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Christie’s $30m Rothko from 1954 for May

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The Contemporary catalogues are still closing for New York’s May sales and the auction houses still have a few very big lots left to announce next week. So sit tight. Making it in just under the wire today is Christie’s with a giant 8ft-tall Mark Rothko canvas once owned by Hollywood studio exec and brief Yahoo! CEO, Terry Semel. The picture has a relatively modest $30m estimate given its massive size and the overall price level for the artist:

Mark Rothko’s monumental canvas, No. 7 (Dark Over Light), 1954, will highlight the May 17 Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York (estimate in the region of $30million). At nearly eight feet tall, No. 7 (Dark Over Light) belongs to a select group of canvases that were among the largest that Rothko ever painted. Its grand scale is matched only by the emotional intensity of its painted surface. Such a highly active painterly surface is a mark of Rothko’s paintings from this important period, but it is the scale on which it has been executed in No. 7 (Dark Over Light) that makes this particular work one of the most extraordinary; its broad sweeps and feathered edges reveal the artist’s ambition to create a pure and direct form of painting. No. 7 (Dark Over Light) is being offered at auction for the first time in over a decade.

Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s Global President, remarked: “No. 7 (Dark Over Light), comes from a small and highly sought-after group of monumental canvases by Mark Rothko. Standing before this radiant picture, one is immediately enveloped by the dramatic brilliance of Rothko’s artistic vision.  Between its intensely kinetic surface and its epic scale, No. 7 is a consummate example of Rothko’s ability to convey pure emotional power. Given the international demand for canvases of this quality by Mark Rothko, we expect that No. 7 will draw enthusiasm from collectors around the globe.”

Rothko’s stated aim was to dissolve the traditional, and what he thought of as artificial boundaries, between paint and canvas, between painter and idea, and ultimately between the idea and the observer. To the artist, what the viewer saw was not a depiction an experience, it was the experience, and to this end he championed what he considered to be the two fundamental elements of picture making—space and color—making these the sole protagonists of his aesthetic drama. Reaching its height in his iconic Seagram Murals, this painterly struggle dominated Rothko’s work for a little over a decade, as in 1968, on the instructions of his doctors, he was forced to retreat into making smaller paintings, often no larger than 40 inches. As a result, works such No. 7 (Dark Over Light) represents the fullest and purest expression of Rothko’s unique artistic vision, one whose visual and emotional power is present in abundance in this magisterial canvas.

No. 7 (Dark Over Light) belongs to a small group of paintings that Rothko executed in the mid-1950s which feature large passages of predominately dark, moody color. Primarily, his paintings from this period are known for the triumphant schema of fiery reds, golden yellows and deep oranges. But in a handful of canvases he also introduced opposing hues, such as can be seen in the present work along with Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange on Gray), 1953 (National Gallery of Art Washington), No. 203 (Red, Orange, Tan and Purple), 1954 and Untitled (Red, Black, White on Yellow), 1955 (also in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These dark paintings reflected not so much a ‘darkening’ of Rothko’s mood as a deepening of feeling.

In addition to color, size was also an important factor in Rothko achieving the necessary emotional intensity that he desired. As he explained, “I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however—I think it applies to other painters I know—it is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside you experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However, you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.”

No. 7 (Dark Over Light) was first acquired by Count Alessandro Panza di Biumo, Sr. in 1961. He was the son of the legendary Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, widely considered to be one of the most important collectors of postwar American Art. Works from the elder Panza di Biumo’s holdings later formed the basis for the collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and in the 1990s, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum filled a yawning gap in its holdings when it acquired, in a combined gift and purchase arrangement, more than 300 Minimalist sculptures and paintings from the collection.

