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Sotheby’s Announces £20m Monet Venice Ducal Palace for February

December 21, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Claude Monet, Le Palais Ducal, oil on canvas, 1908 (est. £20,000,000-30,000,000)

Sotheby’s is announcing a Monet painting from the series of works the artist produced in Venice over a three month stay. Monet’s habit was to paint the same view multiple times with the works displaying the effects of weather and time of day to produce different color and mood schemes. The work on offer is,  Le Palais Ducal from 1908, is one of three paintings of the same view.

This work is estimated at £20-30 million and will appear at auction for the very first time. It has been in the same family since it was acquired by Erich Goeritz in 1925. Goeritz was a Berlin-based textile manufacturer who was one of the most important Jewish collectors of the Weimar Republic.

This version of the Le Palais Ducal was exhibited as part of the Monet and Architecture show at the National Gallery in London earlier this year. It was shown in a room dedicated to the Venice series. That exhibition was first public appearance in almost four decades. It was shown alongside its counterpart from the Brooklyn Museum in New York which is the largest of the three works. The final version was owned by a prominent collecting family whose heirs recently sold. This version was not sold with the rest of the collection.

This version and the one still in private hands are remarkably similar in color, tone and light. Both are close to the hues of the Brooklyn Museum picture, something of a departure for Monet. Sotheby’s holds the auction record for a Venice painting by Monet: Le Grand Canal, which sold in London in February 2015 for £23.7 million. Here is their release for the picture:

Claude Monet arrived in Venice on 1 October 1908 – and, taken aback by the splendour of what he saw, the artist declared the city ‘too beautiful to paint’. Enchanted by the city, Monet painted just under forty canvases during the course of his three month stay, the greater part of which adorn the walls of museums across the globe. This spectacular painting depicts the historic Gothic façade of the Doge’s palace, and it belongs to a celebrated group of three works painted from the vantage of a boat moored along the canal, one of which is held in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Le Palais Ducal has been in the same family collection since 1925, when it was acquired by Erich Goeritz, a Berlin-based textile manufacturer. Goeritz was a significant collector of Impressionist and Modern art, building an extensive collection that was both eclectic and forward-thinking, counting among its number celebrated works such as Édouard Manet’s Un bar aux Folies-Bergère, now in the Courtauld Insitute of Art, London.  Philanthropic in his artistic endeavours, Goeritz gifted a substantial number of works to the newly founded Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1933 and a few years later made his first donation to the British Museum. Almost a century later, this painting will now appear at auction for the first time, with an estimate of £20,000,000 – 30,000,000, as part of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 26 February 2018.

The painting was exhibited earlier this year – its first public appearance in almost four decades – alongside its counterpart from the Brooklyn Museum, in a room dedicated to the Venice series in the National Gallery in London’s acclaimed Monet and Architecture show, which toured through Monet’s ground-breaking depictions of the modern world in which he lived.

The composition is harmoniously divided between the palace’s brick exterior, and its reflection in the water. Monet animates the lagoon with wonderfully dappled brushstrokes whilst also bringing to life the façade of the building, which is softly diffused by light. The unique lacustrine quality of Venice and its architectural heritage allowed Monet to explore more abstract compositions, accentuating the interplay between the rhythms of the architecture and the expanse of water. In Venice, Monet turned to his artistic forbears JMW Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, for both of whom the city had held a special importance. Turner presented a Venice transfigured by light, and viewing their poetic paintings side by side, Henri Matisse once remarked that ‘it seemed to [him] that Turner must have been the link between the academic tradition and impressionism’. Unapologetically modern in its outlook and in the way that it is painted, the work is not a topographical view so much as it is an evocation of atmosphere. Venice proved the perfect subject for Monet to explore his apotheosis of painting.

The Changing Market Mix for Impressionist and Modern Art, 2007-2017

November 14, 2018 by Marion Maneker

This detailed analysis of the composition of the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

Earlier this week, we remarked upon the diverging strategies in the Impressionist and Modern market taken by Christie's and Sotheby's this November. Our friends at Pi-eX created chart of the last 11 years of November Evening sales in the Imp-Mod category for each house.

The results are revealing. For the last three years, Christie's has relied upon Picasso and Monet as the bedrock of their sales. Last year, the much larger sale had greater contributions from van Gogh and Léger among other artists. But Picasso and Monet were consistent contributors. Monet's dollar volume rose and fell over those three years expanding in '16 and '18 when the sales levels were comparable. Picasso's dollar volume at Christie's has grown each November from 2014 to present.

Sotheby's took the radical step of only including one Picasso work in the evening sale. But this was not always the case.


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Christie’s Takes Another Shot at Monet Market in June

May 10, 2018 by Marion Maneker

The Rockefeller sale earlier this week left the nagging feeling that Claude Monet’s Extérieur de la gare Saint-Lazare, effet de soleil might have performed better had it been sold outside of the single-owner sale. Even though the work made nearly $33m, there was a sense that the work didn’t get quite the attention it deserved. Now Christie’s announces it will have the rare second chance with another work from the series of 12 paintings on offer in London in June.

The Bass Family’s Monet is the second of the three works remaining in private hands and it has been estimated beginning at where the Rockefeller Monet sold. Officially, the estimate is available on request which gives the house some leeway in taking the market’s temperature. But the whisper number is £22-28m which suggests there is headroom for this work to outperform the Rockefeller picture when it comes to the block in June:

Claude Monet’s iconic La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure of 1877, will lead Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 20 June 2018. This magnificent painting, executed in 1877 as part of Monet’s celebrated Gare Saint-Lazare series will be offered for sale from ‘The Collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass’ (Estimate on Request). Works from this esteemed collection were sold in New York in November 2017 where a highlight was Vincent van Gogh’s Laboureur dans un champ, which sold for $81,312,500, the second highest price achieved at auction for a work by the artist.

