Savvy auction sellers -- the ones who demanded money up front from Sotheby's and Christie's -- should be laughing all the way to the bank. But in the rest of the art world, the next two weeks will be particularly stressful as impressionist, modern and contemporary art valued at more than half a billion US dollars goes on the market in the important fall sales.
This season's splashy auction catalogs are packed with high-priced paintings, drawings and sculptures: one of Monet's famous images of the Houses of Parliament in London, a Gauguin from the artist's Tahitian period, the first painting in Mondrian's legendary Boogie-Woogie series, early photographs by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Total estimates for sales are higher than they have been since May 1990, the last big auction season before the art market crashed six months later.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Some works come from estates, others from well-known collectors who saw the high prices at last spring's sales and are betting the market's upward spiral will continue.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Competition between Sotheby's and Christie's has been so fierce this season that the matter of which company gets the business often comes down to the art of the deal: how big a guarantee -- an undisclosed minimum sum promised to the seller regardless of the outcome of bidding -- an auction house is willing to give. Sometimes the house puts up all the money itself; other times, to spread the risk, it silently works with a dealer or a collector willing to invest in a collection or a work of art.
The result often means higher prices but lower returns. When a work is guaranteed, the profits are shared by the auction house, the seller and any investor. In addition, experts frequently end up putting higher estimates on works that have been guaranteed to cover their costs.
It's a risky business. This season, the number of guarantees makes these risks as high as the quality of the art.
"There's an enormous amount of money being made, and the number of people wanting to put their savings on their walls is larger than it's ever been," said Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art for Sotheby's worldwide and the company's principal auctioneer. "This is not about spending US$500,000. These people are not afraid to spend several million dollars for something they know is really good."
Each auction season reflects current tastes and fashions. For several years there has been a shift away from older, Impressionist works and toward a more modern sensibility. Sotheby's sale on Thursday night is heavily tipped toward more modern art; paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Modigliani are among the top lots.
Christie's auction tomorrow has its share of pretty, classic Impressionist paintings. The work with the highest estimate at Christie's is Monet's Houses of Parliament, being sold by the heirs of Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. The dreamy scene of the buildings glimpsed through thick fog, painted in 1904, is expected to sell for US$12 million to US$18 million.
"There have been relatively few Impressionist works on the market recently," said Nicholas Maclean, Christie's international director of Impressionist and modern art. "Based on the interest we are seeing, we are confident all the top Impressionist works will sell well."
Christie's sale of 58 lots this week is expected to bring US$112 million to US$158 million, far less than the US$208 million to US$290 million expected for Sotheby's 61 lots. But one collection at Christie's -- paintings, drawings and sculptures collected over the last 60 years by Nathan Halpern, a television impresario who died in April -- is especially interesting. Experts say the most sought-after work will be a rare Joan Miro, Caress of the Stars (1938), which is expected to sell for US$6 million to US$8 million. The painting, with the artist's well-known abstractly grotesque figures juxtaposed against a galaxy of stars, is Miro's visual comment on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and hope for the future of the Spanish Republic.
Sotheby's sale the next night has four paintings expected to fetch more than US$20 million each. Of the group, the one that experts say will be the big question of the evening is a Tahitian-period Gauguin, estimated at US$40 million to US$50 million.
Maternite (II), from 1899, was painted about the time the artist's 17-year-old Polynesian mistress, Pahura, gave birth to their son.
It is said to have some condition problems and has been restored several times; dealers and auction house experts say it was quietly offered for sale this summer.
But David Norman, a co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art department for Sotheby's worldwide, stands by the painting.
"There have been some restorations, but relative to Gauguins of the period it's in good condition," he said, adding that its rarity makes its appearance at auction particularly noteworthy. "This is one of the last major works of the Tahitian period left in private hands," he said.
Little speculation surrounds a Modigliani being sold by Dorothy Cherry, the widow of Wendell Cherry, chairman of the Louisville-based health care company Humana, who died in 1991. Jeanne Hebuterne (in Front of a Door), from 1919, is one of the last portraits of the artist's lover and muse, who was 22 and pregnant with their second child when she leaped to her death the day after the artist died of tuberculosis. It is expected to sell for US$20 million to US$30 million but experts in the field think the price could go far higher.
The biggest growth is evident in art made since 1945. "There are new buyers every season," said Amy Cappellazzo, a co-head of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department. "Buyers are in their 30s and 40s and have made a lot of money in financial markets." Price barriers will be broken this season, Cappellazzo said.
On Nov. 10 Christie's has a group of works designated only as "property from an important American collection." Experts in the field say it was formed over 40 years by Dr Paul and Dorie Sternberg, Chicago philanthropists.
Included in the collection is one of Jasper Johns' classic cross-hatch paintings. Executed in 1981 to 1982, the untitled work in deep reds, blues and greens features a skull, one of the artist's leitmotifs, on the right of the canvas. Christie's estimates it will sell for US$3.5 million to US$4.5 million.
Sotheby's sale next week also features work by Johns. The Hollywood entertainment executive David Geffen is selling Through 9, a charcoal drawing executed in 1961. The image of superimposed, stenciled numbers is considered one of the artist's seminal works and is estimated to sell for US$7 million to US$9 million.
Buyers looking for works by younger, less expensive artists may want to go to Phillips, de Pury and Co in Chelsea. The small boutique company is holding two sales this season, next Monday and Nov. 12. Of the two, the more interesting is what experts say is the first single-owner sale of contemporary photography.
Baroness Marion Lambert, wife of Baron Philippe Lambert, a member of the Belgian banking family, is selling her entire collection of 300 photographs by artists including Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Robert Gober and Nan Goldin. The collection, which is expected to bring US$10 million, is well known to photography collectors and has been exhibited around the world for years.
The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, Nuremberg, writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn’t even a character in the miniseries. Kelley, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek, was an ambitious sort who saw in
It’s always a pleasure to see something one has long advocated slowly become reality. The late August visit of a delegation to the Philippines led by Deputy Minister of Agriculture Huang Chao-ching (黃昭欽), Chair of Chinese International Economic Cooperation Association Joseph Lyu (呂桔誠) and US-Taiwan Business Council vice president, Lotta Danielsson, was yet another example of how the two nations are drawing closer together. The security threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), along with their complementary economies, is finally fostering growth in ties. Interestingly, officials from both sides often refer to a shared Austronesian heritage when arguing for
Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Goring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Goring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately
Nov. 17 to Nov. 23 When Kanori Ino surveyed Taipei’s Indigenous settlements in 1896, he found a culture that was fading. Although there was still a “clear line of distinction” between the Ketagalan people and the neighboring Han settlers that had been arriving over the previous 200 years, the former had largely adopted the customs and language of the latter. “Fortunately, some elders still remember their past customs and language. But if we do not hurry and record them now, future researchers will have nothing left but to weep amid the ruins of Indigenous settlements,” he wrote in the Journal of
RSS