Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Giacometti Chandelier Coming to Sothebys in London

by

Sotheby’s has announced for its February 28th sale in London a chandelier by Alberto Giacometti estimated at between £6 and £8m. Given the rage for Diego Giacometti’s design objects and furniture in recent years, this work which combines elements of Alberto’s sculpture canon with a decorative object has the potential to raise design sector values:

Giacometti only produced such objects for friends, and the plaster model for Lustre avec femme, homme et oiseau was originally commissioned around 1949 by Louis Broder, a Swiss publisher based in Paris who specialised in producing printed editions of works by artists including Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Several years later Giacometti agreed to cast three bronzes from the plaster, of which the other two were acquired by the artist’s dealer Aimé Maeght and dealer Heinz Berggruen – who donated the plaster original to the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1983.

Sotheby’s Sells Jean Stein’s Art Collection

by

It has been an extraordinary season for estates coming to market. Last week, Sotheby’s added to the cacophony of collector’s stories with the works once owned by Jean Stein, daughter of Hollywood legend Jules Stein, and major New York cultural figure until her suicide earlier this year:

Sotheby’s is honored to announce a series of sales celebrating Jean Stein – author, editor and oral historian, who chronicled the lives and work of cultural and political figures in New York, Paris, Hollywood and beyond. A cultural connector, who brought together creators in literature, theater and the visual arts, such as William Faulkner, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and others, Ms. Stein created a world that seamlessly combined her involvement in groundbreaking events in 20th century America with her intellectually curious tastes and sprawling network of friends and admirers.

Her property will be spread out among various sales. Next week, her eclectic but superior taste will be on display with works by Magritte, Richard Prince and Giacometti (above, left to right.)

  • Alberto Giacometti’s 1946 oil, Femme Assise (La Mère de l’Artiste) (estimate $4/6 million). Femme Assise was originally in Ms. Stein’s father’s collection, who had acquired it from Pierre Matisse in 1955. Ms. Stein was so enamored with the work that she, in her early twenties, purchased it from him just two years later, in 1957, for $750.
  • René Magritte’s La Voix du Sang, an enchanting gouache on paper executed in 1947 (estimate $600/900,000)
  • Ed Ruscha’s Light Leaks (estimate $1.5/2 million) was commissioned for Stein’s magazine, Grand Street, but she acquired it a year later.
  • Andy Warhol’s Flowers (estimate $150/200,000) was a gift from the artist and is dedicated on the overlap: “To Jean V Love Andy Warhol”
  • Richard Prince’s Untitled (Protest Painting), acquired from the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York (estimate $400/600,000)
  • John Baldessari’s Buffalo and Deer (With Void), exhibited at Sonnabend Gallery’s exhibition of John Baldessari: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (estimate $120/180,000)

Christie’s Has Giacometti & Rothko from Antoni Tapies Collection for Frieze

by

Giacometti, Homme (Apollon), left, and Rothko’s Untitled (Orange and Yellow), right

Christie’s announces that it will sell works from the personal collection of Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies over the next year. A Giacometti work, Homme (Apollon) estimated at £800k-1.2m, will be featured in the up close sale of small scale works on October 3rd and a Rothko from 1969, Untitled (Orange and Yellow) estimated at £4-6m.

Tàpies first came to prominence in the late 1940s, working in a Surrealist idiom that shared much with the ideas of artists such as Paul Klee and his fellow Catalonian Joan Miró.  A scholarship to Paris in 1950-51 led to a meeting with Pablo Picasso. Informed by his interest in Zen philosophy as much as by the privation of Post-War Spain, Tàpies deliberately chose commonplace materials to infuse with new significance, invoking a transformative alchemy that prefigured the Italian movement of Arte Povera.  Following his first American exhibitions in 1953, he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1958; a celebrated solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum followed in 1962, and another toured Europe in 1973-74. In 1984, he created the Tàpies Foundation, which holds his archives and over 2000 of his works, and continues to this day to promote the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary art. Major retrospectives were held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1994, at the Guggenheim in 1995, and at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum in 2000.

Masterworks from the Collection of Antoni Tàpies will be on view at Christie’s King Street from 29 September 2017 with highlights touring to Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York (12 September), Hong Kong (18 to 21 September) and Madrid (19 to 20 September).

