Picasso - Art Market Monitor

Marion Maneker0June 19, 2013

Christie’s Picasso Ceramics Sale = £2.8m

Christie’s had a white-glove sale for Picasso ceramics in London:

Christie’s Picasso Ceramics auction on 18 June 2013 realised £2,845,750 / $4,459,290 / €3,340,911, selling 100 percent of the 171 lots on offer. This Picasso Ceramics sale was the first annual sale in the category, which follows the success of the Madoura Collection of Picasso Ceramics in 2012.

The top lot in the sale was an exquisite solid gold platter, which sold for £193,875/ $303,802 / €227,609, against a pre-sale estimate of £100,000 – 150,000. Never before seen on the market, this stunning plate weighs over 2.5kg and is made from 22 carat gold.

Artists

Marion Maneker0May 23, 2013

Picasso Catalogue Raissoné Republished As Collectible

The New York Times marvels at the trend toward publishing massive, expensive art books, including a reissue of the Picasso catalogues raissoné written Christian Zervos and now republished by Staffan Ahrenberg. Although Ahrenberg insists he’s trying to run a commercial venture, the project was never a money-spinner when first published in the late 20th Century and still won’t be even priced at $15-20,000 this time around:

Mr. Ahrenberg bought the publishing rights, and the gallery is now reissuing “Pablo Picasso,” or as art world denizens call it, “the Zervos,” the most prominent catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s paintings and drawings. Comprising 33 volumes and more than 16,000 images, it was the result of an intense four-decade collaboration between the artist and Mr. Zervos.

“Zervos served Picasso very well, and Picasso was very grateful,” said John Richardson, the Picasso biographer.

The pre-order price will be $15,000 for the set; upon the work’s release in November, it will climb to $20,000. While the price tags may startle, in Mr. Ahrenberg’s view they are “irrelevant” to his target audience: “You can’t buy anything original by Picasso for less than $500,000, or maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars, that’s any good,” he said in an interview in Manhattan.

And he says, the price is a relative bargain compared with vintage sets, which themselves are collector’s items routinely selling for around $60,000 at auction and going for close to $200,000 in pristine condition.

A Tome to Rival the Artist Himself (NY Times)

Auction Results

Marion Maneker0April 30, 2013

Wright Sells Picasso Drawings & Contemporary for $4.7m

Last week, Wright in Chicago held a two auctions. The first contained 13 Picasso drawings and totaled $1.7M, selling 77% by lot. The top lot was a 1943 drawing of Picasso’s mistress, Dora Maar, entitled Buste de Femme (Lot 5). It sold for $746,500. A 1970 pencil and ink drawing, Le Peintre et Son Modèle I (Lot 8) made $446,500. Nature Morte au Gramophone (Lot 2) sold for $242,500.

The second sale, Living Contemporary made $3M, selling 75% by lot. Works from private collections, including the collection Joseph and Janet Shein, were led by an untitled work on paper by Christopher Wool with the word PRANKSTER broken over three lines.The was sold for $506,500.

Other notable lots were

Lot 221: Julio Le Parc, Continual Mobile Transparent. Estimate: $100,000-150,000. Result: $230,500
Lot 160: Félix Gonzáles-Torres, untitled (Warm Water). Estimate: $60,000-80,000. Result: $104,500
Lot 150: Christopher Wool, untitled. Estimate: $70,000-90,000. Result: $98,500
Lot 242: Philip Pearlstein, model in Kimono on Eames Chair. Estimate: $40,000-50,000. Result: $62,500
Lot 246: Alex Katz, Red Coat. Estimate: $30,000-40,000. Result: $50,000
Lot 159: Vija Celmins, untitled portfolio. Estimate: $30,000-40,000. Result: $47,500
Lot 101: Julian Stanczak, Frigit Light. Estimate: $15,000-20,000. Result: $43,750
Lot 138: Bruno Romeda, untitled. Estimate: $7,000-9,000. Result: $36,250
Lot 133: James Lee Byars, untitled. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Result: $31,250
Lot 182: Al Held, untitled. Estimate: $10,000-15,000. Result: $22,500
Lot 210: Edward Ruscha, Roughly 92% Angel, But About 8% Devil. Estimate: $3,000-5,000. Result: $12,500

Results for the remainder of the lots are available on Wright’s own website www.wright20.com.

Museums

Marion Maneker0September 10, 2012

Picasso Gemmaux Mis-labeled for 40 Years

NPR offers an explanation for how a Picasso work disappeared into the Evansville Art Museum’s collection without anyone being aware of its presence:

Curator Mary Bower says the work went unnoticed because of a clerical error.

“All the documentation associated with the gift indicated that this was by an artist named Gemmaux,” she says, “which really happens to be the plural of the artistic technique.”

