Displaying items by tag: Sotheby's

On Wednesday 22nd June 2011, Sotheby’s London Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale will offer a selection of works of exceptional quality and rarity, many of which have remained in private collections for decades and have never before appeared at auction. In addition to two exquisite works on one of René Magritte’s most sought-after themes, a monumental Joan Miró and a rare painting by Paul Klee, the sale is led by one of the most important oils by Egon Schiele ever to come to the market, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II), being sold by the Leopold Museum, Vienna, and estimated at £22-30 million/ $36-50 million*. Further important works include a lifetime cast of Alberto Giacometti’s bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II, an instantly recognisable icon of Modern art estimated at £10-15 million, and Pablo Picasso’s bold late painting Couple, le baiser, estimated at £6–8 million.  The Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale is estimated to fetch a total in excess of £77 million. 

Commenting on the sale, Helena Newman, Chairman, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, said: “The sale will appeal to a wide and very international audience. It presents a great opportunity for collectors to acquire some exceptional works, many of which are fresh to the market, having been in the same collections for many years. The selection, which ranges from Rodin through to late Picasso, brings to the Pablo Picasso, Couple, le baiser,  est. £6–8 million Egon Schiele, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II), est. £22-30 million Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent II, est. £10-15 million Pablo Picasso, Couple, le baiser, est. £6–8 million market many works of museum quality, led by a magnificent Schiele cityscape from the prestigious Leopold Museum collection.”

Egon Schiele’s Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II)

Painted in 1914, at the height of celebrated Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s short career (he died in 1918 at the age of just 28), Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) is one of the most impressive of the artist’s few monumental cityscapes. The work comes to the auction market for the first time from the collection of the Leopold Museum in Vienna with an estimate of £22-30 million. The painting is loosely based on motifs drawn from Krumau, the town known to have inspired some of his greatest works. It was this town in Southern Bohemia in which Schiele’s mother was born, and to which Schiele and his lover Valerie (Wally) Neuzil moved in 1911 in order to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic atmosphere of Vienna. Having been acquired - in the year it was painted - by Schiele’s friend and great patron Heinrich Böhler, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) was subsequently sold by Böhler’s widow in 1952 to Rudolf Leopold, founder of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which is home to a pre-eminent collection of Austrian 20th-century art.

Pablo Picasso’s Couple, le baiser

Representing a culmination of Pablo Picasso’s exploration of lovers that preoccupied him between October and December 1969, Couple, le baiser (£6–8 million) moves beyond the latent eroticism and sense of tenderness embodied by his earlier works to a more uninhibited interpretation of the passionate encounter. With such an erotically charged work - understood to represent Picasso’s wife Jacqueline Roque and the artist himself - Picasso channelled the concerns regarding his fading virility that preoccupied him at the advanced age of 88.

The physical closeness of the lovers in the throes of an embrace, and the bright, lively palette that Picasso used to render the figures and the foliage that surrounds them in Couple, le baiser, belies the emotional profundity that these compositions held for him. Picasso takes the painter and model theme a step further in Couple, le baiser than in preceding works - there is no longer an easel separating the two figures; the erotic tension of earlier works is finally consummated as the painter and his muse become entangled in a forceful embrace. Furthermore, the couple has moved from the artist's studio into nature, emphasising their freedom and the almost primitive intensity of their act. The artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, wrote of these late works, 'These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality ...’.

SCULPTURE

Following the world record for any work of art at auction established at Sotheby’s London, when Alberto Giacometti’s L’Homme qui marche I fetched £65 million in February 2010, Sotheby’s now offers Giacometti’s extraordinary bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II (est. £10-15 million). The sculpture, which epitomises the artist’s mature style and is one of his most iconic works, forms the genesis of L’Homme qui marche I. The image of Trois hommes qui marchent II first appeared in the margin of a letter that Giacometti wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, depicting three men on a raised platform walking in different directions, and the present work is the second of two versions of the subject, with the figures grouped more closely together. Trois hommes qui marchent II – a lifetime cast – was created at the definitive point of Alberto Giacometti’s career, at the end of the 1940s when he was producing career-defining bronzes featuring his signature attenuated figures. The present work depicts three men captured in mid-stride, each seemingly alone in a crowd, as they narrowly pass each other in disconnected paths. Occassionally, as in Trois hommes qui marchent II, Giacometti enhanced the patina of the sculpture to give the work a beautiful modulation of gold and amber highlights against the rich brown base-tone. 

