Magritte

Sotheby’s Sells Jean Stein’s Art Collection

October 30, 2017 by Marion Maneker

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)

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

September 28, 2017 by Marion Maneker

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

Magritte by the Numbers

March 5, 2014 by Marion Maneker

This analysis of Rene Magritte’s market come from Art Media Agency‘s regular weekly newsletter about the art market. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.

René François Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessen on 21 November 1898. The Belgian artist, who is a painter, illustrator, engraver, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, was born to a merchant businessman father and a mother who was a milliner. She committed suicide in 1912, leaving her children to the care of governesses.

In 1915 Magritte moved to Brussels, and produced his first impressionist works. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels from 1916 to 1918, where he discovered the Cubism, Futurism, and Avant-Garde of Antwerp. His paintings are characterised by influences which evolved into a form of Purism. Familiar with the Belgian Dadaists and a keen lover of surrealist poetry, in 1926 he painted what he considered to be his first important surrealist work, The lost jockey. From then on, his art would attempt to demonstrate that – if we separate ourselves from our logical habits and routines – the only thing that we can take from reality is its mysteries. His works often play with differences between an object and the way in which it is represented. In the space of four years, having worked between Brussels and Paris, all of the different elements which constitute Magritte’s work were in place: his games of perception, the tension between academic representation and a disrupted view of reality, and an examination of the difference between an object and its designation. In August 1927, Magritte left Belgium to live near Paris until July 1930. Continue Reading

Lost Magritte ‘Discovered’ at MoMA…and Moderna Museet…and…

October 3, 2013 by Marion Maneker

The Enchanted Pose

The Guardian has nice bit from the recently opened Magritte show at MoMA where research into the retrospective resolved the mystery a critically acclaimed painting that was presumed to have been destroyed. It turns out … the work was indeed destroyed when it was divided up and painted over by the artist:

The Enchanted Pose – which depicted two identical female nudes standing side by side [above] – disappeared without trace having received critical acclaim in 1927, shortly before Magritte created his painting of a pipe with the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe).

A black-and-white photograph of the “lost” painting from the 1992 definitive study on Magritte – the catalogue raisonné – listed it as “probably destroyed”.

To the excitement of art experts, x-rays and other imaging techniques have revealed two sections of the painting beneath two other Magrittes.

A head and torso from the composition have been found beneath The Portrait of 1935, a painting of an eye on a slice of prosciutto, which is part of a collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).

The feet of the nude figures were discovered beneath The Red Model of 1935, in which Magritte depicted a pair of feet – from toes to ankles – as surrealist boots. The painting, which is owned by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, inspired Magritte to paint a second version two years later for Edward James, the eccentric British poet, arts patron and collector of surrealist art, during his five-week stay in London. The other two quarters of The Enchanted Pose are now presumed to lie beneath two other Magritte paintings yet to be x-rayed.

Magritte’s missing nudes found hidden under paintings after 80 years (The Guardian)

Magritte’s the Ticket

October 28, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Observer covers Blain DiDonna’s inaugural show and provides a little background on the Magritte market in the process:

Magritte, then, would seem to be an ideal fit. The works on display would appeal to anyone who walked in off the street—one, in fact, Le Domaine enchanté (II) (1953), is a mural from a casino in Knokke-le Zoute, Belgium. The show is playful, frequently nude and familiar. There’s a man with an apple over his face and a pipe that isn’t a pipe.

“The market is very strong for Magritte,” Mr. Di Donna said, walking through the gallery. “It’s an artist that, over the last 10 years, has increased enormously in value. … It’s also an artist that’s instantly recognizable. I think his imagery is fun, fresh, witty. There’s eroticism, there’s word play. I think a lot of the current marketing, all those images that you’re bombarded with every day, owe a lot to Magritte.”

According to Artnet, eight of the artist’s top 10 prices were achieved in the past five years. In this show, Mr. Di Donna has a work that’s in the same series as L’Empire des lumières (1952), which set the artist’s highest price in 2002 when it sold for $12.7 million at Christie’s. Mr. Di Donna’s 1954 version shares its name.

Of the 29 paintings, six are for sale, with prices that range from $700,000 to $7 million. The show marks Mr. Di Donna’s first curatorial effort and came together in some 10 months (“It is easier when you know an artist very well and you know the collectors,” he said). He stopped before the exhibit’s signature piece, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1935), which features a naked woman holding a mirror that displays her bare midsection going in the opposite direction. The painting hasn’t been displayed publicly for 25 years, and Mr. Di Donna’s enthusiasm for it is obvious.

You’re So Blain (Observer)