That technique, gemmail, uses layered glass to create 3-D art. The work remained miscataloged for more than 40 years, until Bower got a call from Guernsey’s auction house in New York. They were doing research on the special glass technique Picasso used and had tracked one of the works to Evansville.

“I thought, ‘Yes, I do need to check in on that,’ ” Bower says.

For Museum, Long-Lost Picasso Is Too Costly To Keep (NPR)

Museums

Marion Maneker0September 04, 2012

Picasso Gemmaux Discovered in Evansville, IN Museum Now Privately On Offer

A Guernsey auctioneers specialist seeking more information about Picasso’s few gemmaux works set in motion an interesting tale of discovery. Raymond Loewy had bought—and eventually donated to a museum in Evansville, Indiana—one of the few dozen glass sculptures made by Picasso at mid-century. This one, Seated Woman with Red Hat, got lost in the museum’s storage but is too valuable for Evansville to keep, according to local television station WBIR:

Evansville’s Picasso is surely the most spectacular artwork to ever come through town. But only a handful of museum insiders got so much as a peek at it. There was no public showing; the piece was not made available for media photographing. It may even be out of town already. All anyone in the know would say about the artwork is, “It’s in a secure place.”

“I wanted to show it,” said Streetman, “but the president of our board came up with a list of good reasons not to.”

Board President Steve Krohn is a businessman, a lawyer. “It would have cost too much money to insure and to adequately protect,” he said. “We might have had to hire additional security and make changes to the physical plant that we couldn’t justify for one item. We made the only prudent decision.”

The work is hard to value (that’s what provoked the original call) but any significant sale will greatly enhance Evansville’s $6m endowment.

Indiana Museum Unravels Mystery of Picasso Sculpture (WBIR)

Auction Results

Marion Maneker0June 25, 2012

Madoura Sale = $8.08m

The Madoura sale of Picasso Ceramics from the factory where they were produced is taking place these next two days with amazing numbers already on the board.

Grand vase aux femmes voilées was estimated at between £70-100k but sold for £735,650;

Picasso Ceramic, Grand Vase aux femmes voillees (£70-100k) £735,650
Picasso Ceramic, Gran vase aux femmes nues (£40-60k) £337,250
Picasso Ceramic, Grand Vase aux danseurs (£60-80k) £265,250
Picasso Ceramic, Gros oiseau corrida (£30-50k) £163,500

Artists

Marion Maneker0May 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)

Auction Results

Marion Maneker0May 14, 2012

30 Picassos Made $88m in New York

Colin Gleadell wasn’t distracted by the hoopla surrounding the Munch sale two weeks ago. He stuck to his knitting and ran the numbers revealing that Sotheby’s may have had the bigger sale but Christie’s achieved a higher average lot price in its Evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art:

This is a market where collectors can expect to make reasonable returns over a period of time. A colourful, if rather jumbled, still life of peonies by Matisse – for which the owner had paid $4 million at the height of the 1989/90 boom – sold for $19 million, but a better return was had for a small, succulent painting by Picasso of the head of his young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Bought 10 years ago for $3 million, it now sold for $9.9 million. It was one of more than 30 Picassos at the sales, which brought an accumulative $88 million, maintaining the Spaniard’s pole position in this market.

Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York: Treasures silenced by The Scream (Telegraph)

Artists, Dealers

Marion Maneker0February 24, 2012

Gagosian’s Next Picasso Show Focuses on Vallauris

Katya Kazakina details the next Picasso show organized by John Richardson at Gagosian which opens at the end of April in New York:

Three-quarters of the pieces in these exhibitions were either loaned by or consigned from Picasso’s family, including his children and grandchildren, giving collectors their first look at many works.

“Each of Picasso’s seven heirs inherited a remarkable collection of the artist’s work,” says Richardson [Read more...]

Artists, Featured

Marion Maneker1February 17, 2012

Picasso’s Tattoo: Tall Tales from John Richardson

Sir John Richardson is best known as Picasso’s biographer but the London Evening Standard sent a reporter to meet with him. The scribe got this whopper:

When I meet the newly knighted 88-year-old at the Ritz shortly before the opening of Tate Britain’s new Picasso exhibition, his principal regret is that he didn’t allow his actual body to be marked by “the greatest artist of the 20th century”.

“Picasso was very cross when I came back from America and I had a new tattoo here,” Richardson gestures to his right arm where a faded mark is visible. “He said: ‘I would have tattooed you!’” [...]

Apparently Picasso had always hoped to do a Cubist still life on someone’s back. He was about to do one on Georges Braque in Paris, in fact, but the First World War intervened. It was perhaps Picasso’s preference for the DIY “prison” method (needle, ink, pain) that put Richardson off – “It would have hurt.”

Aside from that, it’s a great read.

Picasso–by the Man Who Knew Him Best (Evening Standard)