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THE Modern evening auction at Sotheby’s in New York totalled $282.9 million. Claude Monet’s Coin du bassin aux nympheas was the top lot of the evening. It made $50.8 million. Frida Kahlo’s Diego y yo made $35.5 million, a new record both for the artist and for Latin American art.
The Macklowe Collection made a total $676.1 million at a white glove sale at Sotheby’s in New York last night. Highlights included Mark Rothko’s No. 7 which sold for $82.5 million, Albert Giacometti’s Le Nez which achieved $78.4 million, Jackson Pollock’s Number 17, 1951 which more than doubled its low estimate to achieve $61.2 million, a new artist record, and Cy Twombly’s monumental Untitled which sold for $58.9 million. The 35 pieces belonged to real estate mogul Harry Macklowe and his former wife Linda. The pair were told to sell the collection and split the proceeds during their 2018 divorce trial.
Major works by Jack Yeats, Paul Henry, Roderic O’Conor, Sir William Orpen, Louis le Brocquy and Colin Middleton at de Veres on November 23 will kick off a sizzling winter season of Irish art auctions in Dublin and London. A very fine sale has been put together by de Veres with works they claim could grace any national collection. Viewing gets underway at Kildare St. on November 18 and the full catalogue is online now. A still life by Roderic O’Conor is signed and dated 1921 in which year it was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. O’Conor still lives from these years were well received and were acquired by the French State (now the Musee d’Orsay), Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Somerset Maugham, Alden Brooks, Charles Hall Thorndike and the Contemporary Art Society. This one is estimated at €150,000-€250,000. Another highlight with a similar estimate is William Orpen’s After the Ball, a work of imagination based on the Venice Carnivale.
There are four oils by Paul Henry with Lakeside Cottages and Fishing Boats, Dugort each estimated at €200,000-€300,000. The auction features an across the board selection at varying price points.
A Welcome by Jack B Yeats will highlight Sotheby’s offerings at their flagship Modern British and Irish art sale in London on November 23. Paintings of horses by Yeats, like this one, are particularly sought after. The auction will be followed by an online sale of Irish art on the same day. Over 70 works from Sotheby’s upcoming Irish art auction are on view at the RHA in Dublin this weekend. Viewing times are from 10 am to 5 pm today and 10 am to 3 pm tomorrow. The sale at Sotheby’s – supported by a global marketing campaign – will include property from the collection of Sir Michael Smurfit.
Four Pears by William Scott (1913-1989) from 1976 leads a strong selection of work by Irish artists at Bonhams Modern British and Irish art sale at New Bond St., London on November 24. Estimated at €180,000-€290,000 it has not been seen in public since 1980 when it was exhibited at Irish Art in the Seventies: The International Connection. Kieran O’Boyle, Bonhams representative in Ireland said: “This sale has a great representation of high quality works by Irish artists – from William Scott’s exquisite and subtle Four Pears to an archetypal Paul Henry and John Luke’s nostalgia filled Mountain Composition. Meantime Bonhams Modern British and Irish art sale in Knightsbridge on November 23 offers works by Patrick Hennessy, Pauline Bewick, Arthur Maderson, Graham Knuttel, Norah McGuinness, Markey Robinson and Augustus John. Whyte’s sale of Important Irish Art takes place in Dublin on November 29. The James Adam winter sale of Important Irish Art takes place on December 8.
HERE is a video on Monet’s Coin de basin aux nympheas from 1918 which will lead Sotheby’s Modern evening sale in New York on November 16. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR $50,820,000
Banksy’s Trolley Hunters – a typically powerful, witty and prophetic critique of society’s often irrational predilection for processed and packaged products – will make its auction debut at Sotheby’s Now evening sale in New York on November 18. It is estimated at $5-7 million. Painted over 15 years ago as an indictment against the excesses of consumerist society, the painting has arguably never been as relevant as it is today, with the disruption to the global supply chain having exposed the fragility of our fast-paced consumerist eco-system. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR $6.6 MILLION
The first Penny Black postage stamp comes up at Sotheby’s Treasures sale in London on December 7. The world’s first postage stamp is part of a unique document from the archive of British postal reformer Robert Wallace. It is dated April 10, 1840 and estimated at £4-£6 million.
