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A Quick Look at New York’s Contemporary Evening Sales

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Live Auction Art published the market share figures for Contemporary art pictured above. You can see that Sotheby's pulled off a strong set of sales to finish dead even with Christie's in Contemporary art (though a few stray Rockefeller lots would have given Christie's a negligible few points of market share. Phillips continues to gain its position in the market even if their market share remains far behind the big two.

The top of the Contemporary art market is still down. According to historical numbers gathered by our friends at Pi-eX, the Evening sale totals for Contemporary art for the Spring sales in New York were back below the level of 2013. Over the last six sales cycles, the totals shot above historical levels in 2014 and 2015 before pulling back to their lowest total in 2016 since the 2011 sales cycle. There was a brief rally in 2017 back to that 2013 level. Last week, we saw the numbers pull back slightly.

We'll have a more detailed analysis of the composition of those sales—which on first reaction are quite positive for their depth of value and breadth of new names—when we publish our Contemporary market report next week. In the meantime, let's look at what Pi-eX's numbers can tell us.

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Sotheby’s Brings $30m Pollock to New York

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Sotheby’s will be selling a small but rare Jackson Pollock on May 16th in New York with a $30m estimate. Number 32, 1949has been owned by the same couple for the last 36 years and rarely shown. Despite its size, the work is a candidate to match Pollock’s auction (but not private sale) record of $58.4m which was achieved by Number 19 (1948) five years ago. The Art Newspaper has the announcement:

Number 32 was exhibited in Pollock’s breakthrough show at Betty Parsons Gallery in November 1949 and is in “remarkable” condition, says [Sotheby’s Lisa] Dennison, because it rarely travelled after the owners acquired it from the Robert Elkon Gallery. […]

The fact that the consignors, a New York couple, have decided to part with the work now, sans guarantee, is a vote of confidence in the market, Dennison says. Earlier this month, however, Pollock’s Number 21 (1950), a 22.2-inch square drip painting in enamel and aluminium paint on Masonite, fetched a slightly under-estimate £9.3m ($13m) at Christie’s London; Dennison says this one “had a very different surface quality”.

Sotheby’s press release goes into greater detail:

The production of the artist’s drip paintings of 1948-9 stands as one of the most radical events in 20th-century art, in which the boundaries of painting were pushed and a new aesthetic established. Number 32, 1949 comes from a critical year for the artist and epitomizes the chaotic vibrancy, heroic drama and thrilling vigor that have come to define Pollock’s prodigious legacy. Acquired in 1983 and held in the same esteemed private collection for over 35 years, the work will be unveiled in Hong Kong on 29 March before traveling to Los Angeles and London, with the New York exhibition opening on 4 May.

Jackson Pollock executed his first drip painting in 1947. Over the next two years he would hone this now instantly recognizable, signature technique, producing the monumental Autumn Rhythm (collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Number 1A, 1948 (collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Number 32 is one of a small number of more intimate 1949 paintings in which the artist more fully explored the subtleties of the drip technique. It was featured in the second of two shows that year at Betty Parsons Gallery about which Robert M. Coates wrote in the New Yorker “They seem to me the best painting he has yet done.”

Exceptionally rare, Number 32 is one of a very limited group of 16 drip paintings Pollock created on paper mounted on Masonite or canvas in 1949 and one of only eight that feature the aluminum paint that creates a lustrous shimmer around his elaborate gestural movements. Boasting a fully painted surface with intricate layers of dripped and poured oil, enamel, and aluminum paint, the work has one of the most complete and richly covered surfaces of the entire series; indeed the last time a painting of this composition was offered at auction was in May 2013, when it set a record price of $58.4 million. It is further distinguished by a dense composition of black and silver splatters offset by bursts of brick red, bright orange, sunflower gold, and vibrant sea green that extend to the very edges of the paper. Other examples from this limited group reside in prestigious collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, New York.