Warhol’s Double Elvis at Christie’s for $30m

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Warhol, Double Elvis

Christie’s just announced it will offer Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963 with a whisper estimate in the region of $30m in a version that is a little more Elvis 1.1 than two times given the faint register of the second printing of the image. This  work sold at Sotheby’s in 2012 for $37m which means were going to see another test of the Warhol market. The original Elvis series consisted of 23 works. MoMA in New York has a version of the Double Elvis [Ferus Type] with a sharp, vivid double printing that was donated by Jerry and Emily Spiegel in 2001. A substantial portion of the Spiegel’s collection has been a driver of the top of the Contemporary art market in the last few years.

Here’s Christie’s release on the work:

On May 17, Christie’s will offer Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963 as a central highlight of its Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art (estimate in the region of $30 million). The silver Elvis paintings that Warhol made in the summer of 1963 represent the culmination of several series of celebrity portraits that Warhol made in the early 1960s..

Warhol’s Double Elvis does not portray Elvis the hip-shaking musician but rather Elvis the actor playing a role in the 1960 movie Flaming Star, a liberal-themed Western in which Presley plays Pacer Burton, a half-Kiowa youth torn between two cultures. The painting is a unique variation from a group of portraits of single and multiplied Elvises created especially for Warhol’s second solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—the centre of America’s entertainment industry. Of the twenty-two extant ‘Ferus Type’ Elvis works, eleven are in museum collections, including the canvas Bob Dylan insisted on taking in exchange for his presence in a Warhol film, now housed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Double Elvis features two black screen-printed images of the King on a silver painted ground. A bold, high-contrast figure is accompanied by its ghostly duplicate, collapsing Warhol’s strategy of serialization into a single frame, while also providing an eerie reminder that Presley was a twin, his brother being lost at birth. When the crowd of cloned Elvises were shown at the Ferus Gallery, the paintings were both confrontational and an almost anonymous backdrop.

The Ferus Gallery’s director, Irving Blum, had tried to press on Warhol the idea of a mini-retrospective, writing, “your exhibition should be the most intense and far reaching composite of past work, and the Elvis paintings should be shown in the rear of my gallery area.” Warhol, however, insisted on focusing on his new work and planned to utilize the gallery’s physical space as part of a highly conceptual installation. Before his arrival, Warhol instructed Blum to line the front room with his series of Elvis paintings and the back room with portraits of Elizabeth Taylor.

The repetition of the image created an impression of mass production that had rarely been seen before in an artistic context. The effect was of great interest to artists like Larry Bell, who wrote in response to the exhibition: “It is my opinion that Andy Warhol is an incredibly important artist; he has been able to take painting as we know it, and completely change the frame of reference of painting as we know it, and do it successfully in his own terms. These terms are also terms that we may not understand … In any event, nothing can take away from it the important changes that the work itself has made in the considerations of other artists.”

Daily Mail Says Regional Rivalry Drove Leonardo Bidding

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File this under stories too good to check. Update: And Christie’s has officially poured cold water on it, calling the story “pure fantasy” (adding that no bidder can directly or indirectly bid against himself in a sale.)

Once the information came out that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was behind the $450m purchase of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi at Christie’s last Fall, the immediate question running through the art world was, “who was the underbidder?”

The Daily Mail now claims it was the UAE’s ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed on the other side. Each Gulf potentate had sent a proxy to the auction with instructions not to lose out to their rivals in Qatar whom both assumed would be the other bidder:

‘The bidding started to get high, and each of them thought they were bidding against the Qataris, and didn’t want them to get it,’ said one source close to the Emirati leader.

‘So they gave their proxies instructions, saying ‘you can go as high as you want, just make sure you get it’.

‘It got to $450 million and the Emiratis gave up. Then s**t hit the fan when the record came out.