A further work by Giacometti, the unique bronze Figure debout of circa 1950 (est. £300,000-400,000) comes to the market from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be sold, alongside Jean Arp’s bronze Evocation d’une forme humaine lunaire spectrale, executed in 1950 and cast in 1957 (est. £800,000 – 1.2 million), to benefit the museum’s Acquisitions Fund.

Marino Marini’s Piccolo cavallo (£1–1.5 million) beautifully represents the dominating theme throughout most of Marini's career, and the subject of the horse was rarely invested with such energy and dramatic force as in the present work. In contrast to the tranquillity of Marini's horses of the 1940s, this work - executed in 1950 - indicates the artist's move towards a more expressive rendering of this theme that characterised his mature work, whilst retaining the elegance of his earlier pieces. The extraordinary power and beauty of Piccolo cavallo lies in the careful rendering of its surface: Marini painted and hand-chiselled this bronze, resulting in an immediacy and versatile quality rarely achieved in this medium.

wo rare lifetime casts by Auguste Rodin will also be offered. Ève, an intense psychological study of the mother of humanity depicted at the very moment of the end of innocence, was executed in 1883 and cast in 1913 and is estimated at £1.3-£2.2 million (pictured right). The work was first owned by Eugène Rudier of the famous Rudier foundry in Paris, which cast a number of Rodin’s celebrated works. In 1933 it was presented as a gift to Henri Coignard on the occasion of his receipt of the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. The sculpture has remained in his family collection for nearly 80 years. The second Rodin work is the artist’s lifetime bronze L’un des Bourgeois de Calais: Pierre de Wiessant, conceived in 1895 and cast in 1906, which also comes to the auction market for the first time and is estimated at £250,000-350,000. The sculpture is distinguished by its exceptional patina, executed by Jean Limet, whom Rodin used almost exclusively to finish his casts from 1890. The sculpture was acquired by a German collector from the artist in 1906 and has remained in the same family for over 100 years.

IMPRESSIONIST AND POST-IMPRESSIONIST WORKS

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s masterly painting La Liseuse will be offered for sale for the first time in over 70 years (est. £5–8 million). Painted in 1889, the work is a major example of the insightful character of Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraiture, as well as of his remarkably modern style. The artist himself held La Liseuse in great esteem, as demonstrated in his selection of the work, together with four other paintings, for the exhibition of Les XX held in Brussels in 1890. Writing to his grandmother, he said: ‘At the end of January I’m going to carry the good work, or rather the good paintings, to Belgium…’. The subject of this intimate portrait is the artist’s 18- year-old neighbour, Hélène Vary, whom he had known since childhood and proclaimed to be ‘very beautiful’, ‘her Grecian profile is incomparable’. In 1888 and 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec executed three portraits of Hélène, and the present work is the most penetrating and personal in its projection of her inner life, tenderly capturing the model in the act of reading and exemplifying Lautrec’s exploration of the expressive qualities of line and colour. The work was acquired by the distinguished Brussels collector Roger Janssen in 1939 and it has remained in the same family until now.

Coming to the market for the first time in over 80 years, Paul Cézanne’s La Rivière of circa 1881 (est. £1.5–2.5 million), dates from a pivotal period of Cézanne's career. Executed in soft brushwork, La Rivière presents a departure from the style that dominated his painting at the time, characterised by an increasing use of wide vertical and diagonal brushstrokes. The first owner of La Rivière was Victor Chocquet (1821-1891), a nineteenth-century art collector who was an important early patron of Impressionist painters as well as the first collector of Cézanne's works. La Rivière was later acquired, in 1925, by French collector Maurice Gangnat – one of the greatest collectors of Impressionist art – and has remained in his family’s collection until now. Also to be offered from Maurice Gangnat’s collection is Les Roses au rideau bleu by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with whom Gangnat cultivated a strong friendship, amassing over 150 works by the artist over the course of 14 years. This 1912 painting of Rodin’s favoured still-life subject, roses, is estimated at £400,000-600,000.

Not seen at auction for nearly 70 years, Paul Signac’s magnificent Pointillist harbour scene of 1913, Les Tours vertes, La Rochelle (est. £1.2-1.8 million) is one of the artist’s earliest oil paintings of this French Atlantic port, with its characteristic medieval towers surrounding the busy harbour, a subject the artist returned to many times between 1911 and 1928. By the time Signac painted the work, he had developed his pointillist technique so that his dabs of paint had become larger, looser and more expressive than the more tightly spaced dots of his earlier compositions, and the individualised colour patches hold an expressiveness and freedom that characterised many of the artist’s most accomplished works.