Sotheby’s Solo Imp-Mod Sale in London = £148.9m

by

(Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby's)

This recap of Sotheby's London Impressionist and Modern sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. The first month subscription is free. You can cancel AMMpro at any time.

Sotheby's hybrid Evening sale of small works and Impressionist and Modern masterworks was an uneven success with some real surprises as the two sales tallied £127.9m for the Impressionist and Modern sale + £20.9m for Actual Size, the small works sale or £148.9m ($187.7m) combined. On a hammer basis, Actual Size failed to reach the low estimate while the Impressionist and Modern sale just reached the low estimate. The sell-through rates were 65% and 74% respectively for Actual Size and the Imp-Mod sale.

These numbers may reflect the state of estimates—especially when they are undergirded by actual buyers who took positions pre-sale with irrevocable bides—which are quite high and require a fair bit of work for the specialists to rally bidding interest. With estimates peaking, there are two likely outcomes for the category (Impressionist and Modern works, not small ones.)

Sign up to Art Market Monitor Premium today

You need a membership to AMMpro to view this article and other exclusive content daily.

You can register today for $90 per month—with your first month free!—or for $756 per year (no free trial period.)

Screenshot 2016-08-05 16.28.45

If you already have an account, sign in here:

Sotheby’s Unveils $17m Finn Collection of Giacometti, Arp & Moore for May

by

Alberto Giacometti Buste de Diego Conceived circa 1957 Height: 24 ½ in.; 62.2 cm Estimate $10/15 million
Alberto Giacometti Buste de Diego Conceived circa 1957 Height: 24 ½ in.; 62.2 cm Estimate $10/15 million

It’s sculpture week in the auction house press departments as Sotheby’s releases its own highlights of the May sales with the $17m collection of David and Laura Finn.

The Evening Sale will offer a selection of five sculptures from the Finns’ collection, with works by Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Germaine Richier and Marino Marini together estimated in excess of $17 million. This group is united further by the fact that each piece was conceived in the late 1950s, during the period of turmoil and uncertainty following World War II.

Highlights from the collection will be shown in Hong Kong from 21-24 April, before returning to New York for public exhibition beginning 5 May.

Continue Reading

Catherine Grenier Is New Head of Giacometti Foundation

by

Catherine Grenier

Catherine Grenier has been named the new head of the Giacometti Foundation:

She will join as from the 1st of February 2014 following up her assignment from the Ministery of Culture and Communication.

As a Cultural Heritage Conservator, Catherine Grenier is the former deputy director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, for which she organized numerous forefront exhibitions, including the new display of the museum’s collection.

As an art historian, Catherine Grenier published numerous books and promoted innovative research programs. Her scientific expertise, extensive international network and dedication to the research field will contribute to enhance and expand further the Foundation’s actions.

Thanks to her experience and skills, she will develop an ambitious new policy in harmony with the different right holders and the specialists of the artist’s work. A new chapter in the history of the institution will be open with the following priority objectives: spreading the knowledge of Alberto Giacometti’s work around the world, bringing new perspectives and original thinking in link to the artist’s singular path and personality, encouraging innovative research and publications from both recognized scholars and young researchers, guaranteeing a permanent visibility of the artist’s work and of the Foundation’s activities.”

Christie’s Gives Giacometti a Little Color at $30-50m

by

Giacometti_Diego en Chemise Ecossaise

Christie’s has announced a Giacometti portrait of his brother Diego as the top lot in their Impressionist and Modern Evening sale with an attention grabbing $30-50m estimate:

Alberto Giacometti’s (1901-1966) Diego en chemise écossaise, estimated at $30—50 million, will lead Christie’s November 5 Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York.

The present work is one of the most fully realized of all Giacometti’s portraits. The surface of the painting is rich in texture showing how he compulsively worked and re-worked his material. While Giacometti’s paintings most often utilize a grisaille palette, Diego en chemise écossaise is distinctive for its use of color, with the red of Diego’s tartan shirt, which raises this portrait to a level of complexity rarely seen in the artist’s oeuvre. The pattern of the interwoven plaid also allows Giacometti to enrich the painting with a new level of complexly charged brushwork. The portrait also employs some of Giacometti’s familiar devices; the sitter is presented with the barest of anecdotal surroundings, and he has painted a linear frame around the subject, which separates the illusion of pictorial space from the reality of the canvas’ flatness.