‘MBZ [Mohammed Bin Zayed] told Salman: “That was us bidding for it, why didn’t you tell me?”‘

Two Arab princes in $450m bidding war for Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi | (Daily Mail Online)

Christie’s $70m Brancusi for May

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During Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on May 15th the auction house will sell for the first time Constantin Brancusi’s, La Jeune fille sophistiquée (Nancy Cunard) which carries a whisper estimate of $70m. This Brancusi is a unique sculpture, cast in polished bronze in Paris in 1932. It comes from the collection of Elizabeth Stafford and her husband Frederick Stafford who bought the work directly from Brancusi during a visit to his studio in 1955. It has been in their collection ever since:

An extraordinarily rare and important work, La Jeune fille sophistiquée is the only existing bronze example of Brancusi’s stylized portrait of the Anglo-American heiress and writer Nancy Cunard. The work retains the artist’s original hand-carved marble base, a factor of immense significance given the importance Brancusi attached to the interaction between materials and the interplay between his sculptural subjects and the pedestals upon which he placed them.

Conor Jordan, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York, remarked: “A daring and exquisite work of art, the Brancusi from The Collection or Elizabeth Stafford represents one of the vanishingly small number of the artist’s bronzes with its original carved base not in a museum collection. Its appearance on the market will be an exciting event for the world’s foremost collectors of Modern art.”

By the 1920s Brancusi enjoyed a near mythic status among the Parisian avant-garde. He was the author of a revolutionary visual language, who had famously arrived in Paris on foot from Romania in 1904, from “beyond the mountains and beyond the stars” as he liked to say. From his studio in Montparnasse, guided by instinct, he carved works of increasing radical simplicity, often using the ovoid form as the starting point.

In La Jeune fille sophistiquée (Nancy Cunard), Brancusi’s purity of line renders the famous cool beauty of Nancy, with her striking waved hairstyle and sylph-like proportions. Cunard was a major patron of artists and writers in Paris between the wars, counting Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and James Joyce among her circle. In this context Nancy encountered Brancusi, whom she described as “a fine bearded-old- shepherd of a face and to my mind, one of the great
sculptors of our time.”

Brancusi met Nancy Cunard in 1923 through the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, one of her many paramours. The profoundly iconoclastic heiress, who openly flouted sexual, racial, class, and national boundaries, struck Brancusi as the very embodiment of the liberated Twenties—a figure of and for the moment. “Everything about the way she behaved,” he recalled, “showed how truly sophisticated she was for her day.”

Cunard never posed for Brancusi and in fact was unaware until many years later that he had sculpted a figure that bore her name. However, with superbly distilled volumes, Brancusi succeeded in capturing Cunard’s elegance and stylized presentation, creating a precise, individualized characterization that simultaneously transcends the particular personality to
arrive at a universal, essential form.

In 1955, at a friend’s suggestion, budding collectors, Elizabeth and Frederick Stafford visited Brancusi’s studio. Mr. Stafford, who had emigrated from Romania in the 1930’s, relished the opportunity to meet Brancusi as a fellow Romanian and learn about his work. When the couple arrived at his studio, they were astounded by the beauty of his work. Mr. Stafford returned
the next day and purchased La Jeune fille sophistiquée as a 28 th birthday gift for Mrs. Stafford. This sculpture would come to define the couple’s collection. And over 62 years, the Staffords generously loaned it to prominent institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, Centre Georges Pompidou and New Orleans Museum of Art among others.

The Estimates on David Rockefeller’s Art Go Up

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James Tarmy has an interesting story on Bloomberg about the Rockefeller estate which will come to market at Christie’s over the next few months. David Rockefeller had a good eye and a keen trading sense. As Tarmy points out, the success of Rockefeller’s Rothko sold at the pre-credit crisis peak of the market for $73m was bought for $10,000 53 years earlier.

The capital gains on that sale caused Rockefeller to make plans to dispose of his art in a way that would maximize the value to charity. The subsequent competition between auction houses became legend within the industry. Rockefeller’s representatives were the toughest of customers. They drove a very hard bargain which has left some bruised feelings even years later.

No one can confirm the final guarantee level (and it is said to include a toggle that gives the estate an additional advantage) but $750m is a safe number to work with on what the estate was expected to generate.

