Displaying items by tag: Auction

Although major figures in the British art world including Tate director Nicholas Serota, filmmaker Danny Boyle, and artist Jeremy Deller have voiced their opposition, the council of the Borough of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End decided on Wednesday to sell Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman. In addition to the big name opponents, more than 1,500 signed a petition against the sale in just a few days.

Completed in 1957, Moore sold the bronze sculpture to the London County Council in 1960 for a fraction of its worth. When the sale was made, Moore and the now defunct London Council agreed that the statue would be on view permanently near a housing project. When the project was leveled in the late 1990s, Draped Seated Woman was moved to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of the Tower Hamlets, blamed the government’s severe budget cuts for leaving him with little choice in the matter. The sculpture is expected to bring in about $32 million when it goes to auction in early 2013.

On December 5, Sotheby’s in New York will help cosmetics executive, Leonard Lauder, auction off jewelry that once belonged to his wife, Evelyn, and mother Estée. The collection is worth at least $13.4 million and includes a 47.714-carat heart-shaped yellow diamond with connections to the Duchess of Windsor, a Van Cleef & Arpels brooch featuring a pair of ruby tulips and diamonds, a flawless 6.54-carat fancy intense pink diamond ring by Oscar Heyman & Bros, and a 22.16-carat platinum and diamond ring from Graff.

Part of Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels auction, the proceeds from the 35 pieces will benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, an organization founded and championed by Evelyn Lauder. Additional pieces from the collection will be offered in New York as part of the Important Jewels auction in February 2013, also sold to benefit the Research Foundation. Leonard Lauder, chairman of The Estée Lauder Company and acting chairman of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation said, “We are pleased to be partnering with Sotheby’s for this important auction. Each piece of jewelry is unique and very special.”

 The auction comes at a time when high-end jewelry has been outperforming most of the art market. Buyers and collectors continue to seek recession-proof assets and have turned to quality jewelry designed by big names such as Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels for stable investments. Sotheby’s said its jewelry sales were up 19% this year.

Beginning on November 13, Doyle New York will start auctioning select works from the Spanierman Gallery, one of the Upper East Side’s foremost American art galleries. Founded by Ira Spanierman in the 1960s, the Spanierman Gallery has played an important role in the understanding and appreciation of American art from the colonial era through the 20^th century. The gallery has also placed many iconic works in prominent public and private collections across the country.

As the Spanierman Gallery has decided to shift its focus to modern and contemporary American art, they will auction hundreds of works from their early American art collection at a number of select sales that will take place in 2012 and 2013. The November 13 auction will include thirty works including four pieces by John Henry Twachtman, the last fully bound sketchbook of studies by Maurice Prendergast not in a museum collection, and a double-sided work by Alfred Maurer that exemplifies the artist’s Fauvist palette.

Another 36 works from the Spanierman collection will be sold at Doyle’s American furniture, decorations, and 19^th century painting sale on November 19.

The National Geographic Society is well known for its collection of photographs chronicling scientific exhibitions, explorations, archaeology, wildlife, and various cultures of the world. With 11.5 million photos and original illustrations in its collection, National Geographic will bring a small selection from the archive to Christie’s December auction. There will be 240 pieces spanning from the late 1800s to the present including photographs as well as paintings by artists such as Andrew and N.C. Wyeth. The National Geographic Collection: The Art of Exploration is expected to bring about $3 million on December 6. This marks the first time any of the institution’s collection has been sold.

While many of the works have never before been published or exhibited, a number of them are well known including Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl that has a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. Other works include a 1969 illustration entitled A Blue Globe Hanging in Space–The Earth as Seen From the Moon by Charles Bittinger, a photo of a diver with an octopus taken by Jacques Cousteau, and The Duel on the Beach, a painting by N.C. Wyeth.

All proceeds from the auction will be put towards the promotion and preservation of the National Geographic archive as well as the young photographers, artists, and explorers who will guide the institution into the future.

Last week at Sotheby’s auction house in London, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (809–4) sold to a telephone bidder for $34.2 million, the highest price paid for a living artist’s work at auction. Previously owned by musician and collector, Eric Clapton, the abstract painting was estimated to bring $14.1 million to $18.8 million.