Sotheby’s Announces Giacometti & Picasso November Headliners

by

Picasso, Tete de Femme ($20-30m)

Sotheby’s announced two star lots for its Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York this November. One is this Picasso, Tete de Femme:

Painted in March of 1935, the work is distinguished as perhaps  the last major canvas that the artist completed before  taking a year-long break from painting, during the  time of his contentious divorce from Olga Khokhlova  as well as Marie-Thérèse’s pregnancy with their child, Maya.  Tête de femme is estimated to sell for $20/30 million in the November auction.

In the last five years, six of Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse have achieved prices of more than  $20 million at auction. The most recent examples were sold at Sotheby’s in London and New York:  Femme assise près d’une fenêtre, which sold for $44.8 million in London in February 2013, and  Nature morte aux tulipes, which sold for $41.5 million in New York in November 2012.

Giacometti, Grande Tete de Diego ($35-50m)

And this Alberto Giacometti sculpture of his brother Diego:

By the 1950s, Giacometti shifted his attention from the elongated figures of his post-war years and  turned to figural sculptures that were more naturalistic in scale. Many were heads and half-length  busts, completed between 1951 and 1957 and often executed from memory. For the most part, these  sculptures were solid, designed without a base, and executed with the matiére pétrie, or kneaded  method, which heightened the expressiveness of the figure.

The first owner of this sculpture was Richard K. Weil (1902-1996), the St. Louis manufacturer and  trustee of Washington University. Weil and his wife Florence Steinberg Weil were avid collectors of  modern art and major benefactors of the University’s Art Department and Gallery. The couple  acquired this bronze from Giacometti’s European dealer Maeght in 1957 and sold it to the present  owner in 1980.

Who Made the Fake Giacomettis?

by

The last of the Giacometti forgers is about to face judgment. But Der Spiegel asks where the 200 fake Giacomettis were fabricated:

So who created, one by one, around 1,200 of these forgeries? Investigators discovered that Schulte had driven regularly to the Netherlands, where he picked up the sculptures and brought them to his storeroom in Mainz. Schulte also admits to sending bank transfers to the Netherlands amounting to €700,000. The recipient was a business partner known as “Brummie,” who moved to Thailand five years ago. Schulte continued to send money there, too.

“We still don’t know where the factory is, even after all these years,” laments Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Giacometti Foundation, in Paris.

Wiesinger engaged Hamburg-based lawyer Kristoff Ritlewski to represent the foundation as a joint plaintiff in the trial in Stuttgart. “It was only due to our additional suit that we were able to obtain a ruling concerning copyright infringement as well,” Ritlewski says.

In any case, Wiesinger reports, there are plenty of forged Giacometti sculptures still at large. It bothers her greatly to know that “at this point, these lousy imitations are being resold on eBay.”

Sculptures in a Suitcase (Der Spiegel)

Sotheby's London Imp-Mod Preview

by

Sotheby’s February 8th Impressionist and Modern Evening sale is full of an array of objects capitalizing on trends in the art market for name-brand, decorative work. Led by a colorful Picasso, La Lecture from 1932. Sotheby’s is signaling well above the £12-18m estimate range by linking the picture to Le Rêve (The Dream) and Sotheby’s success with Giacometti’s Walking Man which briefly held the world’s auction price record. (Unstated is the Brody Picasso record price set in May 2010.)

Picasso is hardly the only headline-worthy artist on offer. Giacometti is represented by a Diego sculpture and painting. There is Monet landscape and a Signac harbor scene of Venice. As well as this giant work:

Marino Marini’s L’Idea del cavaliere (pictured right, est: £3.7 – 4.5 million) is one of the most important works by the artist ever to come to the market. Remarkable both in terms of its monumental scale (it measures 220cm / 865/8 in. high) and because it is hand-painted by the artist, this extraordinary 1955 bronze of Marini’s most famous subject of the horse and rider is an exceptional example of his achievements in this area. L’Idea del cavliere is one of an edition of four bronzes of the subject. Others from the series are at the Museo Marino Marini in Milan and San Diego Museum of Art. In 1956, Marini carved a unique painted wood version, which was sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2007 for $7 million – a record for the artist at the time.

2011 Feb Imp-Mod Evening Sale PR

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Advertise on Art Market Monitor