That’s a big number even for Rockefeller. Christie’s approached the market gingerly. In January, some of the top works—Picasso, Matisse and Monet—were released to the press with estimates of $70m, $50m and $35m respectively. Since then, Christie’s has clearly gotten good feedback from the market as it tours the works to Asia and Europe.Continue Reading

Christie’s Surprise Picasso Buyer and Other Tales From a Long Sale

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This recap of Christie's Impressionist-Modern and Surrealist Evening sale in London is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Christie's Evening sales of Impressionist and Modern art as well as Surrealist art last night were a success by the numbers. The combined sales made £149.5m which was £13m more than the same sales a year before. If you are looking to those numbers to give you some sense of market direction or mood for what Christie's now calls the 20th Century art market, you ought to look elsewhere. The sales were punctuated with lots that were avidly pursued though price levels proved important. Estimates over £5m saw light bidding and after many seasons where the auction houses have actively managed their sales to present high sell-through rates, Christie's ran two large sales last night that they were more than willing to let 'sell-through' at only 78% of the works. Make no mistake, 78% is traditionally a solid, very business-like sale result. Only in the last few years of hyper-competition (with the added sense that the Impressionist and Modern market needed to project stability,) have the the sell-through rates consistently posted in the high 80s or low 90s.

We will have a more detailed analysis of the lot-by-lot sales in the next two weeks. For now, here are some impressions.

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$80m Tisch Collection at Christie’s in May

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Joan Miro’s Femme entendant de la musique, 1945 ($10-15m)

Christie’s rushed out an announcement this morning that the house had secured the art collection of Joan and Preston Tisch. Joan died late last year at 90 years old. Today, Christie’s is announcing a Miró and De Kooning for the May sales. There will be more works  announced later:

Encompassing over 40 objects in total, The Collection of Joan and Preston Robert Tisch is expected to realize in excess of $80 million. The collection includes works by some of the leading names of the recent art historical canon. From strikingly modern bronzes by Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore to boldly-colored canvases by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and others, it is a dynamic lesson in 20th century creativity.

Collection proceeds will go to the Tisch family foundations to continue the couple’s lifelong philanthropic mission. Joan and Preston Robert Tisch sought to share this same visual and intellectual delight in the public sphere. The couple continuously contributed leadership and substantial financial backing to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, home of the Tisch Galleries, and the Museum of Modern Art, where Joan Tisch served as a trustee and posthumously donated works by artists including Léger, Braque, and Giacometti.

A selection of works will be on view in Christie’s King Street galleries from February 20 – March 8. Among the highlights being exhibited are Joan Miro’s Femme entendant de la musique, 1945 ($10,000,000-15,000,000) and Willem De Kooning’s Untitled XVIII, 1976 (estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000). Further details on the collection will be available in the coming months.

Willem De Kooning’s Untitled XVIII, 1976 (estimate: $8-12m)

Six Small Fright Wigs at Christie’s Provide Warhol Market Test

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Christie’s is taking another run at the restrained Warhol market with a series of small late self portraits, the so-called Fright Wigs. The work on offer last appeared on the market in 2014 which was the peak year for Warhol in terms of market volume and average prices. This work comes back with an estimate range that only tops out at the previous sale price. The work also carries a guarantee which means we know it will sell—and provide the rest of the Warhol market with a reference point:

