Art Market
Modern and contemporary art was in great demand in New York and Hong Kong in May. In London in July, an ursine drawing by Leonardo and a panoramic view by Bellotto are likely to set new auction records at the Old Masters sales
Susan Moore previews Old Master auctions in London and reviews modern and contemporary sales in New York and Hong Kong
Preview
Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by bears. These fierce creatures abounded in the mountains of Tuscany and Lombardy in the early modern period and, as Carmen Bambach’s magisterial study of the artist noted, the artist copied a moralising fable about the bear as a symbol of ire from a Venetian bestiary, planned to include a discussion of the bear’s paw in his intended treatise on anatomy, and noted how hunters trapped these mammals by pitching them off cliffs. And, of course, he drew them.
The study of a walking bear in the Robert Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests that his model may have been one such injured or dead specimen, as the artist evidently struggled to make a convincing case for its anatomy, stance and lolloping stride. The separate detail below of a single, dog-like paw is rather more authoritative – as is the Head of a Bear (Fig. ) which appears to have been drawn, and cut down, from the same sheet or from the same quire of paper. (It is unlikely to be a coincidence that both drawings once belonged to the British artist and collector Sir Thomas Lawrence.)
In fact, this head is as sensitive as it is closely scrutinised. The artist’s line is incisive, particularly in the handling of the drooping fleshiness of the bear’s jowl and the form of snout and eye socket. Adding to the drawing’s appeal, inevitably, is the medium itself: silverpoint on prepared paper of a soft pink-beige. The artist was taught this technique by his master Andrea del Verrocchio, and the drawing belongs to a group of subtly toned animal studies made in Florence in the s. What is also striking is the resemblance between this head and that of the ermine in Leonardo’s mesmerising portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. Unlike that painting, which is now in the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, this widely exhibited drawing is up for sale. Despite its small scale – just . cm by . cm – it comes with an estimate of m– m and is expected to fetch a new world auction record for a drawing by the artist at Christie’s Exceptional Sale on July. (Horse and Rider, another silverpoint, fetched just over m in ).
Of the Old Master drawings in the dedicated sale on July, delicately coloured sheets by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and John
Robert Cozens stand out. Design for a ceremonial barge representing the Triumph of Poland of around 1740, almost prefiguring the great trompe l’oeil ceilings in the Residenz at Würzburg, is all one could hope for in terms of rococo courtly fantasy, and the artist’s inventiveness and lightness of touch are miraculous (£400,000–£600,000). In contrast, In the Gardens of the Villa Negroni at Rome (c. 1783) gives full vent to Cozens’s brooding and melancholic vein, the gloom of its towering cypresses echoed by a lowering sky (£300,000–£500,000).
Italian art and the Italianate emerges as a prevailing theme of Christie’s Classic Week in London. Dominating the Old Masters evening sale on 8 July is the panoramic View of Verona with the Ponte delle Navi, of majestic scale, painted in around 1745–47 by the young Bernardo Bellotto, which presages the great topographical views of Dresden (see the June 2021 issue of Apollo). Previously on long-term loan to the Scottish National Gallery, and a pendant of a painting at Powis Castle, this veduta may well set a new auction record for the artist (estimate £12m–£18m).
At Sotheby’s, there is more of an emphasis on northern Europe. The centrepiece of the Old Master paintings evening sale on 7 July reveals J.M.W. Turner reinterpreting the 17thcentury Dutch marine tradition of Willem van de Velde the Younger. Purfleet and the Essex Shore as seen from Long Reach (1808) brings together a variety of sea vessels from a manof-war to a humble fishing-boat whose crew is netting pilchards but, as ever, the real subject here is the drama of man pitted against nature, light against dark, and the monumentality – the gust, foam and spray – of the great swell (£4m–£6m).
Amsterdam rather than Rome is the subject of a Gerrit Berckheyde topographical view of the Oudezijds Heerenlogement (£300,000– £500,000), but the more dazzling work is one of Willem Kalf’s bravura still-lifes. This oil on canvas rejoices in textures as diverse as silver-gilt, porcelain, paper and petal, carpet, bread crust and the flesh of cut melon (Fig. 3). Surviving in a remarkable state of preservation, Kalf’s signed and dated canvas of 1658 is expected to fetch £800,000–£1.2m. In the Treasures sale on 6 July is a fine figural standing salt of 1621 by the Utrecht master silversmith Adam van Vianen (1568/69–1627), best known for his sculptural objects in the fluid ‘auricular’ style. This contemporary Flora is described as an emblem of summer although she is clasping costly tulips at her waist (£600,000–£800,000; Fig. 1). A figural salt featuring the sea nymph Galatea fetched just over £1m in 2018.
Silver and Kunstkammer objects of all periods in a variety of precious materials are to be found at Lempertz in Cologne on 15 July where the distinguished Belgian dealer Bernard De Leye has consigned 266 works of art judiciously amassed over the decades for his own delectation. As one would expect, these include exemplary connoisseur-collector pieces, exceptional for their rarity, craftsmanship or provenance. A silver basin by François-Thomas Germain (1726–91), for instance, bears the coat-of-arms of Madame de Pompadour – only three other pieces from her extensive silver collection are known to survive (€250,000–€300,000). Marking the marriage of another of Louis XV’s mistresses, Marguerite-Catherine Haynault, to the Marquis de Montmelas in 1766, is a silver-gilt ewer and basin with the mark of Jean-Baptiste-François Chéret (1728–c. 1791), all the more remarkable for the accompanying four design drawings, some signed and annotated, documenting their creation (€1m–€1.2m). According to family lore, the garniture was a gift of the king. The collection is expected to fetch more than €9m.
