Displaying items by tag: Christie's

Christie’s New York has announced that two classic works on paper by Norman Rockwell will lead its American Art auction in September.

One of the Rockwell drawings, Study for ‘The Runaway,’ illustrates a young boy and a policeman sitting side by side at the counter of a coffee shop and is one of the artist’s most iconic images. Underneath the boy’s seat is a bag containing his belongings as he is preparing to run away from home. The policeman, in a friendly manner, tries to talk the child out of his departure. The completed work was used as a Saturday Evening Post cover on the Sept. 20, 1958, issue. The piece is expected to bring in $80,000 to $120,000.

Picasso’s lovers, Richard Serra's steel and Andreas Gursky’s yacht-studded Monaco are the highlights of a $130 million trove Gagosian Gallery is taking for its first expedition to Brazil next month.

The occasion is the second annual ArtRio in Rio de Janeiro, a fair spread over 7,500 square meters (80,730 square feet) in four warehouses on Guanabara Bay. It will feature 120 galleries, including David Zwirner and White Cube, as well as events hosted by Christie’s and Sotheby's. The size and participants reflect a growing interest in the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Artists and collectors looking to cash in on the reported one percent's run on the international art market can take cues from a recent Washington State University study on auction house sales of paintings by Picasso, Magritte, Munch, and a dozen other impressionist and modern masters. Among the preliminary findings, a single percentage point increase in Google hits on the artist—the assigned indicator of popularity—corresponded to a chunky price increase of 38 percent.

Jackson Pollock’s mistress Ruth Kligman said she watched him paint it, as a love token, just before his fatal 1956 car crash. But the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board, whose members were close with Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, have questioned its authenticity. Pollock, Kligman, and Krasner are all now dead, but as Red, Black & Silver heads to auction, on the 100th anniversary of Pollock’s birth, Lesley M. M. Blume chronicles the dramatic ongoing battle over what may have been an American master’s last canvas.

The imagery on the canvas is relatively spare: a black oblong shape resides at the picture’s center, encircled by a loose knot of swirling red lines. It’s a small painting, just 24 by 20 inches. There is nothing to indicate that this unassuming, unsigned work has been the subject of an explosive, decades-long battle, a saga that has drawn in some of America’s best-known artists and the power brokers of the art world.

As the world economy began to tank about five years ago, a curious thing happened at the top level of the international art market: It started to boom. At the annual spring art auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's in New York and their branches around the globe, deep-pocketed bidders snapped up Braques and Bacons, Klimts and Kandinskys, often at record prices.

Now with the global recession officially over but the American and European economies still shaky, auction records for blue-chip modern and contemporary art continue to be shattered. Just a few months ago, a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s "The Scream" (1895) fetched an astounding $119.9 million at Sotheby’s, by far the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art, surpassing the winning bid of $106.5 million for Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (1932) at Christie’s two years earlier. A week after the gavel fell on the Munch, Mark Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" (1961) went for nearly $87 million, the artist’s personal best at auction.

At Progressive’s offices in Mayfield Village, Ohio, a walk down the stairs is a little more exciting than at most companies. The main stairwell is draped with candles, steel, wire, silk flowers and ribbons all dripped in wax. The installation, by artist Petah Coyne, gives the space the feel of a “haunted ballroom,” says Kristin Rogers, art education and communications manager for the Progressive Collection.

The auto insurance giant boasts one of the most extensive contemporary art collections in the corporate world, and it’s more than just decoration: the company says it uses the art to encourage its employees to think creatively.

Hundreds if not thousands of companies collect art—but only a few make an art of collecting.

Financial return is not the aim. “Art is a risky investment,” says Shirley Reiff Howarth, editor of the International Directory of Corporate Art, who points to the notion that there must be some financial payoff as one of the great myths that surround corporate art.

Some corporate collections are little more than furnishing, others are historical. The companies on our list of the top corporate art collections, however, fall under a third category of corporations that do more than just possess work. Nick Orchard, head of Corporate Collections at Christie’s Europe, calls this “proactive collecting.” UBS and Deutsche Bank, for example, have made art central to their corporate identities. Bank of America uses art to connect with the public.

