Artists
0May 15, 2012
Richter Comes in Second to Picasso with $83m NY Total
Colin Gleadell is still at his sums from last week’s sales in New York. Having tallied $88m for Picasso, Gleadell comes up with Gerhard Richter as a close second:
The other pre-eminent figure was Gerhard Richter, by whom 16 works, estimated to fetch about $54 million, sold for $83 million, eclipsing even the normally dominant Andy Warhol. The largest Richter abstract painting sold for a new record $21.8 million.
The week ended at Phillips, where the most significant sale was a six-foot Jean-Michel Basquiat crucifixion figure which sold for a record $16.3 million – a price that now puts Basquiat on a par with late Picasso, which is just where his fans want him to be.
Munch, Pollock and Calder help New York’s auction houses notch up $1.42 billion (Telegraph)
Artists
0May 11, 2012
Man Ray Estate Plays Chicken with Getty in WSJ
The Man Ray estate wants out. The executor, Eric Browner, is 86 years old and the heirs would like to see some cash in their pockets. The problem is that the estate was valued at $20m half a decade ago, before the art market turned its remorseless gaze fully on Surrealism. The Wall Street Journal sums it up:
Today, Mr. Browner manages 15,000 copyrights for the artist and oversees licensing contracts worth roughly $300,000 a year—from Mandarin Hotel headboards embroidered with Man Ray’s images to Zara’s taupe-colored Man Ray shirts. The trust’s proceeds are split among a dozen heirs.
Mr. Browner said he’s been feeling family pressure lately to sell the archive before he dies. He has had discussions with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington; both museums said they demurred [...] Last month, a few curators from the Getty Research Institute came out to the trust, said Marcia Reed, the institute’s curator and head of collection development. Ms. Reed said she is “very interested” in the artist, but her team hasn’t yet presented its findings to the Getty board. [...]
The trust’s decision to sell Man Ray’s studio contents has already irked some in the art establishment. Mr. Baum, the Surrealist dealer, dismissed Mr. Browner’s target price as “crazy,” given that “it’s the residue of an archive,” whose top works were cherry-picked years ago by auction houses. Other dealers who have looked through the archive peg its value closer to $6 million. The Browners stand by the appraisal.
Merry Foresta, an independent curator who worked on a 1988 Man Ray retrospective at the Smithsonian, said she worries the trust will be tempted to break up the archive and sell off its parts if they can’t eventually get their asking price. “The archive’s value for researchers hinges on it staying together,” she said.
The Surreal Selling of Man Ray (Wall Street Journal)
Artists
0May 10, 2012
Cashing In On Betty Freeman
If this Roy Lichtenstein work that sold tonight at Phillips de Pury looks familiar that’s because it was part of Betty Freeman’s extraordinary sale at Christie’s in May of 2009 where an important collection served to beat back the misery of the credit crisis and financial panic gripping the world.
This Lichtenstein made just a hair under $2m at that sale. It was flipped tonight for a number near the low estimate—$3.44m but still enough to generate a solid 50% return in three years time.
Artists
0May 10, 2012
The Sherman Market Has a Brain
You’re not seeing double. These are two different lots of Cindy Sherman‘s Untitled #94. The two works were on offer in very different settings. Phillips de Pury sold the one on top tonight in its evening sale with a $1-1.5m estimate. (Zach Miner must have been pretty hot for the picture.) The other went into Christie’s day sale with a $300-500k estimate. The folks at Christie’s clearly had bigger fish to fry.
The disparate estimates caused some confusion among observers. (We had assumed the works were different sizes at first and said so in print.) But no matter how battered and scattered the Cindy Sherman market may have become this week, the wisdom of the crowd asserted itself. Both works sold for the exact same price: $722,500 with premium.
Artists
0May 10, 2012
Heirs Enlist WSJ to Find Museum Willing to Pay $20m for Man Ray
The Wall Street Journal hangs out a shingle for Man Ray’s estate hoping to entice a museum to pay up for what probably wouldn’t make the same price tag parceled out on the market.
Artists
0May 07, 2012
Anish Kapoor Reflects
Jackie Wullschlager has Anish Kapoor to Lunch with the FT and gets this deep background on his path to becoming an artist:
Kapoor’s maternal family came from Baghdad, emigrating to India where his grandfather was cantor of the Pune synagogue – I question him about his mother.
“My mother? Oh God, don’t ask! God knows!” he answers hastily, adding without enthusiasm, “It was a great childhood.” The oldest of three brothers, Kapoor left India at 17 for Israel: “My parents were very cosmopolitan, we grew up with Judaism as a cultural reality, a family reality, rather than a religious one – which is right, I believe in that.”
Initially, he lived on a kibbutz, then studied engineering before realising “it really wasn’t for me, it was too tight. I went back to the kibbutz and decided I had to be an artist. I got myself a little studio and made some really bad paintings. My parents weren’t over the moon. I was so young and so naive. I’d hardly looked at any art, hardly ever seen a painting. Then I came to art school [Hornsey College of Art] in London and felt utterly liberated. They were very difficult years emotionally, but in a way I’m grateful for them. It took me many years of psychoanalysis to get over it.”
Was the problem a standard coming-of-age neurosis? Kapoor looks vaguely amused at this understatement. “Er, no. It was much, much, much more than that. It was a sense of disorientation, not culturally, but with myself, which I needed to live with, understand, be less afraid of. Perhaps I was also coming to terms with an idea that I wanted to do something. No – wait, it’s difficult to find the right words – a sensation that I had something to do, but I didn’t know how to do it and didn’t know if I could allow myself to do it.
“The first years when I was making art, I felt as if I didn’t exist if I didn’t work. Now I don’t. The work got better when I didn’t feel that. Now I’ve allowed the work to be the work, I can be me, and somehow we can live together.”