This small Penny Black – a pristine impression, unused, and from plate 1a (the very first printed sheet) and lettered A-I – represents the birth of a device that would be central to the birth of mass communications across the globe for more than a century and a half and that still has not been completely supplanted by newer technologies. Rediscovered nearly three decades ago but not fully recognised until much more recently, the stamp’s identification began when British businessman and philatelist Alan Holyoake came into the possession of The Wallace Document, to which the stamp is attached, almost ten years ago. Holyoake was to instigate a three-year research project – which culminated with the document being issued with certificates of authenticity from The Royal Philatelic Society, London (2016) and The British Philatelic Association (2015), and its subsequent exhibition at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington DC.
‘The Wallace Document’, which will be offered for sale at Sotheby’s, is considered the most important piece of philatelic history in the world. It is from a now dispersed personal scrap-album assembled by MP Robert Wallace, and brings together two highly important philatelic artefacts: the Penny Black and a proof of the ‘Mulready Stationery’ that had been commissioned by the government as an alternative means to prepay postage. Both were given to him in thanks by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Francis Baring, for everything that Wallace had done to overhaul the postal system and bring these innovations to fruition.
L.S. Lowry’s only known painting of an auction room is to make its debut at Sotheby’s in London on November 23. The Auction is estimated at £1.2-£1.8 million. The bustling scene characteristic of the artist is populated by familiar characters, and even a dog on a lead. The Auction transports the viewer into the centre of the action, with the auctioneer on the rostrum poised to bring the gavel down. As early as the 1920s, Lowry touched on the subject of auctions with a drawing titled Selling Up the Old Antiques Shop. Another painting, Jackson’s Auction and Saleroom from 1952, depicts the exterior of the auction house in Manchester, with furniture amassed outside. In The Auction, this longstanding interest comes to its apex, and the viewer is shown the full glory of a sale in action for the first and only time
Executed on a large-scale in 1958, the work has never been offered at auction, and was acquired by the present owners over two decades ago. It was exhibited at Lowry’s landmark retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1976 and was last shown at AMNUA in Nanjing in China in 2014. It will be a highlight at the Modern British Art auction.
One of the last great Botticelli masterpieces in private hands will come up at Sotheby’s in New York next January during Masters Week. The Man of Sorrows – which portrays the resurrected Christ – is a late work produced at a time when the artist had come under the influence of fanatical Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. It has an estimate of in excess of $40 million. It comes to market following the record-breaking sale of Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel at Sotheby’s last January. It made $92.2 million.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 28, 2021)
Boat, Connemara by Lucian Freud comes up at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening sale in London on October 14 with an estimate of £750,000-£950,000. It is one of two works the artist produced while in Ireland for three weeks in August 1948. It appeared on the market for the first time in more than 50 years at Christie’s in 2012 with an estimate of £200,000-300,000 and sold for £657,250. It is being sold by the owner who acquired it then. UPDATE: THIS WAS UNSOLD
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 30, 2012)
The international autumn selling season gets underway in earnest this month. Major auction houses have been issuing previews of what to expect. Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening sale in London on October 14, to coincide with the Frieze and Frieze Masters art fairs, will be headed by what they cheerfully describe as the most famous artwork of the 21st century, Banksy’s Love is in the Bin. Global news and instant art history happened when Girl with a Balloon was shredded just after the hammer came down on a million pound bid in 2018. It was then authenticated by Banksy and given a new title of Love is in the Bin. The new owner decided the wise thing to do was bank on Banksy and kept it. It now comes to market with an estimate of £4 million – £6 million (€4.67 million – €7.01 million).
This is the dawning of the age of minorities and in what will be an undoubted shot in the arm for black transgender women artists MGM resorts will sell their Picasso’s in Las Vegas on October 23 and build a new collection with a focus of diversity. The art market of the future will feature artists from a more diverse range of backgrounds, particularly from groups who have been discriminated against. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Because it Hurts the Lungs (1986) will be a highlight at Christie’s live and livestreamed 20th/21st Century evening sale including Thinking Italian in London on October 15. The title of the work is taken from a cryptic quote by Leonardo: “Why the thunderbolt kills a (man and) does not wound him, and if the man blew his nose he would not die. Because it hurts the lungs”. Winston Churchill, whose Tower at Koutoubia Mosque” sold for a record £8.3 million in March, will highlight Christie’s Modern British art evening auction in London on October 20. The Bridge at Aix en Provence was gifted to the Swiss paint manufacturer Willy Sax, who supplied Churchill with his artistic materials and would become a lifelong friend. It is now estimated at £1.5-£2.5 million (€1.75-€2.92 million).As part of a global expansion Bonhams has just opened its first dedicated saleroom on the Continent at Rue de la Paix in the heart of the luxury district in Paris. There will be a sale of Antiquities next Thursday (October 7). This will be followed one week later by a sale of Post War and Contemporary art.