MODERN HIGHLIGHTS

Sensual, bold and ultra-stylised, Tamara de Lempick’s La Dormeuse (est. £2.2-£3.2 million) is a highly charged and suggestive depiction of a femme fatale in repose. Tamara de Lempicka’s striking depictions of women have come to personify the age of Art Deco and in this tantalising work, painted in 1930, her model epitomises the ideal of early Hollywood glamour. Every curve of the figure’s flesh is rendered with imperceptible brushstrokes. Her skin appears to be incandescent, as if she is bathed in silver moonlight and her hair glows with a metallic sheen. The subject of the sleeping woman was filled with erotic potential, and in this painting, Lempicka precedes Picasso’s celebrated 1932 portraits of the sleeping Marie-Thérèse Walter by two years, creating perhaps one of the most intimate and unashamedly sensual renderings of the theme.

Appearing for the first time at auction, Paul Klee’s important oil and tempera on gesso on board, Stadtburg Kr. (est. £ 2-3 million) is a magnificent example of the artist’s ability to blend architectural elements and geometric forms into a fantastic, dream-like composition. The present work was executed in 1932, shortly after Klee left the Bauhaus, where from 1920 he had worked as a Form master. Inspired by Bauhaus teaching, Klee’s work became increasingly abstract and geometricised and on leaving the school he introduced a pointillist technique in his watercolours and oils. In this rare example, he replaced dots with small rectangular forms, combining them in a wonderfully poetic fashion. Klee commented in his diary as early as 1902: ‘Everywhere I see only architecture, linear rhythms, planar rhythms,’ and this sense of rhythm and movement is beautifully rendered in the present work. According to Klee's own analysis, he tried 'to achieve the greatest possible movement with the least possible means’. Having belonged to the important Basel collector Richard Doetsch-Benziger, who owned the painting for several decades, the work now comes to auction from a private Swiss collection where it has remained for the last 40 years.

ainted in circa 1905/1906 at the height of Kees van Dongen’s Fauve period, Le Clown (est. £1.8-£2.5 million) portrays the brightly lit pageantry of the Cirque Médrano on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Depicting a clown performing in a circus ring with a horse and rider in the distance, Van Dongen invests his composition with all the frenetic energy that the event demanded. This vibrant painting exemplifies the spirited colour palette and painterly freedom of Van Dongen’s most successful compositions. For several decades Le Clown remained in Van Dongen’s personal possession, until it was acquired by Lucile Martinais-Manguin, daughter of the painter Henri Manguin. Together with her husband André, Martinais-Manguin amassed an impressive collection of modern art and founded the Galerie de Paris, and the present work remained in her collection for more than 50 years.

SURREALISM

Sotheby’s February 2011 series of sales demonstrated the high demand for supreme Surrealist works, with Salvador Dalí’s Portrait de Paul Eluard selling for £13 million, establishing a new record price for any Surrealist work of art sold at auction, and René Magritte’s gouache Le Maître d’École selling for £2.5 million, achieving a new auction record for a work on paper. The forthcoming June 2011 sale presents a selection of great works by artists including Joan Miró, René Magritte and Max Ernst.

Coinciding with the Tate Modern retrospective of Joan Miró, the artist’s bold and powerful work Femme à la voix de rossignol dans la nuit of 1971 appears at auction for the first time (est. £4.5-6 million). The intensely colourful and pictorially commanding oil on canvas displays a broad swathe of red pigment draped down the centre of the composition like a matador’s cape. Painted at a time when Miró was one of Spain’s most renowned cultural figures, the work belongs to a series of monumental compositions that occupied Miró during this time (the present work measures 130 by 195cm). The compositions that Miró completed during this period demonstrate a level of expressive freedom, exuberance and confidence in his craft.

Sotheby’s is delighted to offer Magritte’s gouache on paper L'Empire des lumières (est. £800,000 – 1.2 million), one of the most iconic images of his art and a subject that he returned to throughout his career. In a television programme recorded in April 1956, Magritte gave a commentary on this image: “The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry.” It is this poetic and mysterious quality that makes L'Empire des lumières one of Magritte's most popular and celebrated images, and the evocation of night and day is precisely the sort of reconciliation of opposites prized by the Surrealists. The present work was first acquired from Magritte’s dealer Alexander Iolas and has remained in the same collection until now.

Strong demand for Brazilian abstract art and works by Colombia's Fernando Botero propelled Sotheby's to its best-selling auction of Latin American art with more than $21.6 million in sales.