The present work, La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, belongs to a series of twelve canvases painted in 1877 depicting the busy railway station which had been modernised and extended in the late 1860s. By 1870 the Gare Saint-Lazare was handling over 13 million passengers a year and had become a major transit point for the vibrant city. The modern age of steam trains, iron railway bridges and extensive public transport was perfectly captured in this remarkable series of Monet’s steam-filled, atmospheric impressionist masterpieces. Gare Saint-Lazare paintings are frequently shown in major retrospectives, are much reproduced, and are included in the permanent collection of many of the most celebrated museums in the world. Of the twelve Monet painted in 1877, three still remain in private hands and nine are in public institutions. These include: The Fogg Art Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Gallery, London; The Musée Marmattan, Paris; and The Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Two of these museum works are currently included in London’s National Gallery exhibition Monet & Architecture, a pioneering show that examines Monet’s career through the lens of the architecture that he painted. La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure was recently on loan to the Kimbel Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The entire series, ‘Gare Saint-Lazare’, was created in a short period of intense creativity: in just three months between January and March 1877. The subject would turn out to be Monet’s last confrontation with modernity, before he abandoned the painting of modern life, and started to pursue pure landscape painting. While the works in the group differ in size, viewpoint and handling, the series marks the first occasion whereby the artist committed himself to the pursuit of a single subject through a long sequence of variations. This would come to be one of the defining aspects of Monet’s practice for the rest of his career. In April 1877, Monet included several of his recently painted Gare Saint-Lazare canvases in the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

The group depicts the station from a variety of different positions, at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions. In La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, Monet has moved outside the covered interior area of the Gare Saint-Lazare, into the midst of the platforms; the railway track weaving a dynamic, serpentine path through the foreground of the scene, as two trains move through the bustling station. One emerges from beneath the Pont de l’Europe made famous by Monet’s illustrious impressionist counterpart Gustave Caillebotte. Captured with a combination of loose, staccato brushstrokes, as well as areas of more refined architectural detail, steam, people, the surrounding architecture of the city, and the structure of this newly constructed beacon of modernity all come together in this vivid, rapidly executed scene of modern life. Architecture and atmosphere combine to create a painting that has become an icon of its time.  Before he painted the present work, Monet had been living and working in Argenteuil, just outside of Paris. Having immersed himself in rural Montgeron in the summer of 1876, he returned to Paris in the new year, eager to capture the subjects and scenes of the bustling urban landscape of modern Paris. Caillebotte paid the rent for him to live in a small ground floor apartment near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and just three months later, the series of twelve works was complete.

Jussi Pylkkänen, Global President, Christie’s: “This superb painting describes Monet at his impressionist best, capturing in quick, bold brushstrokes the energy of metropolitan Paris as described by the sound and fury of the glorious steam trains as they left the Gare Saint Lazare on their journey’s northwards out of the city. Painted in situ from the platform of the station, several of these urban plein-air paintings served as the centrepieces of the important Third Impressionist Exhibition in April 1877. It is an honour to exhibit and offer for sale this magnificent painting from The Collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass, in whose collection it has hung for so many years. Only three works from this critically acclaimed series remain in private hands and it is a particular honour for Christie’s to handle the sales of two of these within a month of each other in London and New York.”

Monet’s Market Reaches a Junction in New York

May 8, 2018 by Marion Maneker

The volume of Picasso material on the market in the next two weeks has gotten all of the pre-sales attention—and with good reason. But the other perennial market leader, Claude Monet, is also having a big week or two in New York. Since the London sales cycle put up a solid ~$35m in sales for the Impressionist master, the combination of the Rockefeller's taste for Monet and the market's affection for the artist has brought another ~$125m in paintings to the auction block.

Our friends at Athena Art Finance ran some numbers for us looking back over the last 12 years of sales to show Monet's market share along with the rise and fall of his market volume. Before we get to those, it is important to remember that unlike some of the modern masters or works by Cezanne and Gauguin sold on the private market, Monet's top prices have somewhat lagged. It took nearly a decade for a work to outsell Monet's previous record price. Even at that, it barely nudged the top price for the artist above the previous $80m mark.

At the height of the previous market, in the Summer of 2008, a Nymphéas long held in a Midwest collection made $80m when an advisor known to work with Russian Oligarchs bought it for twice the previous record set the previous month in New York. Since that time, there have been a number of works sold at prices in between those to reference points. Nonetheless, it has been hard for Monet to set a new top price.


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The Estimates on David Rockefeller’s Art Go Up

March 7, 2018 by Marion Maneker

James Tarmy has an interesting story on Bloomberg about the Rockefeller estate which will come to market at Christie’s over the next few months. David Rockefeller had a good eye and a keen trading sense. As Tarmy points out, the success of Rockefeller’s Rothko sold at the pre-credit crisis peak of the market for $73m was bought for $10,000 53 years earlier.

The capital gains on that sale caused Rockefeller to make plans to dispose of his art in a way that would maximize the value to charity. The subsequent competition between auction houses became legend within the industry. Rockefeller’s representatives were the toughest of customers. They drove a very hard bargain which has left some bruised feelings even years later.

No one can confirm the final guarantee level (and it is said to include a toggle that gives the estate an additional advantage) but $750m is a safe number to work with on what the estate was expected to generate.

That’s a big number even for Rockefeller. Christie’s approached the market gingerly. In January, some of the top works—Picasso, Matisse and Monet—were released to the press with estimates of $70m, $50m and $35m respectively. Since then, Christie’s has clearly gotten good feedback from the market as it tours the works to Asia and Europe.Continue Reading

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