A $65.1 million Edouard Manet painting of a woman with a parasol set an auction record for the artist and led Christie’s US$166 million sale in New York.
Wednesday’s tally exceeded the $144.3 million total from last year’s Impressionist and modern art sale and surpassed the New York-based auction house’s high estimate of US$158 million. Of the 39 lots offered, 35 found buyers.
Christie’s result comes a day after Sotheby’s record US$422 million sale and the fall auction season gets into full swing in Manhattan. Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips next week will conduct auctions of postwar and contemporary art.
Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Dealers and advisers said the art market may remain strong because the expansion of private wealth has boosted the number of collectors. A robust stock market also may help fuel prices, they said. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index closed yesterday at an all-time high of 2,023.57 in New York, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a record 17,484.53.
“There are very exceptional works on sale,” said Jude Hess, an art adviser based in London who bought paintings by Georges Braque and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. “There’s a lot of collectors from Asia, and Russians are still buying, so it’s a healthy market.”
MANET RECORD
A flurry of bidders, both in the salesroom and on the phone, thrust Manet’s 1881 Le Printemps past its US$25 million to US$35 million estimate, selling for US$65.1 million and setting an auction record for the artist. Manet’S previous record was in 2010, when hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen sold Self Portrait With a Palette for US$33.2 million at Christie’s in London.
Last night’s Manet was bought by New York dealer Otto Naumann on behalf of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles-based museum said today. The New York Times first reported the Getty was the buyer.
“Spring was the last of Manet’s salon paintings still in private hands, and universally recognized as one of his great masterpieces,” Timothy Potts, director of the Getty, said in a statement. “I have no doubt that it will soon become one of the most iconic images in the Getty’s painting collection.”
WATERCOLOR, PASTEL
The Getty said it owns two Manet paintings, Portrait of Madame Brunet and The Rue Mosnier with Flags, as well as the watercolor Bullfight and the pastel Portrait of Julien de la Rochenoire.
The runner-up for the Manet was Acquavella Galleries, which competed by phone. Le Printemps had been in the same private collection for more than a century and had been on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
In perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening, Fernand Leger’s Les Constructeurs Avec Arbre, which depicts four construction workers perched atop a building, failed to find a bidder.
“I can wait all night,” said auctioneer Andreas Rumbler, chairman, Christie’s Switzerland, as the crowd sat in silence. After repeatedly asking for starting bids of US$15.5 million, Rumbler moved on.
The Leger had a presale estimate of US$16 million to US$22 million. The work was exhibited in 1998 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas by its then-owner, billionaire casino magnate Steve Wynn, according to Christie’s.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50