Botero's painting "A Family," which fetched $1.4 million, was the top seller at Wednesday's sale and his "Man on a Horse" set a record for a bronze sculpture for the artist at auction -- at $1.17 million.

Overall, Botero works accounted for a third of the total sale, which topped Sotheby's $21 million Latin American sale record, set in the spring 2008 before the financial crisis sent art markets into a tailspin.

"In every crisis, there is somebody who makes money and they have to spend it," said Carmen Melian, Sotheby's Latin American art chief. "I think also the big shock is over ... some people are starting to buy and the whole cycle (of art buying) starts all over again.

Unusually for Botero at auction, three decades of his work were represented, including earlier art seen as political like the 1975 "El Presidente," which fetched $266,500.

The evening's most intense bidding was for Brazilian abstract sculptures made of wood.

Brazilian Cildo Meireles' 1982 sculpture "In-Mensa" sold for $518,000, an artist auction record. It fuses polished brown wood into hybrid furniture, tricking the eye into alternatively identifying what parts are chairs or tables.

Detroit-area developer and philanthropist A. Alfred Taubman today pledged to give $11 million to Lawrence Technological University for an engineering, architecture and life sciences building in his name.

The donation brings to about $225 million the amount of money Taubman has given to universities, art schools and institutes and other causes.

Last month, he donated $56 million to the University of Michigan for stem-cell medical research. Taubman has given $142 million to U-M, of which $100 million went to the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.

Asked what motivates the giving, he quipped. “I’m 87 years old. Gotta give it away some time.”

With a net worth of $2.3 billion, Taubman is the fourth richest man in Michigan and ranks 512th among 1,210 listed this year on Forbes magazine’s World’s Billionaires list.

Taubman, who did not complete college, studied at the University of Michigan for three years before transferring to night school at Lawrence Tech as a junior. He took classes at night for two years when the school, now in Southfield, held classes in Highland Park. In the last year, he returned to teach at the school, though he joked that his title as affiliate professor of architecture and design came without faculty parking privileges.

NEW YORK CITY – Work from two private collections and the Wichita Center for the Arts sparked competitive bidding at Sotheby’s auction of American paintings, drawings and sculpture on May 19.
 
Sotheby’s shook off marketplace jitters to generate $27.1 million on 84 lots, exceeding its global low estimate of $25.3 million. Heaviest in 19th century and Impressionist paintings and works on paper, the varied selection included only a smattering of sculpture.
 
Thirty-seven lots failed to find buyers, a better result than that achieved by Christie’s a day earlier when high-profile property from the Westervelt Company was heavily bought in.  Experts in the trade generally agreed that material was overestimated at both houses and that great property is scarce in a market still recovering from recession.
 
Six paintings at Sotheby’s surpassed $1 million and records were set for Ernest Blumenschein, William J. McCloskey and William Aiken Walker, painters who enjoy strong regional followings.
 
Edward P. Evans Collection
Casanova, Va., collector Edward P. Evans, who died in January, avidly acquired everything from sporting art to American Impressionism. Like his father, Thomas Mellon Evans, the former chairman of Macmillan Publishing was a noted breeder of race horses.
 
The Evans consignment generated $12,726,750, handsomely exceeding low estimate and producing five of the day’s top ten lots.
 
“Dock Builders,” an important early modernist oil on canvas by George Bellows, went to a private collector for $3,890,500 (est. $2/3,000,000). This pivotal Maine painting of 1916 is the first of the artist’s studies of American workers in the countryside. According to expert Michael Quick, it is also a foremost example of Cezanne’s influence on the Ashcan School artist.
 
“Quai St. Michel,” an 1888 Paris street scene by Childe Hassam, who arrived in Paris from Boston in 1886, sold to the Caldwell Gallery for $2,098,500 (est. $2,5/3,000,000).
 
“It is an extraordinary painting and a surprising result,” said dealer Joe Caldwell. “Hassam’s Paris street scenes are very much sought after. This one sold for almost $3 million in 1998. I was frankly surprised to buy it for this price.”
 
Hassam painted his best work between 1888 and 1906 and during World War I, Caldwell said. Richly detailed, “Quai St. Michel” depicts an attractive young woman browsing at an outdoor book stall with architectural landmarks in the background.
 
Debra Force underbid “The Old Sand Road” by William Merritt Chase. Painted en plein air circa 1894, the tranquil Shinnecock, Long Island, N.Y., scene fetched $1,202,500 (est. $7/900,000).  Two small figures in the middle ground are Chase’s daughters.
 