Sotheby’s to offer Jackson Pollock drip painting in May sale series (The Art Newspaper)

Sotheby’s Has $25m 1932 Picasso ‘Le Repos’ for May

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In case you thought last week’s Picasso madness was an aberration, Sotheby’s is coming back to the Marie-Thérèse market with a small 1932 work estimated at $25m:

Sotheby’s is pleased to announce that Pablo Picasso’s stunning Le Repos from 1932 will highlight of our Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 14 May 2018. A stunning and intimate depiction of Picasso’s ‘golden muse’, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the work was painted at the apex of Picasso’s artistic production, and captures the rapturous desire of his greatest compositions.

Le Repos is estimated to sell for $25/35 million when it is auctioned this May at Sotheby’s New York. The work will travel to Sotheby’s Hong Kong, London and Los Angeles galleries this spring, before returning to our York Avenue headquarters for public exhibition beginning 4 May.

The sumptuous canvas will appear at auction during a sensational time for related works from Picasso’s oeuvre: the Tate Modern’s first solo exhibition of Picasso’s work, The Ey Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy, opens in London this week. Last Wednesday, Sotheby’s sold the artist’s 1937 portrait of Marie-Thérèse, Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée, for an outstanding £49.8 million – a record price (in GBP) for any painting auctioned in Europe. Simon Shaw, Co-Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department, commented: “We are thrilled to offer this stunning painting from Picasso’s greatest series this May. As we saw last week in London, there is a vigorous global demand for depictions of Picasso’s golden muse. This classic, dreamy example from his critical year of 1932 is immediately recognizable, and captures the key elements of his work inspired by Marie Therese. Its lush, painterly quality and vibrant colors stand in stark contrast to Picasso’s final portraits of his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, which immediately precede this extraordinary period – generally considered the strongest in Picasso’s entire career.”

Picasso’s paintings of his lover Marie-Thérèse are arguably the finest emblems of love, sex and desire in 20th century art. He executed his major series of paintings depicting her in January 1932, in anticipation of Picasso’s first retrospective that coming June at Galeries Georges-Petit in Paris.

The frank avowal of Picasso’s love for Marie-Thérèse is particularly evident in this work. He depicts his serene model asleep, her head in Grecian profile, and resting on her interlaced fingers. Devoid of the attributes that often accompany her in other compositions, in the present work Marie-Thérèse’s striking facial features are the main focus of the composition. Picasso embraces not only a vibrant palette of primary colors such as yellow, red and green, but also employs sumptuous and curvaceous brushstrokes to convey Marie-Thérèse’s full, passive and golden beauty, which had now become for him the personification of ripeness and fecundity.

Picasso Portait of Jacqueline Leads Christie’s NY Sale in November

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Pablo Picasso, Femme accroupie (Jacqueline) ($20-30m)

Christie’s has a Picasso for the New York sales in November that has never been on the auction market before:

Christie’s will offer Pablo Picasso’s Femme accroupie (Jacqueline), painted on October 8, 1954 as a central highlight of its Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on 13 November in New York. Marking its first time at auction, Femme accroupie (Jacqueline) comes from a private collection, and is estimated to sell for $20-30 million.

The work will be on public view at Christie’s London from 16 – 19 September, and at Christie’s Hong Kong from 28 September – 3 October.

With May Sales in New York, A Pattern Begins to Emerge

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This analysis of the Contemporary sales results in New York is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

The New York Contemporary art sales made just a bit more than $1bn combined last month. So, even if the auction houses had not continued to hold all of the New York May sales in a single week, the Contemporary art sales would still have been a gigaweek. Does it matter? Probably not. There has been a great deal of talk in the press about the art market being in a slump based upon the dubious benchmark of the market's absolute peak in 2014.

You can see from the chart above the two years where the Spring sales of Contemporary were effectively identical and loomed 35% higher in total value than last month's sales. But you can also see that matching sale values from year to year has been effectively unheard of. For many reasons, not to mention the art's heterodox qualities (that means few objects that are sold are alike,) sales rarely match up from year to year. More to the point for those looking to normalize art sales levels, those peak years were the culmination of five previous years of rapidly rising art values.

Even a passing familiarity with economic and historical events will explain why that same period was anything but normal. The slumping art sales of 2016 were still reasonably close to the peak years of 2007 and 2008. But now that the sales have recovered, we can also see some similarities to the previous pullback.

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