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Di Donna Brings Jasper Johns’s Disappearance I to Art Basel

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Jasper Johns, Disappearance I, 1960. Encaustic and collage on canvas. 101.6 by 101.6 cm (40 by 40 in.) © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Di Donna Galleries’ booth at Art Basel 2018 will include works by Arp, Calder, Ernst, Francis, Giacometti, Magritte, Miró, and Nuvolo but feature Disappearance I, by Jasper Johns from 1960.Disappearance I was first shown publicly in Johns’s highly anticipated and critically-lauded ten-year retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1964 and was recently included in the 2018 retrospective of Jasper Johns’ work shown at the Royal Academy and Broad Museum and is offered at $18.5 million.
Di Donna clearly believe the inclusion the recent retrospective validates the work which has had trouble selling publicly in the past. The work was owned by Alfred Taubman who picked it up after a Sotheby’s auction. The work was not sold during the Taubman sale in 2015.
The gallery’s press release is below:

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Sotheby’s Prints & Multiples Leads with $1m Johns Double Flag

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Sotheby’s New York auction of Important Prints & Multiples will take place on 26 & 27 April. The exhibition opens to the public 22 April featuring:

  • Jasper Johns’s Flags I (ULAE 128), carrying an estimate of $1/1.5 million
  • Andy Warhol’s complete set of Flowers (F. & S. 11.64-73). Estimated at $700/1,000,000, the group of ten screenprints in colors from 1970 are each signed on the verso and individually framed
  • Henri Matisse’s Océanie, la mer – stretching over 5 by 12 feet – only the sixth to be available at auction, will be offered with a pre-sale estimate of $500/700,000
  • Mary Cassatt, Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother’s Shoulder (No. 2) (estimate $250/350,000)
  • Max Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars (Spies & Leppien 7) (estimate $80/120,000)
  • Richard Diebenkorn’s Blue Surround (estimate $80/120,000)

Dealer Fred Dorfman Vulnerable in Jasper Johns Case

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Grossman LLP, a firm specializing in art law, won a court ruling against art dealer Fred Dorfman late last week. Dorfman had been the dealer for James Meyer, Jasper Johns’s former studio assistant who pled guilty in 2014 to interstate transportation of stolenJohns artworks (many of which were unfinished). Meyer received an 18 month jail sentence and was ordered to pay restitution. Of the 83 pieces of art Meyer stole from Johns, Dorfman sold 42 for a total of $9m, including $5.99m in “commissions” for Dorfman. 

Grossman’s client, Equinox Gallery, purchased one of the stolen works for $800,000.  In last week’s ruling, Judge George B. Daniels held that Equinox had adequately alleged the types of activity that can support viable RICO claims, the Court rejected Dorfman’s attempt to paint the alleged plot as “a discrete scheme with a narrow purpose”

“[Dorfman’s characterization of the fraud allegations] ignores the magnitude of Plaintiff’s allegation that Meyer and Dorfman worked in tandem to defraud more than twenty victims over six years to the tune of more than $9 million.” 

Daniels ruling in Dorfman’s motion to dismiss allows Grossman to sue Dorfman for treble damages (i.e., $2.4 million) and attorney’s fees, as well as punitive damages on the fraud and civil RICO claims. According to Grossman, “this is an important ruling in the context of art-fraud cases, given the heightened pleading standard for such claims.”

Sotheby’s Has 90 Works on Paper from Spielvogels with $40-60m Estimate for November

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Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Ambassador Carl Spielvogel are selling their collection of 90 works on paper (above from left to right: Magritte, Rothko, Pollock, Lichtenstein, and Johns) ranging from Degas, Matisse, Braque and Miró to Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Twombly, Lichtenstein and Freud. The entire collection is estimated at between $40 to $60m and will be sold across multiple sales:

Works featured in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction include

  • an example of Mark Rothko’s mature work, created just two years prior to his tragic death in 1970, which is estimated at $5/7 million.
  • a Pollock that shows him working through a major stylistic development in 1951 (estimate $3/4 million)
  • an incredible group of seven works by Jasper Johns that includes examples of his numbers and flag (well-timed with the current RA show + recent catalogue raisonné)
  • five drawings by Lichtenstein that correspond directly with major oils

Works featured in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale:

  • a Degas scene of three dancers from 1889 through to a 1970s Picasso nude
  • 5 works by Picasso crossing his career from 1901 to 1971, led by a scene from 1935 that foreshadows the compositional arrangement that would ultimately manifest in Guernica two years later (estimate $1.5/2.5 million)
  • a Magritte gouache at $2/3 million

Regrets? Jasper Johns Has a Few But He’ll Only Share Them with MoMA

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Jasper Johns, Untitled (Regrets)

It may be the ultimate irony that in a story about Jasper Johns’s Regrets series making their debut straight from the studio to MoMA, the octogenarian artist is unwilling to open up about any of his past connections. Not that Julie Belcove doesn’t try. From Robert Rauschenberg to former studio assistant James Meyer who was caught selling unfinished works through a New York dealer without the artist’s knowledge, Belcove keeps getting deflected in her answers. Here’s an example about the subject matter of this new series, a picture of Lucian Freud that Francis Bacon used as the basis of a self portrait:

It may be simply another coincidence that Bacon and Freud were once close friends but had a bitter break, mirroring the rupture between Johns and Rauschenberg more than half a century ago. Johns, though, insists any similarity is accidental. “I don’t know anything about their lives, so that wouldn’t be important to me,” he says.

Johns also claims never to have met either artist, though his friend Bill Katz, who was also close to Bacon (and who renovated the barns and Johns’ grand, stone house), recalls with a chuckle, “I remember introducing [Bacon and Johns] at lunch. When I tell Jasper things he thinks he doesn’t remember, he says, ‘Interesting if true’.”

Though Johns owns a small Freud painting, “a portrait of a poet”, he denies especially admiring either artist. “I don’t think it had anything to do with either of them,” he says before allowing, “You don’t know what happens in your unconscious.”

Jasper Johns: ‘Regrets belong to everybody, don’t they?’ (Financial Times)

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