Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

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

The Season of Seventies de Koonings

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Sotheby’s Untitled de Kooning from 1977 in Hong Kong, left; Lévy Gorvy’s 1975 de Kooning from Paul Allen’s collection, right.

Art Basel in Hong Kong is kicking off a season of seventies de Koonings as several works come to market in the wake of the record price set two years ago when a much-traded work from 1977, Untitled XXV sold for $66.3m.

Lévy Gorvy announced today that it would be offering Paul Allen’s six-and-a-half-foot tall Untitled XII from 1975 with an asking price of $35m. Previously, Sotheby’s announced that it would be holding a private sales exhibition in Hong Kong that same week with a smaller (four-and-a-half-foot by five-foot) untitled work from 1977.

Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina also toted up the de Koonings that will follow on during the New York sales in May:

Some lower-priced de Kooning paintings will be offered during the May auctions in New York: a 1976 “Untitled XVIII” from the estate of billionaire couple Joan and Preston Robert Tisch […] at Christie’s; and a 1978 “Untitled VI” sold by the Mandel Foundation at Sotheby’s.

Billionaire Plans to Part With $35 Million Painting at Hong Kong’s Art Basel  (Bloomberg)

Christie’s Adds $25m de Kooning from 1977 to May

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WILLEM DE KOONING oil on canvas 77 x 88 in. Painted in 1977. $25-35 million
WILLEM DE KOONING
oil on canvas
77 x 88 in.
Painted in 1977.
$25-35 million

Christie’s isn’t done yet. They’ve just announced a de Kooning from 1977 that will appear in the New York Evening sale following last year’s record $66m price set by Untitled XXV from the same year. The work on offer is Untitled II and it’s low estimate is $25m.

Now that Critics Obsess Over the Market, Who Is Talking About the Art?

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Willem de Kooning, No Title (1984)Jed Perl has an angry yawp in The New Republic and though it would be easy to dismiss his frustration with the art market, it is worth noting that the real story isn’t the surging market but the narrowing focus. It would be a bit more honest if Perl included his fellow critics in the indictment for they too spend too much time talking about or complaining about the market instead of drawing attention to all the other exciting art that is out there. Finally, Perl is wrong about the spending. There’s a great deal of money going to the other works. As Todd Levin recently commented, the art that is sold today is no “better” than the art that was sold ten years ago.

There’s active buying at all levels of the Contemporary market. But museums are chasing shows that duplicate previous shows or cater to board members pet projects and failing to keep up with the critical advances of galleries.

Isn’t anybody troubled by Elderfield’s organizing “Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985,” the show currently at Gagosian, not long after he organized a de Kooning retrospective at MoMA? Isn’t anybody embarrassed by Elderfield’s fulsome (and economically convenient) praise of the late works of an artist who many of the finest minds of his own generation believed had been in a steep artistic decline since 1960, if not a few years earlier? On the question of quality thoughtful people can surely disagree. I would have imagined, however, that the same thoughtful people would be deeply troubled by Elderfield’s willingness to turn MoMA’s prestige into Larry Gagosian’s financial advantage. The sad fact is that Gagosian’s de Kooning catalogue—with its full-cloth binding, tipped-in plates, over-the-top text, and lavish supporting illustrations of work by Rubens, Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian—is engineered to brook no disagreement. The super-rich have no problem with John Elderfield, you can be sure about that. They also have no problem with Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who next summer is dedicating nearly the museum’s entire Madison Avenue building to a Jeff Koons retrospective.

Record Auction Prices Show Money’s Victory Over Art  (New Republic)

Sotheby’s Unveils 70s de Kooning ($25-35m) for November

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de Kooning, Untitled V ($25-35m)

Sotheby’s announces a massive 70 x 80 inch work from 1975’s Xavier Fourcade show will be part of their Evening sale of Contemporary art:

On 13 November 2013 Sotheby’s New York will present Untitled V by Willem de Kooning as a major highlight of the Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The work dates from the critical year of 1975 and is the prime example from the watershed period when de Kooning returned to painting after a period in which he focused on sculpture. Having not been seen in public since 1980, Untitled V goes on view for the first time in over 30 years in London on 12 October before the pre-sale exhibition in New York opens on 31 October. The work is estimated to fetch $25/35 million.

