80 Art Market
American landscape studies by David Hockney and Ansel Adams are among the highlights of December’s saleroom offerings in New York, following an autumn season marked by disappointing sales totals, gimmicky lots and the occasional encouraging surprise
Susan Moore previews December sales in New York and reviews a disappointing autumn season
On 7 December, Phillips New York will offer David Hockney’s painting Nichols Canyon, which it describes as ‘unequivocally the most important landscape by the artist in private hands’ (Fig. 2). It is one of two monumental paintings of 1980 that launched the British artist’s decades-long exploration of the California landscape; both document the experience of the drive he made several times a day between his home on top of the Hollywood Hills and his studio beneath them on Santa Monica Boulevard. ‘The moment you live up here, you get a different view of Los Angeles,’ Hockney has explained. ‘First of all these wiggly lines seem to enter your life, and they entered the paintings.’ He began Nichols Canyon by drawing a wiggly line down the middle of the canvas.
With its saturated complementary colours and unconventional perspective, the canvas draws from the work of Matisse and the Fauves but surely also from the rhythmic repeating patterns used in nihonga art, which the artist had encountered in Japan in 1971. These suggest not only the textures of the natural world but also movement and the passage of time. The other monumental landscape of 1980, the horizontal-format Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; this painting Hockney kept for himself initially, then exchanging it and another piece for a small Picasso. Acquired by the current West Coast consignors in 1982, this muchexhibited acrylic is expected to realise a figure in the region of $35m.
Eduard Gaertner (1801–77) is to the German Romantic cityscape what Caspar David Friedrich is to the German Romantic landscape. Trained in perspective while working as a painter at the royal porcelain factory in Berlin, he honed his skills on the set designs of the great Karl Friedrich Schinkel before specialising in architectural view painting, finding patronage at both the Prussian and Russian courts. His recently rediscovered canvas of 1845, View of the Opera and Unter den Linden, Berlin (Fig. 1), closely related to a version of the same date and dimensions in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, is entirely typical of his work in this period.
Like many of his paintings, the scene is linked to a specific event – in this case the reconstruction of the royal opera house, which had burned to the ground in 1843. Here, the facade of the grand Palladian building glows in the evening sun, the main protagonist of a scene representing the cultural, political and military heart of the Prussian capital. Gaertner’s analytical clarity of detail is tempered by the atmosphere of this balmy evening, and a carefully observed cast of promenaders, riders and soldiers. No comparable painting has been seen at auction since the early 1990s, when another Berlin view was hammered down for a record £950,000. The painting comes to Sotheby’s Highlights from European & British Art sale in London on 2 December with expectations of £800,000–£1.2m.
A quite different specific atmospheric effect is captured in Jacob van Ruisdael’s little-known Landscape with a Cottage and Stone Bridge under a Cloudy Sky – in fact, it must rank among the boldest and most dramatic of leaden skies in the history of art. In this early work, painted in Haarlem around 1650, a burst of sunlight suddenly illuminates a dilapidated bridge and patch of land, as well as the wings of the birds above, silhouetted against the inkiness of the lowering clouds. This small canvas comes to market for the first time in more than 150 years at Sotheby’s Old Masters sale in London on 10 December, bearing an estimate of £800,000–£1.2m.
This season in London promises several works of art returning to market after a century or more. The star lot at Sotheby’s has descended in the family of the 1st Viscount Melbourne, who probably bought it in the 1770s. The Wine Harvest (estimate £3m–£5m) is billed as the largest and finest work by David Teniers the Younger to come to market in living memory. More than 2.5m wide, this confident and ambitious genre scene was probably created in the mid 1640s, and incorporates a figure based on the artist himself; its central characters of the estate owner, his family and his foreman seem similarly specific rather than generic.
On 16 December, Christie’s offers A Banquet Still Life by the Utrecht-born Golden Age painter Jan Davidsz de Heem. The last in a series of four monumental canvases painted between 1640 and 1643, it has been in the same private collection since the 19th century, and is offered with an estimate of £4m–£6m. Christie’s sales in London that month also include the Italian drawings of the Swiss collector Robert Landolt on 8 December. The fortunate purchaser of Lot 38 will find themselves the owner of a double-sided work on paper, with two spirited studies by Taddeo Zuccaro (1529–66) of Diana the huntress on the recto, and on the verso a partially draped woman holding a vessel on her head, drawn by his pupil Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529–92). Estimate £150,000–£250,000.
