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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.

Barney Ebsworth’s $300m Collection of American Art Debuts at Christie’s Paris

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Travel entrepreneur and art collector Barney Ebsworth built one of the leading collections of American art in private hands. He estimated that his collection had only one other rival in private hands. Among his great prizes were two of Georgia O’Keeffe’s best abstract works.

One he acquired at auction from the sale of the influential American art dealer Edith Halpert’s collection. The sale piqued O’Keeffe’s interest. Halpert had shown her work earlier in the century. The aged artist wanted to meet the man who bought Black, White and Blue.

Ebsworth declined her first few invitations to come to New Mexico. Finally, Ebsworth, who preferred to buy the work of artists who were no longer living so he didn’t have to engage with the artists, made the trek. The two hit it off. For many years after that, Ebsworth and O’Keeffe sought each other’s advice and counsel. Ebsworth was eventually called upon to mediate between the notoriously difficult artist and her long-time dealer.

Because O’Keeffe respected Ebsworth so much, she eventually sold him one of her other ‘best’ abstract works from her own holdings, Music—Pink and Blue I. Those two works might have fetched nine figure sums. Instead, they’ve been donated to museums. Black, White and Blue went to the National Gallery in Washington, along with Charles Sheeler’s Classic Landscape. The Seattle Museum got Music—Pink and Blue I and Marsden Hartley’s Painting No. 49, Berlin.

Such is the quality of the Ebsworth collection that even without those two extraordinary works, Christie’s has plenty of firepower to launch the collection. One of the lessons of Christie’s last few successes, the Leonardo and the Rockefeller Collection, has been global appeal of Western art and the need to bring that art to various cities around the world to cultivate unexpected collectors.

Today, Christie’s launches the Ebsworth collection with 11 works unveiled in Paris. From now until the end of October, the collection will travel to New York, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In November there will be a single-owner day and evening sale of the works.

Christie’s estimates the collection will yield $300m. Rumors in the art market suggest Christie’s has guaranteed the family trust that figure. Among the eleven works touring are a Jackson Pollock estimated in the region of $50m, a Willem de Kooning Woman estimated in the region of $60m, and Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey which is estimated in the region of $70m.

Ebsworth claimed he was offered $60m for Chop Suey in the 1990s. That’s 20+ years ago and before the steep climb in international art prices. Then, again, tastes change; artists go out of fashion. Those three works with an aggregate estimate of $180m may be set to attract bidders. Ebsworth had a few other very significant works that have not been announced here.

Christie’s may be holding some of those works for later sales. Or the works might be family favorites still held by the family trust. The two works we don’t see either on the list of donations or announced for viewing in Paris are by artists with particularly active and advancing markets. We’ll be keeping our eye out for them.

In the meantime, here’s Christie’s release for the Paris show:Continue Reading

London Gives Some Second Thoughts About June Sales

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This wrap-up of the coverage of the June Contemporary sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

The great surprise of the London Contemporary art sales was not the strong performance of works by younger artists or overlooked historical masters. Taken together, all four auction houses transacted somewhere around £186m with only a few of those works selling above £10m.

That trend within the art market continues to be pronounced and persistent. We'll have a more detailed discussion of the sales composition and performance when we publish our sales analysis in the next week. In the meantime, let's marvel at the unexpected strong performance of the Evening sales of Contemporary art in London just when it looked like these events were getting squeezed out of the calendar.

To be sure, the top of the market is much lower than it has been in the past for these sales. Sotheby's posted the biggest single lot with a guaranteed Lucian Freud reclining nude that sold for nearly $30m. Just below that was the surprise lot of the week, Jean-Michel Basquiat's untitled work sold from an American collection (said to be New Line's Michael Lynne) that composed a significant portion of Sotheby's sale. It made just below $20m but had carried a low estimate nearly half of the final selling price.

The dogged bidding over the Basquiat began with auctioneer Oliver Barker pushing the opening bids toward the low estimate. It wasn't long before two aggressive telephone bidders engaged in pitched campaign to out do each other. Their bids came either without the briefest hesitation or in increments greater than the crying required. The underbidder bowed out several times before finally capitulating.

In the current climate where high-value works are sold with an armature of financial support surrounding them which have a tendency to often but not always dampen bidding, it was a rare show of determination by two collectors.

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Christie’s Scores By Just Getting It Done

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Christie’s £128m Impressionist and Modern Evening sale in London, working off a similar estimate range as its rivals, was demonstration of the value of just getting things right. The two top lots, a Picasso and a rare example of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series, sold without much excitement. But they sold at or around expectations which did no damage to the sale’s total. That opened the door for Christie’s to make great gains with two or three works that surprised to the upside.

The two most dynamic lots were a lifetime cast of Auguste Rodin’s Kiss which sold for £12.6m over a £7m high estimate and Franz Marc’s Drei Pferde sold for £15.4m over a £3.5m high estimate. The bidding battle on the Marc was as intense as it was unexpected topped only by the unusual fact that art dealer Jeffrey Loria took the additional step of having Christie’s inform the press that he had bought the work for his personal art collection (drawing a distinction from his other holdings that only raised more questions than it answered.)

The fact that outsized gains came from lots with more modest estimates further emphasizes that the top of the market is both fully priced and potentially spent out after the Rockefeller sale. The $700+m that was spent on Impressionist and Modern art in New York at the Rockefeller sale was effectively another major season of spending in the category inserted into the first half of the year.

The secret to Christie’s sale may have been Asian buyers who were mostly absent from Rockefeller but took up about a third of the London Evening sale, according to the auction house. Continue Reading

Christie’s Improves Its Imp-Mod Category Performance

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This look at the last 12 years of Christie's June Impressionist and Modern Evening sale performance is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

Christie's had a stronger sale than Sotheby's but both events showed that the market for Impressionist and Modern art may have been affected by the tidal pull of the massive Rockefeller sale which featured a full sales season's worth of Impressionist and Modern art just a month before these auctions.

For many years, Christie's was the weaker player in the Impressionist and Modern market with results not unlike those seen at Sotheby's the night before. These last two  June sales cycles were quite different and echo the strong years of 2010 and 2011 when Impressionist and Modern art was seen as a long-term store of value.

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De Staël Explodes in Paris Continuing Market Rise

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Nicolas de Stael, Flowers (3.5-5.5m EUR) €8.25m

Christie’s Evening sale of Contemporary art in Paris yesterday totaled €25.4m with a third of that value coming from Nicolas de Staël‘s Flowers which made €8.25m against an estimate of €3.5-5.5m. Other outperforming lots were Pierre Soulages‘s Peinture 227 x 306 cm, 2 mars 2009 which was estimated at €1-1.5m but made €2.4m; Kazuo Shiraga‘s Chikakusei Dokukakuryu, €1.87m; a small Joan Mitchell work that made €655k; and a Jean Dubuffet, Partition which hit €895k.

The day sale added another €9.33m to the total.

Christie’s Hong Kong 20th C & Contemporary Evening Sale Breaks a Billion HKD ($132.6m)

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Zao Wou-ki, 14.12.59 ($22m)

Christie’s broke a billion dollars in their Hong Kong Evening sale opening the Spring sales cycle in free trading zone. The $132.6m sale was led by this Zao Wou-ki painting that previously sold in 2007 for $3.75m which gives you some sense of how far the Chinese market has traveled in a decade.

Other notable sales were a small Richter abstract painting for ~$2m, a Basquiat for nearly $10m and a Keith Haring tarpaulin for $1m.

Christie’s Asian 20th Century and Contemporary art

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)

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