Alex Branczik, Senior Director and Head of the Evening Auction of Contemporary Art, said, “The combination of outstanding provenance and gold-standard quality in this sublime work by this blue-chip artist made for an historic auction moment. Gerhard Richter’s international appeal as one of the hottest Contemporary artists was once again confirmed this evening.”

The German postwar painter, best known for his abstract and figurative works, was recently the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, at the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Staatlichen Museum in Berlin. After the show, the prices of Richter’s works have continued to climb.

Friday’s sale beat out Jasper Johns’ Flag painting from the 1960s, which brought $28.6 million at Christie’s in 2010, for a living artist at auction. Richter, 80, lives in Cologne, Germany.

Sotheby’s hosted a number of sales in Hong Kong this past week. On October 7^th, the Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian paintings sale achieved $15.5 million, soaring past the pre-sale estimate of $5.8 million. The sale achieved the highest auction total for this category and the painting Fortune and Longevity by Lee Man Fong, an Indonesian modern master, set a record for any Southeast Asian painting when it sold for $4.4 million. The final price for the painting was almost three times the pre-sale estimate.

The Contemporary Asian Art sale totaled $15.1 million and Tiananmen No. 1 by Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter, Zhang Xiaogang, was the top lot at $2.69 million. Liu Wei’s Revolutionary Family Series – Invitation to Dinner was the second highest sale at $2.24 million, a world record price at auction for the Beijing-based artist who works in various mediums including video, installation, drawings, sculpture, and painting.

The 20^th Century Chinese Art sale brought in $24.6 million and sold 90% by lot. Works from Europe, the United States, and around Asian sold well and many were above their pre-sale estimates. The top lot was Potted Chrysanthemums by the Chinese modern art pioneer, Sanyu, which sold for $3.99 million.

The following day, the Fine Chinese Paintings sale totaled $53.2 million, the highest of the four art auctions. Offering many works from private collections, the total sale was more than double the pre-sale estimate and sold 97.2% by lot. The two top lots at the auction, Zhang Daqian’s Swiss Peaks; Calligraphy in Xingshu and Fu Baoshi’s Lady at the Pavillion, both sold for $2,974,278.

Last year China beat out the United States as the world’s largest art and antiques market and the autumn sales reflect that power swap. There was a bit of controversy when a 60-year-old Taiwanese Buddhist sister demanded that a $1.65 million sale be halted at the Fine Chinese Paintings auction. Sotheby’s canceled the sale of a painting by Zhang Daqian after Lu Chieh-chien requested a court hearing to prevent bidding on Riding in the Autumn Countryside (1950) which she claims was the property of her family and had been consigned without consent.

While sales totaled $3,486,127 million at Sotheby’s American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture auction on September 28^th in New York, 35% of lots went unsold. Sotheby’s did slightly better than Christie’s in the American Art arena, but both sales are a testament to the lackluster performance of mid-season auctions.

“Sotheby’s did put a few more important paintings in the sale,” said Debra Force of Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. “The question is whether the clientele is there to buy it.” It appears that the clientele interested in purchasing Rockwells were at least in attendance. Is He Coming? (1919), a quintessential Norman Rockwell painting of a young boy and his dog peering up the chimney on what appears to be Christmas Eve, brought in $602,500. The final price was $300,000 more than than the paintings high estimate ($200,000–$300,000).

Sotheby’s sale featured more than 200 paintings, drawings, and sculptures and included property from two noteworthy private collections belonging to Margie and Robert E. Petersen and Susan Kahn Rosenkranz and Richard Rosenkranz. Highlights included works by Rockwell Kent, Marsden Harley, Grandma Moses, and Ben Shahn with Kent and Moses taking two of the top five lots. Moses’ On the Banks of the Hudson reached the third highest price of the sale at $92,500 but still brought in considerably less than its high estimate of $120,000. Rockwell Kent’s Adirondack Farm, Summer sold for $86,5000 (estimate: $25,000–$35,000), the fourth highest sale of the auction.