While London is the focus of the Old Master sales this month, Leo Spik in Berlin offers on 3–5 December a recently discovered small triptych by the Castilian artist Fernando Gallego (c. 1440–1507; Fig. 3). Few details of the artist’s life are known, but he did have the foresight to sign three major works – in the Prado in Madrid, the Cathedral Museum in Salamanca and in Zamora Cathedral – and his distinctive style leaves little doubt as to the attribution here. The work of a pre-eminent artist painting in the hybrid Hispano-Flemish tradition, this markedly linear altarpiece, largely painted in grisaille and strikingly offset by gold leaf, is clearly indebted to both International Gothic and Northern Renaissance prototypes. Given its small scale – the central panel measures 67 by 45cm – and the fact that there is no decoration on the outside of the wing panels, it is possible that this may have been a travelling altar rather than a typical domestic devotional altarpiece. It is expected to fetch around €120,000.
Back in New York, the most famous image produced by the photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams stands as a modern reprise of the Ruisdael. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico was taken in the late afternoon of 1 November 1941, when Adams was passing the tiny town and was struck by the quality of the dying light under a menacing sky. Knowing he had little time, he pulled over and hastily assembled his equipment. As the shutter released, the last rays of sunlight left the white crosses of the graveyard and the distant, snow-covered peaks. The resulting photograph has all the sumptuous tonal range and depth of vision that characterise his early work.
Over the next 40 years, Adams made more than 1,300 prints of Moonrise. On 14 December, Sotheby’s New York offers the earliest known example to come to the market, one of only a handful printed near the time the negative was produced, and before 1948, when he refixed the negative. The highlight of the widely travelled David H. Arrington Collection, and expected to fetch $700,000–$1m, it will be joined by some 100 photographs that span Adams’s career, including a group of monumental mural-sized prints of Yosemite Park. o
It was ingenious of Christie’s to include the Tyrannosaurus Rex ‘Stan’ in its hybrid ‘ th Century Evening Sale’, livestreamed from New York on October (Fig. ). The dinosaur’s fossilised skeleton, excavated in South Dakota in , bolstered the auction total, realising more than five times its low estimate and changing hands for . m. Yet Stan’s gigantic feet helped move the auction business one step further into the circus ring. It won’t be long before the P.T. Barnums of Rockefeller Plaza and York Avenue will be asking us to step up to ever more entertaining spectacles, at which the world’s super-rich are presented with absolutely anything valued at, say, m or over. An awe-inspiring m long and almost four metres high, Stan would prove to be a hard act to follow.
The finale of a floorshow accessed by , people online and featuring elaborate stage sets, background music and a running commentary, Stan was the most hotly contested lot of the night but not the most valuable. That accolade went to a muchexhibited untitled painting by Cy Twombly, one of canvases from his ‘Bolsena’ series, inspired by the Apollo space mission. It had come with expectations of m– m, and sold for . m, including fees. Like most of the top lots of the evening, it was sold close to or on its low estimate or reserve.
The Cézanne watercolour Nature morte avec pot au lait, melon et sucrier made a record
. m, despite a lack of competition for it. There was more interest in another exceptional work, Emil Nolde’s intense seascape Herbstmeer XVI of , which realised . m. One of the few lots to soar beyond expectations was Tamara de Lempicka’s languid painting of two female nudes, Les deux amies ( . m). Four lots were withdrawn immediately before the sale. Its . m total was thus a solid per cent sold by lot, per cent by value. At Christie’s European iteration of the th-century sale on – October, market confidence seemed to have ebbed further. Perhaps the offering was simply less appealing, or overpriced. Or perhaps European buyers are less likely to buy if they haven’t seen work in the flesh. The four-sale, two-city ‘London to Paris’ epic realised . m, just inside the pre-sale estimate. Proceedings began well. Monumental sculptures from a single-owner collection, ‘Le jardin secret de Paul Haim’, were -per-cent sold and doubled expectations by realising
. m. The top lot, at . m, was Joan Miró’s painted bronze La Caresse d’un oiseau ( / ). The star lot of the ‘Paris Avant-garde’ sale that followed was a spectacular rediscovered masterpiece by Pierre Soulages. Peinture x
cm, juillet , not seen on the market since its initial purchase, came with expectations of
m– m but sold to its guarantor for . m. Five other works failed to elicit a bid.