To come up with our list of the best corporate art collections, we spoke to a range of writers, art advisers and curators. Their standard: the best collections use art to improve lives and to educate. In addition to expert interviews, we considered activity and buzz around the collection. This means owning fifty Picassos is not enough if they have been sitting in storage for a decade.

Some of the collections are managed by a staff of curators and others rely on outside advisers. Some are largely open the public and others are only accessible to employees. Collections that have been sold or donated to museums are not included and the corporation must currently maintain the collection to be considered for this list. None of the corporations we spoke with would disclose the value of their collection for this story.

One of the companies featured on our list is UBS, which owns 35,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art. The Swiss bank mainly acquires works by relatively unknown (aka less expensive) emerging and mid-career artists. UBS’ philosophy is “to be supporting living artists at integral stages of their career,” says Jacqueline Lewis, the bank’s curator for the Americas.

The bank has loaned or gifted some of its art to major museums like MOMA, but much of the collection is displayed in employee only areas. Works are rotated among UBS location every year or two. Lewis says she often gets frustrated calls from bank employees when a work they’ve grown attached to is moved.

Christie's is standing by its attribution of a painting to the Russian artist Boris Kustodiev, which is at the centre of a long-running authenticity battle after a judge in London ruled last week (28 July) that “the likelihood is that Odalisque was not painted by Kustodiev”.

Christie's was ordered to refund £1.7m to Aurora Fine Arts, a company owned by the Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, which purchased the work in 2005. The judge cleared the auction house of claims of negligence and misrepresentation.

A spokesman for the auction house says: “We are surprised and disappointed,” adding that it stands by its attribution to Kustodiev. When asked whether the company would appeal he says it is “considering its options.”

The painting is dated 1919 and depicts a nude woman asleep. It is known to have been exhibited in Riga, Latvia, in 1932 and first sold at Christie's London salesroom for £19,000 in 1989. It was sold again by the auctioneer to Aurora Fine Arts in 2005. Doubts are thought to have been raised by an art dealer soon afterwards. By 2010, Aurora had filed its lawsuit.

During the 20-day hearing, Alisa Borisovna Lyubimova, a research fellow at the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, said she was “almost 200% sure” that the work is not genuine. The judge also noted in his summing up that she would not change her view even if shown contemporary documents tending to suggest authenticity. Max Rutherston, who works as a consultant for Bonhams, argued that the quality of work by artists is not always consistently high and concluded that the painting was by Kustodiev's hand.

Archive material was presented, including research by Kustodiev's friend Vsevolod Voinov. His monograph of the artist's work notes a painting called Sleeping, 1919, which Christie's believes is the same work as Odalisque. Aurora, however, maintains that another list by Voinov refers to Sleeping as a drawing not a painting.

Debate during the hearing also focused on whether the signature on the work was contemporaneous with the rest of the painting.

A Francis Bacon portrait of a naked model sprawled on a bed and a Gerhard Richter abstract last night boosted a 80.6 million pound ($126.5 million) auction as contemporary artworks drew multiple bids.

Bacon’s sexually charged 1963 canvas “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes” fetched $33.3 million, topping the 65-lot Christie’s International (CHRS) sale. The total was the company’s second-highest for a contemporary-art auction in London and was greeted with whoops and applause from Christie’s staff members.

“We expected fireworks, and we got it,” London-based art adviser Wendy Goldsmith said in an interview. “When you add all the extras up, the prices are high. Where will it end?”

Bacon is the U.K.’s most expensive artist at auction. The portrait’s final price of 21.3 million pounds with fees beat an 18-million-pound hammer-value estimate. The sale demonstrated investment demand for his paintings and the attractiveness of the U.K. capital as an auction venue, with its population of wealthy international residents, dealers said.

Sheldon Solow, a Manhattan real estate developer and art collector, was identified by dealers as the Bacon’s seller. The work was bought on the telephone by Sumiko Roberts of Christie’s London-based client services department, representing a customer, against two other telephone bidders.