Force had better luck when it came to “Wrapped Oranges on a Tabletop,” claiming the 1897 trompe l’oeil depiction of fruit for a record $782,500 (est. $250/350,000). She also acquired, from a private New York collection, Winslow Homer’s signed and initialed watercolor “Listening to the Birds,” for $326,500.
 
“It’s a charming little piece,” said the New York dealer.
 
Sotheby’s will continue with sporting paintings, furniture and decorations from Evans’ New York and Virginia residences this fall with sales in New York and London.
 
East Coast Collection
Two other major lots came from a consignment of more than 100 works from an unidentified East Coast collection.
 
Thomas Hart Benton’s timely “Flood Disaster (Homecoming - Kaw Valley)” sold to the phone for $1,874,500 (est. $800,000/1,200,000). The price is the second highest at auction for a work by Benton, who created the oil and tempera on canvas in response to the devastating 1951 flooding of the Kansas and Missouri rivers.
 
Two phones competed for Milton Avery’s oil on canvas “March Playing the Cello,” which went for $1,426,500 (est. $800/1,200,000). The liquid looking portrait of the artist’s daughter dates to 1943.
 
Regional Interest
Bidders clamored for paintings of Western and Southern interest.
 
Two of  New Mexico’s top dealers in historic Santa Fe and Taos school paintings, Nedra Matteucci and Gerald Peters,  were in the room to watch Taos founder Ernest Blumenschein’s  monumental oil on canvas “White Blanket and Blue Spruce” of 1919 soar past its low estimate of $700,000 to sell for a record $1,538,500.
 
The Blumenschein was consigned by the Wichita Center for the Arts, which acquired it from the artist in 1928. Walter Ufer’s “After the Chapel Hour,” a lively Pueblo Indian scene purchased from the artist by the museum in 1923, fetched $818,500 (est. $6/800,000.) William Penhallow Henderson’s “Lucero’s Place, Springtime” crossed the block at $410,500 (est. $100/150,000). The Arizona collector who consigned it acquired it from the Gerald Peters Gallery around 1990.

Born in Charleston, S.C., William Aiken Walker (1828-1921) painted sentimental genre scenes of the old South.  “The Cotton Wagon,” an 18 by 30 inch oil on canvas, went to the phone for $434,500 (est. $150/250,000), while a pair of Walker portraits made $27,500 (est. $20/30,000). A smaller genre scene, “The Old Cabin,” grossed only $8,750 (est. $10/15,000).
 
Other notable paintings included Sanford Gifford’s “Haverstraw Bay (Shad Fishing on the Hudson),” $290,500; Severin Roesen’s “Abundant Bouquet with Pomegranate,” $302,500;  Alfred Henry Maurer’s “Woman in White,” $590,500; and David Johnson’s “View from Garrison, West Point, New York,” $278,500.
 
Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York claimed “Spring Evening,” a drybrush and watercolor on paper of a nude by Andrew Wyeth, for $458,500.
 
“It’s a very important picture but not a big price,” said Guilford, Ct., dealer Thomas Colville, who purchased “A White Note” by James McNeill Whistler for $290,500. Originally owned by English artist Walter Sickert, the unfinished portrait depicts Whistler’s companion, Joanna Hifferman, who posed for “Symphony in White No. 1” and “No. 2,” at the National Gallery of Art and the Tate Gallery, respectively.
 
Passed
Sotheby’s misgauged its cover lot, Albert Bierstadt’s “Light in the Forest,” atypical in both its subject matter, deer grazing in a forest clearing, and in its vertical format.  Estimated at $2/3,000,000, the oil on canvas painted in the mid to late 1890s passed at $1.7 million.

Other notable failures included a 1985 recast of Augustus Saint-Gauden’s “Diana of the Tower,”  passed at $190,000, and the tiny “Fruit, Nuts and Grapes” still life by Raphaelle Peale, passed at $220,000. Painted in 1923, Marsden Hartley’s 22 by 41 ½ inch oil on canvas, “New Mexico Recollection #8,” passed at $590,000. A similar Hartley painting of the same year and size fetched $242,500, well under its $5/700,000 estimate, a day earlier at Christie’s.

Prices quoted include buyer’s premium.
 
Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

NEW YORK CITY – Work from two private collections and the Wichita Center for the Arts sparked competitive bidding at Sotheby’s auction of American paintings, drawings and sculpture on May 19.
 
Sotheby’s shook off marketplace jitters to generate $27.1 million on 84 lots, exceeding its global low estimate of $25.3 million. Heaviest in 19th century and Impressionist paintings and works on paper, the varied selection included only a smattering of sculpture.
 