Andy Warhol, Six Self-Portraits (1986), estimate on request

A rare masterpiece completed just months before Andy Warhol’s sudden death in 1987, Six Self-Portraits stands among his last great artistic gestures. Taking on the grand tradition of self-depiction in a manner unprecedented within art history, the artist assembles six distinct variations of his iconic 1986 ‘fright wig’ self-portrait, creating a unique sequence that stands alone within his oeuvre. Few of Warhol’s original silkscreen groupings remain intact, rendering the present work exceptional. His disembodied face emerges from darkness in six intimate 22 x 22-inch canvases, alternately pink, pale blue, lilac, orange, green and cobalt against a void of black. Within a practice punctuated with complex self-portraits, the ‘fright wigs’ are widely considered to represent Warhol’s most deeply personal revelations. They are stark, rarefied exposures of an artist who ultimately became a greater cultural icon than his most famous celebrity muses. Six Self-Portraits was unveiled at Anthony d’Offay’s London gallery between July and August 1986 – the first and only self-portrait exhibition of Warhol’s career. Works from this exhibition now hang in the collections of Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. The work’s remarkable six-fold format brings the faces into a chorus of technicolour synergy, dominated by no single hue. Placing himself alongside the great masters of the genre – from Dürer and Rembrandt to Picasso and Bacon – Warhol charges his self-image with a poignant sense of his own mortality. Rendered in immaculate high definition, his sculpted, mask-like face resembles a skull, bathed in dramatic chiaroscuro contrast; his body fades into obscurity beyond. ‘I paint pictures of myself to remind myself that I’m still around’, Warhol once claimed (A. Warhol, quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London 1989, p. 480). Nearly thirty years after his death, these images are vivid reminders of the twentieth century’s greatest artistic enigma.

Jackson Pollock Drip Painting at Christie’s in March

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Jackson Pollock, Number 21, 1950 (£10-15m)

Over the weekend, Francis Outred announced over Instagram that Christie’s would be selling a small Jackson Pollock drip painting in its London sale of Contemporary art. The work carries an estimate in line with the sale in New York two and a half years ago of Number 12, 1950 for $18.2m. One of the unanswered questions in this somewhat quiet launch is why the work is being sold in London instead of New York where it would be expected to do well. Is this an indication of interest from Europe and Asia or a signal that Christie’s has fair amount of traffic in May or simply a feather in Francis Outred’s cap.

Only time will answer those questions. Until then, we have Christie’s catalogue information:

Jackson Pollock – Number 21, 1950 (1950), Estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000

With its opulent, marbled galaxy of dripped, splashed and spattered paint, Number 21, 1950 is a beautiful and important work from the peak of Jackson Pollock’s iconic ‘drip period’. It was included in the artist’s seminal third solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, which opened on 28 November 1950. Now recognised as the crowning moment of Pollock’s career, this exhibition contained several of his greatest large-scale masterpieces, all of which were painted that year: Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Number 27, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); One: Number 31, 1950 (Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Number 32, 1950 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf). Number 21,1950 was among thirteen square-format works in the exhibition. Each roughly 22 x 22 inches in size, these were painted on the reverse sides of Masonite boards given to Pollock by his elder brother Sande McCoy, a commercial screen printer who had a stock of panels left over from the manufacture of a baseball board game in 1948. Other examples of this singular, jewel-like series are held in major museum collections worldwide, including Number 15, 1950 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Number 16, 1950 (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro), Number 17, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Number 18, 1950 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Number 20, 1950 (University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson), and Number 22, 1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

The Mother of All Bradfords at Phillips in London + Another at Christie’s

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Melanie Gerlis’s column in the Financial Times has the announcement that Mark Bradford’s massive Helter Skelter I from 2007 will come to market in London next month:

The auction house has won a massive consignment from tennis legend John McEnroe in the form of Mark Bradford’s “Helter Skelter I” (2007), to be offered in London on March 8 (est £6m-£8m, third-party guaranteed). The price could more than double the Los Angeles artist’s record, though a work of this size (10 metres wide) has never come to auction before.

McEnroe worked with Josh Baer to buy the work four years ago just before the Bradford market saw substantial upward price movement. In 2014, Bradford’s top price was $2.6m. A year later, four works had traded publicly at higher prices all the way up to $5.8m which stands at the record price for the artist.

Since that time,  Bradford’s stature and visibility has only risen. Bradford represented the US at the Venice Biennale recently and the showing at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC of the massive Pickett’s Charge.

Over at Christie’s, there will be a cheaper work, Bear Running from the Shotgun from 2014 which was last seen at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December of the same year. It’s estimated at £2.2-2.8m.

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