Lunch with the FT: Anish Kapoor (Financial Times)
Artists
0May 02, 2012
Emmanuel Di Donna on André Masson
Pasiphaé
Emmanuel Di Donna is a co-owner of Blain Di Donna Gallery on Madison Avenue (in the Carlyle Hotel.) His show of André Masson’s work has just opened to huge interest just as a clutch of Masson 
works go up for sale tonight and tomorrow at Di Donna’s former haunt, Sotheby’s. Di Donna graciously answered a few questions that came to mind:
You opened Blain Di Donna gallery with a stunning Magritte show. And Surrealism has been re-emerging as an important category both art historically and in market terms. But why follow up with Masson who is not one of the most recognizable Surrealist names?
Surrealism has many facets. While Magritte and Tanguy may represent one aspect of this rich and varied movement, other artists like Masson, Ernst, and Miro exemplify another perception and expression of this poetic, mysterious and at times violent movement. Limiting the public’s perception of Surrealism to Magritte is reductive. Masson was a pioneer of the Surrealist movement, the inventor of the automatic drawing and painting technique so central to the Surrealist movement and what was to come in the postwar NY school of Abstract Expressionism.
Of the top 25 auction prices for Masson, 9 came in the last two years, including the €2.36m paid for 1939′s Gradiva in Paris in December of 2010 by the Centre Pompidou. What’s driving interest in Masson? Influential museum shows? New scholarship? An important tastemaker?
The circle of die-hard Masson collectors is expanding. With a few very good paintings coming to the market in the last couple of years, buyers of modern, Surrealist as well as Contemporary Art have started to appreciate the fascinating and rich language of Masson’s language.
L'histoire de Thésée
Masson’s highest prices are clustered around the 1927 or 1939-43 with a few other works from the 30s. Is there a particular period of his work that you think is most important?
Masson has two distinct Surrealist periods, one culminating in 1927-28 and the other from 1938-42. Unlike Cubism, Surrealism is engaged in life and death, sex and the psyche, war and politics. I love the poetic, automatic paintings of 1927 which mix sand and sometimes collages of different elements to be pure and dream-like. I also find the violent colors and subject matters of the late 1930s to be absolutely passionate and compelling.
The press materials talk about a renewed commitment to Surrealism. Did Masson move in another direction in the late 20s and early 1930s?
Masson was not a follower but a pioneer and an explorer. While he was part of the Surrealist movement from the beginning, he pushed boundaries and fought with André Breton. He left the movement in 1928 only to come back with even more passion and creation in 1937.
Finally, there are three quite similar Masson works at Sotheby’s this week. One in the Evening sale and two in day sale.
Those paintings probably come from the same collection. They belong to a rarified group of works done in Spain in the mid-1930s, staging insects as a metaphor of the violence in Spain prior to its civil war.
Aube à Montserrat
Artists
0May 02, 2012
The Great Sunflower Seed Mystery: How Much? What Price?
Colin Gleadell asks if buyers have figured out that there are just way to many of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower seeds:
For anyone keeping track of the price of sunflower seeds, Sotheby’s has a one-ton installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, laid out like a carpet, with an estimate of £370,000 to £490,000. This seems cheap compared with the much smaller 100 kg work which Sotheby’s sold last year for £350,000 ($560,000). But then maybe people have worked out that there an are awful lot of sunflower seeds available. Apart from the 150- ton installation at Tate (of which Tate now owns about 8 per cent), these are various piles of seeds, priced by weight, each of which come in editions of 10.
Joseph Beuys Suit Sells for $96,000 (Telegraph)
Artists
0May 01, 2012
Seeing All Four Screams in One Day, Only Four Men Have Done It
Sotheby’s David Norman recounts the mission to Oslo undertaken by four senior members of the Impressionist and Modern team at the auction house:
We signed in at the guard’s station, were buzzed through a double set of doors and escorted to a cold, bare room with a single fluorescent light and one table pushed against the center of the longest wall. We waited. A few minutes later, two men carried in a large, reinforced box. Automatic screw drivers spun with a grinding sound, one by one pulling up each screw. The lid was opened, the protective paper pulled aside and there before us was the most familiar image in the world — yet it was a shocking surprise to us. Before the endlessly referenced, infinitely disseminated image of angst and existential drama (a 20th-century notion which Munch felt and expressed decades in advance), we were struck by the work’s chromatic brilliance. [...] The work was sealed and we were led out. Throughout the viewing we had all maintained a veneer of studied reserve, but as soon as we left the building, we burst into a frenzy of excitement, talking over each other about the picture, its status as an icon, and, of course, its potential value. This would be the stuff of auction history. The car awaited, but before heading to the airport to catch our plane back to London, we made a mad dash to both the National Gallery and the Munch Museum in order to compare the work we had just seen to the three other versions of The Scream before that initial startling viewing receded.
First the Munch Museum. The earliest version, from 1893, read like the study it has long been thought to be: more summarily executed, limited in color and lacking the details of the pastel we had just seen. The 1910 version was a late reprise; the movement of the landscape and sky were nearly psychedelic. The figure appeared to be on the verge of melting, with greater shadows and hollows in the face; this is the only version in which there are no dark spots denoting the eyes — it is nearly blind. Instead of the beady black irises, there are just the edges of the bony sockets. Neither work seemed to have the power and impact of the pastel. [...] Finally the National Gallery version, also from 1893, the one that Munch placed in the great Frieze of Life. It was larger, darker and more terrifying than the two in the Munch Museum. It exudes the force of Munch’s singular vision, which he translated into a universal image of the human condition, without place or time constraining it.
Mission to Oslo (Sotheby’s)
