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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)

Richard Prince Market Snapshot, 2014-2016

March 18, 2017 by Marion Maneker

Richard Prince, Nurse Elsa $5.8m

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The market for Richard Prince’s work has seen its share of ups and downs in recent years. His most valuable works have always been the series of nurse paintings. Yet those images have had their own rocky history on the market. In July of 2008, Overseas Nurse was sold for £4.2m or nearly $8.5m on the day. Six years later, Nurse of Greenmeadows achieved that price level again.

In the interim, nurse paintings have appeared sporadically on the market. Runaway Nurse sold for a solid $6.8m in Nov. 2011 at Phillips. Five years later, Runaway Nurse #2 sold at Christie’s in May for a record $9.6m. That record sale brought more nurses to market last November in New York. Aloha Nurse sold at Sotheby’s for $4.73m; Nurse Elsa made $5.85m at Christie’s two nights before. Both of those works sold on or around the low estimate.

That pattern seems to be a hallmark of Prince’s market. Many of his series sell quite well but the prices often struggle to meet the consignor’s expectations, if the estimate range is anything to go by. This suggests anticipation is often greater among owners in Prince’s market than demand is among buyers.

In an attempt to understand this dynamic, we analyzed the data from the November sales in New York. (There were not enough significant sales in London recently or even at the Armory Week sales in New York.) We also looked back at the last four years of Prince’s sales to see what that data might explain about Prince’s market.Continue Reading

Richard Prince Has Kenny Schachter & a Bunch of Lawyers Worried

January 17, 2017 by Marion Maneker

A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Jan 14, 2015 at 9:05am PST


Kenny Schachter read about Richard Prince’s renunciation of the New Portrait work he did for Ivanka Trump. It raised some alarm for the collector dealer about the ramifications for the art market if living artists can arbitrarily de-authentic works owned by others at whim.

The post has been very popular with art lawyers. Here’s what Kenny wrote:

The repercussions to the market if artists had the right to impugn the authenticity of their works after the fact would turn the art economy topsy-turvy, destabilizing what many already judge to be a thinly traded, tenuous ecosystem to begin with. The whole enterprise cannot be pegged to the capriciousness of artists, fickle at best: the laissez-faire markets with their (quasi) built-in checks and balances would lose confidence in art. And Richard would be robbed of his private-plane-fueled, St. Barts lifestyle; that, I am sure, he can appreciate. And besides, you don’t kill the (market) animal to remove a splinter from its foot.

Judd Grossman, one of the aforementioned art lawyers, had some thoughts on the limits of Prince’s VARA rights:Continue Reading

Richard Prince Makes an Anti-Trump Statement; But Everyone Wants Talk About the Renounced Work’s Value

January 13, 2017 by Marion Maneker

A photo posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Jan 14, 2015 at 9:05am PST

It has to be a bit ironic that website devoted to following the market side of the art market and rise of art as an asset should post about the confusion surround Richard Prince’s recent decision to return the fee paid for one of his New Portraits—this one of Ivanka Trump—and renounce the work.

First, Georgina Adam wondered on Twitter if VARA gave Prince the ability to destroy its value (then she tweeted that she applauded his decision); then, Artnet News thought it was a joke; and, now, the New York Times is pretty sure Prince isn’t doing some kind of performance art but they’re still more interested in whether the work will retain any asset value.

The Times does, in fact, clarify a few things. Ivanka Trump sought out a New Portrait of herself (or someone close to her did.) And Prince doesn’t care about the money:

Mr. Prince said that in 2014 he was approached by an art adviser, whom he declined to name, with a request that he make a painting based a post from Ms. Trump’s Instagram feed.

“I don’t do commissions and so what I said to the guy was, ‘Let me look at her feed and see if I like it, and if I do I’ll do it,’” Mr. Prince said. “I found an image of her looked like it was made up. It looked like the kind of thing I was interested in.” He added, of Ms. Trump: “I don’t care who she is. I care more about who I think she is.”

He continued: “She posts a lot of pictures of herself. It means I get a whole bunch of choices. I don’t have to meet her. It’s not Richard Avedon. I don’t have to invite someone over to my studio or meet them. I just find an image that I can imagine is what somebody is really like.” Of his interest in Instagram in general, he said: “It’s like going down a rabbit hole. It’s like a giant magazine. It’s frankly a lot of fun.” […]

Mr. Prince, asked whether he thought his disavowal would have any effect on the piece’s status as a legitimate Richard Prince work or on its market value, said: “Whether it will affect anything is not the point. It’s a way of me saying to them I don’t want my work in your possession. I don’t want anything to do with your family.”

Richard Prince, Protesting Trump, Returns Art Payment (The New York Times)

Richard Prince’s Defense

January 1, 2012 by Marion Maneker

The New York Times takes up the Richard Prince-Patrick Cariou copyright case today bending the story toward the broader implications the case might have on the mash-up culture of digitized content. But deeper in the story, we get Richard Prince’s own defense which is hardly the “everybody does it” shrug that story first suggests.

In depositions, Prince is straight-forward in his denial that his work is meant to comment in any way upon his source materials as the law allows. Perhaps it shouldn’t have to:

Joshua Schiller, Mr. Prince’s appeals lawyer from the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, said the boundary is whether a new work of art results from the borrowing. And he argued that it was clear that Mr. Prince had made parts of Mr. Cariou’s pictures into distinctive Richard Prince works, not just copy them to pass them off as his own and deprive Mr. Cariou of his livelihood. Whether the work was successful and whether Mr. Prince’s intentions were interesting or even explainable can be left to debate. But the primary intention was to create a work of art, Mr. Schiller said, and that is the kind of creativity the law seeks to encourage.

“This is not piracy,” he said. “These are not handbags.”

 Apropos Appropriation (New York Times)
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