Thirty-seven lots failed to find buyers, a better result than that achieved by Christie’s a day earlier when high-profile property from the Westervelt Company was heavily bought in.  Experts in the trade generally agreed that material was overestimated at both houses and that great property is scarce in a market still recovering from recession.
 
Six paintings at Sotheby’s surpassed $1 million and records were set for Ernest Blumenschein, William J. McCloskey and William Aiken Walker, painters who enjoy strong regional followings.
 
Edward P. Evans Collection
Casanova, Va., collector Edward P. Evans, who died in January, avidly acquired everything from sporting art to American Impressionism. Like his father, Thomas Mellon Evans, the former chairman of Macmillan Publishing was a noted breeder of race horses.
 
The Evans consignment generated $12,726,750, handsomely exceeding low estimate and producing five of the day’s top ten lots.
 
“Dock Builders,” an important early modernist oil on canvas by George Bellows, went to a private collector for $3,890,500 (est. $2/3,000,000). This pivotal Maine painting of 1916 is the first of the artist’s studies of American workers in the countryside. According to expert Michael Quick, it is also a foremost example of Cezanne’s influence on the Ashcan School artist.
 
“Quai St. Michel,” an 1888 Paris street scene by Childe Hassam, who arrived in Paris from Boston in 1886, sold to the Caldwell Gallery for $2,098,500 (est. $2,5/3,000,000).
 
“It is an extraordinary painting and a surprising result,” said dealer Joe Caldwell. “Hassam’s Paris street scenes are very much sought after. This one sold for almost $3 million in 1998. I was frankly surprised to buy it for this price.”
 
Hassam painted his best work between 1888 and 1906 and during World War I, Caldwell said. Richly detailed, “Quai St. Michel” depicts an attractive young woman browsing at an outdoor book stall with architectural landmarks in the background.
 
Debra Force underbid “The Old Sand Road” by William Merritt Chase. Painted en plein air circa 1894, the tranquil Shinnecock, Long Island, N.Y., scene fetched $1,202,500 (est. $7/900,000).  Two small figures in the middle ground are Chase’s daughters.
 
Force had better luck when it came to “Wrapped Oranges on a Tabletop,” claiming the 1897 trompe l’oeil depiction of fruit for a record $782,500 (est. $250/350,000). She also acquired, from a private New York collection, Winslow Homer’s signed and initialed watercolor “Listening to the Birds,” for $326,500.
 
“It’s a charming little piece,” said the New York dealer.
 
Sotheby’s will continue with sporting paintings, furniture and decorations from Evans’ New York and Virginia residences this fall with sales in New York and London.
 
East Coast Collection
Two other major lots came from a consignment of more than 100 works from an unidentified East Coast collection.
 
Thomas Hart Benton’s timely “Flood Disaster (Homecoming - Kaw Valley)” sold to the phone for $1,874,500 (est. $800,000/1,200,000). The price is the second highest at auction for a work by Benton, who created the oil and tempera on canvas in response to the devastating 1951 flooding of the Kansas and Missouri rivers.
 
Two phones competed for Milton Avery’s oil on canvas “March Playing the Cello,” which went for $1,426,500 (est. $800/1,200,000). The liquid looking portrait of the artist’s daughter dates to 1943.
 
Regional Interest
Bidders clamored for paintings of Western and Southern interest.
 
Two of  New Mexico’s top dealers in historic Santa Fe and Taos school paintings, Nedra Matteucci and Gerald Peters,  were in the room to watch Taos founder Ernest Blumenschein’s  monumental oil on canvas “White Blanket and Blue Spruce” of 1919 soar past its low estimate of $700,000 to sell for a record $1,538,500.
 
The Blumenschein was consigned by the Wichita Center for the Arts, which acquired it from the artist in 1928. Walter Ufer’s “After the Chapel Hour,” a lively Pueblo Indian scene purchased from the artist by the museum in 1923, fetched $818,500 (est. $6/800,000.) William Penhallow Henderson’s “Lucero’s Place, Springtime” crossed the block at $410,500 (est. $100/150,000). The Arizona collector who consigned it acquired it from the Gerald Peters Gallery around 1990.

Born in Charleston, S.C., William Aiken Walker (1828-1921) painted sentimental genre scenes of the old South.  “The Cotton Wagon,” an 18 by 30 inch oil on canvas, went to the phone for $434,500 (est. $150/250,000), while a pair of Walker portraits made $27,500 (est. $20/30,000). A smaller genre scene, “The Old Cabin,” grossed only $8,750 (est. $10/15,000).
 