Review
Extraordinary prices and remarkable sell-through rates were achieved at the May sales in New York and Hong Kong where the pent-up desire to acquire high-value or fashionable works of art was almost palpable – as was the post-sale jubilation. Very little was left to chance. There were guarantees galore to ensure works were sold but there was also, significantly, a sufficient depth of bidding to push prices for the most sought-after lots to unexpected levels. While buyer statistics were only available from Sotheby’s, it seems that bidding by clients in Asia and, moreover, the taste of those buyers, is a powerful driver of this market. The emphasis on figuration is growing, as is interest in Impressionist art.
The record for the week – of the last two years, in fact – was the . m paid at Christie’s for a monumental portrait by Picasso of his young muse Marie-Thérèse Walter (Fig. ). The painting had last appeared at auction less than a decade ago when it changed hands for . m. Now Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) of returned with an unpublished estimate reported to be m – and a guarantee (half of the lots offered in this freshly reformatted ‘ th Century’ evening sale came with third-party or in-house guarantees). This reassurance may have been needed to extract the painting from its owner, but one was not necessary for it to sell. Six bidders competed for the privilege. While freshness to the market remains essential in Old Master sales, it no longer seems much of a priority in the modern period. Monet’s atmospheric Waterloo bridge, effet de brouillard, which had realised . m at auction in
, now found . m, well over its pre-sale estimate. Willem de Kooning’s luminous and luscious East Hampton VI of doubled expectations to sell for . m.
The sale was structured to ensure bidders had to sit through the whole span of works on offer, with pieces from the th century interposed with those by artists who died in the th and st, or who are still alive today (Wayne Thiebaud’s tennis-themed Toweling Off soared to . m). Thus, two little gems of studies by Georges Seurat – both preparatory works for the artist’s celebrated masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – followed the de Kooning. Paysage et personnages (La jupe rose) doubled expectations to sell for . m. They were last on the market in .
There was huge competition, too, for Alice Neel’s Dr Finger’s Waiting Room of , a welltimed offering in light of the well-received survey of her paintings currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Estimated at
, – , , it doubled her previous auction high to sell for a record m. There were further records for women artists. Barbara Hepworth’s bronze Parent II fetched
. m, while The Phoenix by Grace Hartigan realised , . The final sale total was on target at . m.
Further records for women artists of colour were set at Christie’s ‘ st Century’ evening sale, which saw highs for Nina Chanel Abney ( , ), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye ( m) and Mickalene Thomas ( . m). The sale’s substantial total was largely provided by JeanMichel Basquiat’s In This Case ( ), which achieved a mighty . m, the highest price of
the four Basquiats offered this season in New York and Hong Kong. Versus Medici fetched $50.8m at Sotheby’s New York, while Untitled (One Eyed Man or Xerox Face) achieved HKD 243.3m ($30.3m) at Christie’s highly successful 20th & 21st Century evening sale in Hong Kong, which realised a total of HKD 1.6bn.
Almost proving that generalisations are a reckless indulgence when commenting on the art market, Sotheby’s saw more animated bidding for lower-priced works in their concentrated and hardly less successful threesession marathon session on 12 May, with the contemporary art offering exceeding expectations by totalling $218.3m. Here, notably but hardly surprisingly, Robert Colescott’s monumental and satirical George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook of 1975 had a star turn (Fig. 2). A swingeing indictment of racism and inequality in American society, it was claimed by the projected Lucas Museum of Narrative Art for $15.3m. The PakistaniAmerican Salman Toor’s The Arrival sailed 10 times over its estimate to achieve $867,000.
The session began with a staple of largely American modernist greats from the collection of Anne Marion, most of which sold on target. Artist records were found for Richard Diebenkorn, Kenneth Noland and Larry Rivers, fuelling the sale’s total of $157.2m. Diebenkorn’s massive Ocean Park #40 had been bought in 1990 for $880,000 and now sold for $27.3m. Closing proceedings was a somewhat mixed bag, a 34-lot Impressionist and Modern Art offering where five bidders forced the price of Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas to $70.4m, but a lower than anticipated $19.9m was found for a magisterial Cézanne, Nature morte; pommes et poires. The three sales totalled $597m.
This last sale included Childe Hassam’s Flags on 57th Street, Winter 1918, deaccessioned by The New York Historical Society. It appeared to sell on a single bid for a disappointing $12.3m. At Sotheby’s American Art sale on 19 May, no fewer than 17 paintings were consigned from the Newark Museum, most controversially Thomas Cole’s The Arch of Nero (1846). Cole drew an explicit analogy between the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the current failure of the American Republic, dressing his figures in this idyllic landscape in red, white and blue. An open letter by art professionals argued that, as an ever-relevant commentary on the corruption of the founding ideal of the American nation, the painting belonged in a public institution. The Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation, which acquires American masterpieces in order to place them on longterm loan to major museums, was of the same mind, and bought the painting for $988,000, well over estimate. From 2 July it will be on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A Mary Cassatt, the latest in a long line of recent deaccessions by the Brooklyn Museum, was similarly acquired for $1.6m. It is destined for the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In Edinburgh, meanwhile, Lyon & Turnbull offered a real rarity – and achieved a new auction record for a work of art sold in Scotland. This was a previously unrecorded 14th-century French ivory casket, one of nine known complete coffrets carved with secular scenes of courtly love (Fig. 1). Several panels illustrate passages from the medieval romance of Tristan and Isolde, and the Arthurian legend of the quest for the Holy Grail. The ‘wild men’ ornamenting the lid are more implicitly erotic. Emerging after four centuries in a house in Aberdeenshire, the piece came to auction on 20 May with a tempting estimate of £30,000– £50,000 and changed hands for £1.5m.