While the highlights of the auction could have made more money in a more important sale, the quality is there. "Maybe more important collectors need to get used to looking at these mid-season sales," says Force. 

Peter Brant, chairman and chief executive officer of the White Birch Paper Co., has fallen from billionaire status and is turning to his contemporary art collection to help recapitalize the family newsprint business. An early patron of Andy Warhol, Brant recently pledged 56 works to the lending arm of Sotheby’s including works by Warhol, Richard Prince, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Brant also pledged pieces to a unit of the Deutsche Bank AG and his former business partner, including a Warhol from the early 1960s that is said to be worth around $35 million.

Ranked as one of the largest contemporary art collectors in the United States, Brant joins a number of wealthy collectors who have started taking out loans backed artworks to fund their ventures. It is rumored that Brant used his art collection to provide some of the capital needed to buy White Birch out of bankruptcy in 2011.

According to an annual report, Sotheby’s Financial Services provides consignment loans secured by artworks that borrowers have agreed to sell through the auction house, permitting them to get some of the proceeds as much as a year ahead of time. The auction house also makes term loans on works that clients aren’t planning to sell in order to solidify relationships with borrowers that will hopefully lead to future consignments.

On November 5^th, the Cleveland Museum of Art will auction off one of its six Claude Monet paintings in New York. Wheat Field (1881) carries an estimated price of $5–$7 million and the museum hopes to use the funds from the sale to strengthen its early 20^th century European painting and sculpture collection, an area that has been lacking.

The Museum decided to auction Wheat Fields shortly after David Franklin was named the Museum’s director in 2010. Franklin did not think the painting could hold its own next to to the other five Monets in the museum’s collection including a widely admired Water Lily painting and the seminal, Red Kerchief.

Since Wheat Field was donated to the museum in 1947 as an unrestricted gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon, the museum is able to sell the painting without fear of complaint from the donor’s family. The Museum would like to acquire a painting by The Scream artist, Edvard Munch, or Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering Russian abstractionist, to help round out their collection.

Held in New York on September 25^th, Christie’s American Art sale counted two Norman Rockwell works on paper as the top lots. Study for ‘The Runaway,’ perhaps the artist’s most iconic image, brought in $206,500. The original estimate for Study at auction was $80,000–$120,000. In 1958, the completed work, which features a young boy at a diner in conversation with a policeman, was used as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The other Rockwell that fared well was Keeping His Course (Exeter Grill) which had an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 and ended up selling for $218,500. The work was originally conceived as an illustration for the book Keeping His Course (1918) by Ralph Henry Barbour. A less recognizable Rockwell, A Man’s Wife, didn’t quite reach it’s $30,000–$50,000 estimate and ending up selling for $27,500.

Edgar Alwin Payne’s Western painting La Marque Lake, High Sierra more than doubled its $25,000–$35,000 estimate when it sold for $80,500. Other works that exceeded expectations were Andrew Wyeth’s watercolor, Front Door at Teel’s (estimate: $50,000–$70,000), that realized $93,700 and Josef Mario Korbel’s Andante (Dancing Girls) (estimate: $30,000–$50,000), a bronze that brought in $62,500.

The auction offered over 160 lots including Impressionist and Modernist works, Western pieces, illustrations, and bronzes. Artists on the block included Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Will Barnet, Edward Hopper, and William Merritt Chase. Expected to reach in excess of $2.5 million, the total sale realized for the auction was $2,649,475.

While the auction reached its estimate, only 63% sold by lot and 76% by value. Debra Force of Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. said, “63% is terrible but there are many reasons for the poor performance. September is too early in the season for a sale. People are just getting back from summer, putting kids in school, and it’s in the middle of the Jewish holidays.” Force added, “The important collectors don’t look at these mid-season sales. They should, but they’re waiting for the major sale.“

Gavin Spanierman of Gavin Spanierman Ltd. echoed Force’s sentiments. “63% is pretty scary if you’re a seller but that’s representative of mid-season sales. However, the fact that the two Rockwells did well considering they were not phenomenal, shows that there is strength in the market.”