Other notable paintings included Sanford Gifford’s “Haverstraw Bay (Shad Fishing on the Hudson),” $290,500; Severin Roesen’s “Abundant Bouquet with Pomegranate,” $302,500;  Alfred Henry Maurer’s “Woman in White,” $590,500; and David Johnson’s “View from Garrison, West Point, New York,” $278,500.
 
Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York claimed “Spring Evening,” a drybrush and watercolor on paper of a nude by Andrew Wyeth, for $458,500.
 
“It’s a very important picture but not a big price,” said Guilford, Ct., dealer Thomas Colville, who purchased “A White Note” by James McNeill Whistler for $290,500. Originally owned by English artist Walter Sickert, the unfinished portrait depicts Whistler’s companion, Joanna Hifferman, who posed for “Symphony in White No. 1” and “No. 2,” at the National Gallery of Art and the Tate Gallery, respectively.
 
Passed
Sotheby’s misgauged its cover lot, Albert Bierstadt’s “Light in the Forest,” atypical in both its subject matter, deer grazing in a forest clearing, and in its vertical format.  Estimated at $2/3,000,000, the oil on canvas painted in the mid to late 1890s passed at $1.7 million.

Other notable failures included a 1985 recast of Augustus Saint-Gauden’s “Diana of the Tower,”  passed at $190,000, and the tiny “Fruit, Nuts and Grapes” still life by Raphaelle Peale, passed at $220,000. Painted in 1923, Marsden Hartley’s 22 by 41 ½ inch oil on canvas, “New Mexico Recollection #8,” passed at $590,000. A similar Hartley painting of the same year and size fetched $242,500, well under its $5/700,000 estimate, a day earlier at Christie’s.

Prices quoted include buyer’s premium.
 
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Sotheby’s (BID) shares have lost a quarter of their value in the past month, a much steeper decline than this volatile stock has seen during any of the critical spring auction periods of the past five years.

The closing price of $40.46 on Tuesday represented a 25.6 percent decline from a 3 1/2-year high of $54.41 on April 5. Sotheby’s gained yesterday to close at $41.95, making the decline about 23 percent.

After falling as low as $6.47 on March 6, 2009, the auction house came back strongly starting late that year and rode its recovery to the April peak. Then the stock got hit hard by disappointing sales in Hong Kong and New York.

“The expectations were getting higher and higher and it was reflected in the stock price,” said Jason Benowitz, portfolio manager at Roosevelt Investment Group Inc., one of Sotheby’s major shareholders which bought the stock in the beginning of 2010 for a price in the low $20s.

In March, a Chinese vase estimated to fetch $800 to $1,200 soared to $18 million at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive lot among a dozen Asia Week auctions in New York.

“That story began to change during the last days of the Hong Kong auctions in April where the results were within the estimate range, not exceeding them,” Benowitz said.

The Hong Kong auctions brought in $447 million, a 75 percent increase from last year’s total, said William F. Ruprecht, Sotheby’s president and chief executive officer, during a teleconference with investors last week.

‘First Crack’

Still, Hong Kong saw a major setback with the Meiyintang Collection, marketed as one of the greatest private collections of imperial Chinese porcelain in the world. It brought in $51.2 million including fees, below the $91 million to $137 million presale estimate. Even with some pieces selling privately after the auction, the $88.4 million total fell short of the low estimate.

“That was the first crack in the bubbly confidence that characterized the Asian buying until then,” said Vikram Mansharamani, author of “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst.”

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s set a new record for a piece of American Indian Art at auction when an Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt which once belonged to the famous and celebrated Sioux Chief, Black Bird sold to an anonymous buyer for $2,658,500 (est. $250/350,000). The War Shirt led the sale which totaled $4,809,503. This was comfortably over the high estimate and the highest ever total for a various owner sale in this category (overall est. $2.8/4 million).

The auction of 42 works from the collection of the late New York dealer Allan Stone held at Sotheby’s on Monday evening is one of those events that announce the advent of an era. The antiquities of Contemporary art were on sale.

To drive the point home, Sotheby’s did not use the word “contemporary” on the covers of the two catalogs printed for the occasion.

On volume one, the uncharacteristically small title states merely “The Collection of Allan Stone.” An inside page proclaims in white on black (a discreet hint at Mr. Stone’s death in 2006) “Allan Stone is a Celebration of art collecting and an insight into the sophisticated eye of this renowned New York dealer.” There follows a seven-page chronology of artistic development on the New York scene from the 1940s to 2006 illustrated with pictures in the sale. If you were not absolutely dense, you knew that you were being confronted with Cultural History in capital letters.

