the end of First World War when most of the major artists, affected by the chaos of the war, returned to reason and order resulting in very modern compositions. This painting represents the new form of cubism Picasso reached after his long period of search for modernity.

The composition possesses a syncopated energy, delivered through a highly-sophisticated sense of order and rhythm, with two dimensional forms and colours overlapping to create a geometrically constructed image. At the center of the composition lies a guitar, a recurrent motif throughout Picasso’s work of the 1910s and 1920s; the guitar for Picasso was an emblematic symbol employed to recall his Spanish homeland.

Christie’s Middle Eastern Art Comes to London with El Gazzar

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Abdel Hadi El Gazzar, An Ear of Mud, an Ear of Paste (£350450k)

Christie’s is getting more bullish on Middle Eastern Modern and Contemporary art since they moved the sales to London.  The firm is gearing up for its October 24th sale where the lead work will be Abdel Hadi El Gazzar’s An Ear of Mud, an Ear of Paste from 1951.

Christie’s release has details of the several artists like Parviz Tanavoli, Sohrab Sepehri, Monir Farmanfarmaian and Mohammed Ehsai from Iran or Hamed Ewais from Egypt and Syrian artist Marwan:Continue Reading

Van Dyck’s Portrait of Princess Mary Stars at Christie’s

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In a rather unexpected turn, Christie’s announced this morning that they too have a van Dyck portrait as their featured lot for the December Old Master Evening sales in London. More than that, the work comes from the same final year as the pair of portraits announced last week for Sotheby’s. Christie’s brighter, more opulent work is priced well above either or both of Sotheby’s van Dyck portraits of the princess and the Prince of Wales.

To recap from yesterday’s post, the van Dyck market has been in something of a holding pattern for the better part of a decade. This painting aspires to sell among the top works by the artist. If the low estimate of £5m is achieved as a premium price, the work would become the third highest auction price for the artist.

Here’s Christie’s press release:

Portrait of Princess Mary (1631–1660), daughter of King Charles I of England, full-length, in a pink dress decorated with silver embroidery and ribbons by Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1641, will be offered from a Distinguished Private Collection in Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December, duringChristie’s Classic Week (estimate: £5,000,000-8,000,000). Commissioned to celebrate the crucial alliance between the British crown and the House of Orange, this intimatead vivum (from life) portrait of Princess Mary, the finest portrait of the type, is remarkable for its royal provenance, the superb quality of its draughtsmanship and its exceptional condition. It is one of the most important European Royal Portraits to come to auction for a generation. The painting will go on public view for the first time, ahead of the auction, at Christie’s Shanghai on 19 until 21 September, later touring to New York where it will be on public view from 25 to 30 October and to Hong Kong between 23 and 26 November, ahead of the pre-sale public exhibition in London from 1 to 6 December.

John Stainton, Deputy Chairman, Old Master Paintings, Christie’s EMERI:“This beautifully-preserved full-length portrait of Princess Mary, eldest daughter of King Charles I of England, and future mother of King William III of England, was one of the last commissions executed by van Dyck, in the summer of 1641, only months before the artist’s premature death at the age of forty-two. It bears many of the hallmarks of his remarkable genius – in the subtle rendering of the sitter’s physiognomy, the masterful depiction of the shimmering drapery, the brilliance of the palette, and the assured draughtsmanship and deft handling of the paint. A work of the finest quality, it represents the culmination of all that van Dyck had learnt from his master, Peter Paul Rubens, and from his Venetian predecessors, notably Titian. By developing his own distinctive style of portraiture, characterised by a calm authority and supreme elegance, van Dyck both revolutionised portraiture in Europe and left a legacy for future generations of artists from Gainsborough and Lawrence, to Sargent and Freud.”

ROYAL PROVENANCE: Identified by Sir Oliver Millar as one of two portraits commissioned from van Dyck for the court at The Hague, this painting would originally have formed part of the prestigious collection of the Princes of Orange, Stadtholders of the United Provenances of the Netherlands. It would likely have been displayed in one of their principal palaces, possibly at Binnenhof Palace in The Hague, where Princess Mary lived with her husband William, alongside works by many of the principal Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.

VAN DYCK IN ENGLAND: In July 1632, van Dyck was appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’ by King Charles I of England. A passionate collector and patron, the King had long hoped to attract a painter of such exceptional status and renown to his service, and found in van Dyck an artist not only capable of fulfilling his desire for magnificent portraits and paintings, but also one who shared his tastes, especially for Venetian pictures. The style, refinement and brilliance of van Dyck’s portraits was unprecedented in England; the artist instilled in his sitters a new sense of vitality and movement and his bravura technique allowed him to enliven the entire surface of his works with light, assured dashes of paint, as exemplified in the present portrait.

PRINCESS MARY AS SITTER: Van Dyck first painted the sitter in the weeks immediately following his arrival in London in 1632, when the young Princess Royal was shown with her parents, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, and elder brother, the future King Charles II. The monumental group portrait, known as ‘The Greate Peece’, dominated the King’s Long Gallery in the Palace of Whitehall (The Royal Collection). The earliest single portraits of Princess Mary, which show her full-length in a blue dress, with her hands linked together across her stomach – a pose that echoes van Dyck’s earlier portraits of her mother – were painted in or before 1637, and are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at Hampton Court. Four years later, she sat again to van Dyck with her fifteen-year-old husband, Prince William of Orange, for the double portrait now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as for the present work.

JEWELS AND ATTIRE: In both the present work and in the Rijksmuseum double portrait, Mary is shown wearing her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her by her husband on 3 May 1641, the day after their marriage. Her spectacular coral gown, decorated with silver thread trim along its border, is thought to be similar to that worn for her wedding, rather than the cloth of silver-gold she wears in the Rijksmuseum picture. The apparent weight of the fabric, falling in broad, heavy folds, along with the bright highlights along the creases, suggest the fabric may have been cloth of silver. Shimmering highlights, applied in swift, cross-hatched strokes, were used as a form of shorthand by artists, mimicking the lustre of metallic threads as the textile caught the light. In accordance with the fashion of the period, her gown is open down the front, revealing a stiffened stomacher across the chest and a matching skirt beneath. The ribbons, which would at one time have been functional, lacing the skirt and stomacher to the bodice, were applied purely as adornment. One ribbon, however has been pinned or stitched flat to disguise the seam between the bodice and skirt. Details such as the Princess’s brooch, the string of pearls and ribbons on her shimmering dress are rendered with remarkable precision and delicacy, characteristics that defined the artist’s finest late works.

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