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Did David Rockefeller Really Have Such Dowdy Taste, Make Bad Art Investments?

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The New York Times spends a great deal of time and energy complaining about the use of art as an asset. So it is a bit of surprise to see their art market columnist sum up the Rockefeller estate sale by complaining that Peggy and David Rockefeller, who bought widely across a number of categories ranging from duck decoys to Asian art and American art of many eras, were insufficiently investment minded.

Although their taste in art never advanced beyond Abstract Expressionism and, it is important to remember that the sale does not include the many works the Rockefellers donated to museums (a virtue the New York Times is very vocal about,) David Rockefeller commissioned work from Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti for One Chase Manhattan Plaza. One of the works that began as part of that commission was defining moment in the art market when it sold for a record price in 2010. Earlier, David Rockefeller’s Rothko kicked off an upward explosion of the Rothko market before and after the global financial crisis.

Finally, it is often forgotten that the David Rockefeller was the beneficiary of a great fortune but not the possessor of it. That objects he bought to decorate his homes and satisfy his collecting passion should yield more than $830m for charity is an accidental investment achievement to be marveled at.

Yet here’s how the NYTimes characterizes it:

“The collection overall is very dowdy, very end of an era,” said Wendy Cromwell, an art adviser based in New York. […]

During the early 1950s, the couple was spending thousands on Sèvres and Spode dinner services at a time when a Jackson Pollock drip painting could be bought for $800. […] the numbers would have been even bigger had the Rockefellers bought Pollock rather than porcelain.

What if the Rockefellers Had Bought Pollock Instead of Porcelain?  (The New York Times)

Christie’s Rebecca Wei Telegraphs Chinese Rockefeller Interest

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Bloomberg previews the Rockefeller sales this week with a teaser article about the online sales action but the most interesting part of the piece is the way it ends with Christie’s Rebecca Wei outlining the tastes of her Chinese clients. It’s rare to see a Senior figure at an auction house say something anything but upbeat about one the top lots coming up for auction. But in the case of Gertrude Stein’s Picasso, there may be no need for caution. There’s been a lot of talk in the trade, some of it coming from the owner of a number of Picassos that the Rose period Picasso could sell for a great deal more than the $100m low estimate.

That interest is likely to come from buyers in the Gulf States or the owner a private museum than from Chinese clients. Christie’s Rebecca Wei explains why:

“The big whale clients want the top-top pieces only by Tier 1 artists,” said Wei, listing Picasso, Matisse, Claude Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin and Paul Cezanne. “They like bright colors. Women need to be beautiful in the paintings.”

Top on their list, she said, is a sensual 1923 Matisse canvas, “Odalisque couchee aux magnolias.” Estimated at $70 million, it will probably set an auction record for the French artist, whose current high is $48.8 million.

Picasso’s 1905 “Young Girl with a Flower Basket,” which depicts a pale, nude teenage girl with a basket of red blossoms, may be a tougher sell, Wei said.

“I had so many top collectors looking at the piece, saying ‘Mmm… I don’t know, she has a haunted look — I like the Matisse much better.’”

Rockefeller Trove Ignites a Frenzy With $26,000 Money Clip  (Bloomberg)

Here Comes the Rockefeller Sale

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The marketing of the David Rockefeller collection has begun. And though some of the hyperbole of this Vanity Fair story situating the collection within David Rockefeller’s personal life is understandable, there are few clunkers like this: “he lived at a level of refinement that will probably never be seen again on this earth.”

There’s also a few good tidbits in the story: Mitchell Rales bought Rockefeller’s house in Maine, Ringing Point; some of the works come from Gertrude Stein’s estate, including the Picasso Rose period Young Girl with a Basket of Flowers from 1905; and the lurking star of the sale may not be the big ticket pictures but Rockefeller’s passion for porcelain dinner settings (which, because of their accessible value and high quality, may offer many more opportunities for souvenir seekers to bid up a piece of the Rockefeller legend.)

Here’s how Vanity Fair described Rockefeller’s life:

Consummate connoisseurs, they collected masterpieces across myriad categories: 19th- and 20th-century European and American paintings, English and American furniture, European porcelain, Asian art, pre-Columbian ceramics, silver, textiles, decorative art, folk art, and Native American art. All these items they harmoniously integrated into their well-staffed, gorgeously sited, but never ostentatious houses, including Hudson Pines, a nine-bedroom Georgian-style, helipad-equipped country manor on 75 verdant acres overlooking the Hudson River in Pocantico Hills, New York (adjacent to the former 3,400-acre Rockefeller-family fiefdom); Ringing Point, a seven-bedroom summer place on 14.5 oceanfront acres in Seal Harbor, Maine (where his parents built their 107-room “cottage,” the Eyrie, on what over time grew to 1,500 acres); and Four Winds, a house designed for them by modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and built on a 3,000-acre farming estate in Columbia County, New York. Then there was the 40-foot-wide, four-story, red-brick Colonial Revival-style town house on East 65th Street in Manhattan, replete with eight bedrooms and six staff bedrooms. “The staff this year still included a butler and three maids,” says a family friend. “It was running like it was 1948 till the end.”

David Rockefeller and the Largest Art Auction of All Time  (Vanity Fair)

What’s the Times Trying to Say About the Rockefeller Sale?

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David Rockefeller’s very old school townhouse from Brown Brothers Harriman’s listing photos

It’s hard to figure out what the New York Times is trying to say about the Rockefeller estate that Christie’s will be selling in early 2018. In the middle of a column about Old Master sales, the paper’s regular weekend art columnist introduces Michele Beiny who deals in porcelains and has sold works to the David Rockefeller in the past.

Rockefeller liked 18th Century porcelain and his personal collection will be sold with the estate. For some reason, this causes the Times to bring up Rockefeller’s taste in decor and compare it unfavorably to Yves St. Laurent, the fashion designer whose estate made a record in 2009 during the depths of the financial crisis.

Then, Ms Beiny comes back into the narrative:

Though she acknowledged that Mr. Rockefeller owned some exceptional Impressionist and modern paintings, Ms. Beiny said “the collection isn’t like Yves Saint Laurent’s. It wasn’t put together with a decorator’s eye.”

Does she mean a fashion designer’s eye? One supposes that the Times thinks it is being risqué and daringly contrarian here. But there are few in the industry who expect the Rockefeller estate to be filled with amazing treasures. For one, there was the need in his lifetime for Rockefeller to donate works to institutions he supported.

For another, auctions like Rockefeller’s, Jacqueline Onnasis’s, Andy Warhol’s and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s are rarely driven by the overall quality of their personal effects. Even in the YSL/Pierre Bergé sale there were a number of items that sold far above estimates on a fame factor.Continue Reading

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