“For a Bacon, it was a commercial image,” the London-based dealer Offer Waterman said in an interview. “I don’t think it would have fetched a higher price in a gallery.”

Record Triptych

The Bacon auction record is $86.3 million for a 1976 “Triptych” at Sotheby’s (BID) New York, in May 2008.

At least four telephone bidders were prepared to pay the upper estimate of 7 million pounds for Richter’s large green, blue and pink “Abstraktes Bild,” dating from 1994 and never offered at auction before.

Interest in the painting was high, following the recent Richter retrospective at Tate Modern and the record $20.8 million paid by the collector Lily Safra for a 1997 abstract by the artist at Sotheby’s New York in November.

It was eventually bought by Christie’s New York-based specialist Andrew Massad, bidding for a client on the telephone, for 9.9 million pounds.

There was also a flurry of telephone bidding for the 1990 black-and-white word painting “Untitled,” showing the word “FOOL,” by the U.S. artist Christopher Wool, who is consistently in demand at contemporary-art fairs. Again fresh to the auction market, this was sold to a record telephone bid of 4.9 million pounds handled by Pedro Girao, chairman of Christie’s European advisory board.

A rare first edition of John James Audubon’s illustrated “The Birds of America” laid a golden egg Friday, selling for $7.9 million.

Christie’s auction house in Manhattan identified the buyer only as an American collector who bid by phone.

The winning price was within the presale estimate of $7 million to $10 million for the work, which depicts more than 400 life-size North American species in four monumental volumes and is considered a masterpiece of ornithology art.

Another complete first edition of “The Birds of America” sold at Sotheby’s in London in December 2010 for $11.5 million, a record for the most expensive printed book sold at auction.

Christie’s International posted its lowest sales total in two years for Impressionist and modern art in New York as buyers shunned works by Degas and Picasso amid tumbling financial markets.

Christie’s sold $140.8 million of works yesterday, with 38 percent of the 82 lots failing to find buyers, including most of the star pieces. The London-based auction house had estimated the evening would fetch between $211.9 million and $304.4 million.

“The quality could not be any worse and the estimates could not be any higher,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a New York- based art dealer and collector. “This is what happens when you have the combination of these things.”

The biggest casualty was Edgar Degas’ bronze sculpture of a teenage ballerina, “Petite danseuse de quatorze ans,” estimated to bring as much as $35 million. A 1935 portrait of Pablo Picasso’s lover Marie-Therese Walter, estimated to fetch $12 million to $18 million, drew no bids.

The Degas figure last changed hands at Sotheby’s London in 2000, when it sold for 7.7 million pounds ($11.6 million at the time), according to Artnet.com. The highest price paid for any of the bronze casts of the figure made after Degas’s death was 13.3 million pounds in February 2009.

“The estimates were too aggressive,” said Thomas Seydoux, Christie’s international head of the Impressionist and modern art department. “I wish we could blame it on the financial markets.”

Falling Markets

U.S. stocks sank for a second day yesterday, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index falling 2.8 percent. The index has lost more than 9 percent in the past four months on concern about a sovereign debt crisis in Europe and signs an economic recovery is stalling in the U.S.

Christie’s failure rate was only slightly better than the 44 percent of lots didn’t sell in the category on Nov. 6, 2008, seven weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy.

An Henri Matisse painting of a woman in a purple robe from the estate of Hollywood talent agent Lew Wasserman and his wife Eddie also failed to sell. Its presale estimate was $4 million to $6 million. Another flop was Giacometti’s knobby sculpture of a standing woman, “Femme de Venise VII,” which was expected to reach $10 million to $15 million.

The most expensive sale of the evening was a Surrealist 1941 painting by Max Ernst that fetched $16.3 million, more than double its presale high estimate of $6 million. “The Stolen Mirror,” a phantasmagorical landscape with a central totem-like figure composed of a snake, birds, mice and a nude female torso, set an auction record for the artist. Sale prices include a buyers’ premium; estimates don’t.