It was a similar picture in London. The hammer prices of the two top lots of ‘Post War and Contemporary Art’ were below estimate. Peter Doig’s Boiler Room of , one of nine large-scale evocations of Le Corbusier’s abandoned Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Fôret in north-eastern France, realised . m (with premium). Faces may well have been downcast at the Royal Opera House, which had offered David Hockney’s Portrait of Sir David Webster ( ) to benefit future programming. This classic image from of a former general administrator of the ROH sold to the guarantor for . m. Taking Stan’s virtual place here was Marina Abramović’s The Life of – , purportedly the world’s first mixed-reality artwork and the first to be sold at auction. This editioned -minute piece, which allows the headset-wearing viewer a digital encounter with the artist, sold for a record price for the artist, but at , was well under estimate. Works by, among others, Francis Bacon and Albert Oehlen were withdrawn before or during the sale.
Worse was to come at the ‘Thinking Italian Art and Design Evening Sale’. Again, all began well, with Alighiero Boetti’s homage of to the curator Germano Celant soaring times over its estimate to sell for , . Even so, the sale fizzled out like a damp squib, with only per cent of lots finding new homes and a disappointing total of just . m. As Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said in the
after-sale press conference, this is a ‘challenging market’ and ‘nothing is a given’.
Sotheby’s livestreamed auctions on 21 October featured modern art in Paris and contemporary art in London. Here, 10 lots were withdrawn before the sales began and, once more, many were sold on or around their reserves. An exception was one of Francis Picabia’s ‘Transparencies’, Minos of 1929, which changed hands at just under €4m (Fig. 2). In London, at least five bidders went in pursuit of Banksy’s Show Me the Monet (2005; estimate £3m–£5m), the famous lily pond at Giverny now featuring two abandoned supermarket trolleys and a traffic cone. It fetched £7.6m, the second highest price for the artist at auction. Despite the safe selection of artists, there were still casualties for several market darlings. The two sales, which totalled $90.4m, were 80-per-cent and 83-per-cent sold, but the hammer prices at both were lower than the pre-sale estimates.
Again, the results looked stronger in New York on 28 October – at least as far as sellthrough rates were concerned. All 36 lots of Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionist and modern art found new homes, although just under half the lots were guaranteed and two had their estimates adjusted downwards.
Giorgio de Chirico’s Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (1913) sparked a now rare 10-minute bidding battle, selling for a record $15.9m. The sale included a number of deaccessions from Brooklyn Museum – a Monet and a Matisse that both exceeded expectations, while a Degas pastel nude had a disappointing result.
In the contemporary sale, the museum’s unique dining table by Carlo Mollino generated strong bidding and sold for a massive $6.2m, a record for Italian design. Undesired drama came before the sale when it was revealed that the Baltimore Museum of Art had pulled its even more controversial proposed deaccessions – works by Clyfford Still and Brice Marden (plus a Warhol being offered by private treaty) – in the face of increasing public and professional censure, and the threat of rescinded promised funds. Three other works were withdrawn.
This is a market in flux, where anything is possible. The biggest auction-house sale of the month was Alberto Giacometti’s monumental bronze Grande Femme I of 1960, offered by Sotheby’s through a version of a sealed-bid private sale in which the minimum bid was $90m. The auction house was also happy to pull the artist’s Femme de Venise IV from an auction and sell it to a client. Late in the day,
Sotheby’s announced the inclusion of three futuristic Alfa Romeo cars of the 1950s as icons of modern design. Incidentally, their hammer price was also at the bottom end of the estimate, $14m–$20m. Perhaps the most perplexing statistic of all, however, was the almost one million viewers who, it was revealed, chose to livestream this $283m evening event.
It was not this author’s intention to focus on these rescheduled high-value modern and contemporary art sales. October is the month for ‘classic’ art in New York, but it proved impossible not to scrutinise sales series which act as bellwethers for a market heavily dependent on confidence. There were certainly high prices achieved across Christie’s 10 live and online auctions, which totalled $73.8m, but also unexpected prices elsewhere. Marion Antique Auctions in Massachusetts offered a ‘Framed and glazed portrait of a nobleman’, signed ‘I.L.’ and dated 1652, with an estimate of $200–$300 (Fig. 3). Recognised by at least eight bidders as an important lost drawing of Admiral Tromp by Jan Lievens, it was hammered down, despite its less-than-perfect surface, for the extraordinary sum of $440,000 – more than $500,000 with premium – a figure unlikely to have been achieved if the drawing had not been a ‘sleeper’. o