The message got across. The attendance was galvanized.

The first lot was a small sheet of paper with additional bits of paper pasted on, and most importantly, the New York artist Franz Kline’s signature followed by a date, 1957. Kline had violently smeared the paper with black paint. Although “Untitled,” as Sotheby’s dubbed it, was only 11 by 83/8 inches, or 27.9 by 21.2 centimeters, the experts had given it a $90,000 to $120,000 estimate plus a sale charge of more than 20 percent. Dazzled, the room sent it flying to $446,500.

Another “Untitled” followed, signed by John Chamberlain in 1961. Scraps of painted steel, crushed and welded, are attached together with discarded shreds of fabric to a sturdy backing board. It made you briefly wonder whether the artist, rummaging in a scrap heap, had tried to pay homage to the victims of some ghastly car accident. Bidders responded to this monument of old Contemporary art. It doubled expectations at $662,500.

That work served as a prelude to Chamberlain’s big jumble of painted and chromium-plated steel fragments that came up moments later. Executed in 1958, it conjured far more realistically the image of a car wreck. Here, the artist had coined a title, “Nutcracker.” The Cleveland Museum of Art had included “Nutcracker” in a brief Chamberlain exhibition in January 1967. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum gave it the ultimate accolade, when the crushed steel jumble was featured in “John Chamberlain: A Retrospective Exhibition” in the early 1970s. After that, it was impossible to mistake “Nutcracker” for a haphazard assemblage of scrap metal. Bidders ran it up to $4.78 million.

Other hefty prices followed. Willem de Kooning’s “Event in a Barn,” done in 1947 in oil, enamel and paper collage on board, was likewise reassuringly set in the concrete of art history. It had traveled the United States in 2006 and 2007 as part of the show “Picasso and American Art.” De Kooning’s picture realized $4.56 million.

Sotheby’s (BID), which aims to sell a Jeff Koons sculpture tomorrow of the Pink Panther embracing a topless blonde for $30 million, reported a first-quarter profit.

The New York auctioneer earned $2.4 million, or 3 cents a share, compared with a loss of $2.2 million, or 3 cents, a year earlier, it said in a statement. Revenue increased 17 percent to $119.6 million.

The earnings were in line with estimates. Five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg projected profit of 3.6 cents a share. They had estimated revenue of $119 million.

“This is one of our best first quarters on record,” Chief Executive William Ruprecht said today in an e-mailed statement.

Auction sales increased 23 percent, offset in part by a 16 percent increase in operating expenses.

A racy Jeff Koons sculpture and an assemblage of Jackie Kennedy portraits by Andy Warhol drew tepid bidding last night as Sotheby’s New York saw its lowest tally for an evening contemporary-art auction in two years.

The $128.1 million total was just over the low presale estimate of $120 million. As in last week’s Impressionist and modern-art sales, buyers balked at what they perceived as aggressive estimates and lackluster quality.

“There’s nothing really outstanding here,” billionaire collector Eli Broad said as he left the Manhattan salesroom with his wife, Edythe. “There’s no excitement.”

The top lot was Warhol’s “Sixteen Jackies,” assembled by the seller from 16 individual canvases of the former First Lady on the day of her husband’s assassination. It fetched $20.2 million, or $1.3 million per painting, compared with presale expectations of $20 million to $30 million. Painted with blue, white and gold, some images show Jackie Kennedy smiling, others grief- stricken.

Individual “Jackie” silkscreen paintings sell privately for between $800,000 and $1.2 million, dealers said.

“It’s the perfect example of people willing to pay the market price but no more,” said Todd Levin, director of New York-based Levin Art Group.

“The sale felt overestimated by about 10 to 15 percent,” he said. “If you are going to have aggressive estimates, you’ve got to have masterpieces.”

‘Pink Panther’

A Jeff Koons sculpture depicting a topless blonde hugging the Pink Panther fetched $16.9 million, falling short of the presale estimate of $20 million to $30 million and of the artist’s auction record. The porcelain piece went to a telephone client of Patti Wong, chairman of Sotheby’s Asia.

Described as one of the most important works by Koons, “Pink Panther” (1988) was consigned by publisher Benedikt Taschen, who had been guaranteed an undisclosed amount through a third-party irrevocable bid.

The auction record for a Koons sculpture is $25.8 million paid for “Balloon Flower” at Christie’s in London in 2008. Sotheby’s (BID) priciest Koons was a giant magenta-and- gold “Hanging Heart” that fetched $23.6 million in November 2007.