Untitled V was part of a group of work which marked a return of the artist to oil painting in 1975. In that critical year he produced a highly renowned series of canvases of explosive colour in just six months which made up the exhibition De Kooning: New Works: Paintings and Sculpture at the Fourcade, Droll gallery in New York. As his dealer, Xavier Fourcade had the pick of the artist’s work….

Revisionist History On Late Picassos and Late De Koonings

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Picasso, Homme à la pipe assis 2 1969

In Carol Vogel’s recent story announcing Gagosian’s show—and prospective sale —of 10 works by Willem de Kooning curated by John Elderfield, the reporter suggests Gagosian’s show has the potential to super-charge the market for late de Koonings much in the same way that the Modernist master’s landscapes from the 1970s suddenly took off when competing Russian collectors sought them out in the early phases of the last market peak. But De Koonings  from the 1980s have been on the Evening sale block fairly often since the artist’s retrospective at MoMA—organized by Elderfield—brought  about a near universal re-appraisal of the works.

How the fall show could affect the market for late de Koonings is anyone’s guess. In 2009, after John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer (and a consultant to the Gagosian Gallery), organized a show of late Picasso paintings, a rash of other late works by him began appearing at auction, becoming more popular and increasingly more expensive.

Indeed, Gagosian’s Mousquetero show that John Richardson put together was not the beginning of the trend of increasing prices for the artist’s previously dismissed late work. It was the culmination of a public and private sale process that had begun half a decade and more earlier. This observation takes nothing away from Gagosian’s singular ability to bridge the gap between the market and museums. Nonetheless, the process by which works are revalued is more diffused and less coordinated than is presented here.

10 Late de Kooning Works to Go on View, and on Sale (New York Times)

De Kooning Foundation Funds a Catalogue Raisonné

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Carol Vogel’s story late last week announcing the Gagosian show of Willem de Kooning paintings from 1983-1985 leads with this disturbing observation about the lack of a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work and his penchant for selling works directly from the studio, always a good way to end up with a disputed work:

When Willem de Kooning was a struggling young artist and needed money, he would frequently sell a painting or sculpture as quickly as he made it, often bypassing his dealer, Xavier Fourcade. After the artist’s death in 1997, when the Willem de Kooning Foundation needed cash, it, too — like many artists’ foundations — would sell a work from its holdings, but always privately.

Now, to raise more than $30 million for an endowment that would support scholarly and educational initiatives, the foundation has decided to sell 10 paintings in a particularly grand way. […] Since there is no catalogue raisonné of de Kooning’s work, proceeds from the show will go toward financing the publication of one, a multiyear project that will require hiring a team of scholars.

Given the value of de Kooning’s work and the recent problems with fakes by  mid-century masters appearing at the top of the market, the lack of a catalogue raisonné is a real issue.

10 Late de Kooning Works to Go on View, and on Sale (New York Times)

Legitimizing Late de Kooning

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Adam Lindemann wasn’t that impressed with MoMA’s de Kooning show. He explains in his Observer column that the moment seems to have passed and de Kooning is curiously not relevant to the rest of the world. However, Lindemann does think the MoMA show has achieved at least one important milestone:

De Kooning had gone senile by the end of his life, suffering from what we now call Alzheimer’s, but he continued to paint, almost until his death in 1997. Though some say the reduction of his painting style to only a brushstroke or two shows that his assistants did the work, or that he was no longer compus mentis, what do I care? I don’t believe in artist’s personal histories or care how many wives they had or cigarettes they smoked. I look at the work, not the person. To end his life by reducing his painting to only a few sparse brushstrokes was pure poetry, whether he knew it or not. I applaud Mr. Elderfield, who spent six years putting this exhibition together, for dedicating two large viewing rooms to the late work, because though the market for the late paintings has been strong, their credibility was always suspect because of the circumstances of their creation. MoMA’s decision to showcase them is meaningful, and frankly a show of only the late work would have been stronger and fresher than this voluminous “blockbuster.” Years from now that’s all we’ll remember from it: how this was the show that finally gave the late de Koonings permanent credibility.

Did I Need to See a $4 Billion de Kooning Show? (Observer)

de Kooning: A Retrospective (MoMA)

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