Category: Auctions

What makes the Lempertz picture an odd candidate for being by RHL is that it is on canvas, while all history paintings by Rembrandt and Lievens from their Leiden period are on panel. The figure at the left derives from Rembrandt's painting in Lyon from 1625, which was discovered by Horst Gerson in 1962.

Have to be pedanty with reader above - Lievens Raising of Lazarus is most def on canvas...

This Lempertz painting relates to some sketches in the British Museum attributed to Nicholas Maes which are also thought studies for the National Gallery's Christ blessing the Children by Maes (all of which were formerly attributed to Rembrandt).

There are some sketches attributed to Hoogstraten at the RKD and other sketches (read the British Museum curator notes) that relate more to the Lempertz picture.

A very fine Claes Moeyaert, see comparison [below]... Moeyaert was also a partner of Uylenburgh, RHL's dealer and friend. Background figures show other familiar faces. A daring purchase...

As you know, there's another version in Sheffield.  So is the price difference between Sotheby's portrait and that now in Yorkshire, accepted in lieu in 2004-205 settling £315,000 0f tax, the difference between the original and a replica?

After two consecutive nights of sky’s-the-limit bidding, Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art started out on a high, but quickly fell back to earth, with picky buyers passing up paintings and sculptures by major figures like Rothko, de Kooning and Takashi Murakami.

It has been a tough time for Sotheby’s. On the cusp of the spring auction season, Sotheby’s and Daniel S. Loeb, the activist hedge fund manager, declared a truce in one of the most bitter corporate fights in recent memory. After a long proxy battle, the auction house agreed to give Mr. Loeb and two allies the board seats they had been seeking and to allow his firm, Third Point, to increase its stake to 15 percent.

Officials at Christie’s, Sotheby’s archrival, are said to have used Sotheby’s troubles in the competition to win art to sell this season. If they did, it worked.

The York Avenue auction house had a hard act to follow. On Monday and Tuesday, Christie’s held contemporary art auctions that topped expectations, selling nearly $745 million worth in less than three hours on Tuesday alone. But despite having eight more works than the Christie’s auction, Sotheby’s sale on Wednesday only managed less than half as much, totaling $364.3 million, just above its low $336.7 million estimate. Of the 79 works up for sale, 12 did not sell.

"We've got an economic model which is slightly contradictory [...] Prices seem to set the value. Overpaying is almost the best thing you can do, because you start to define your own market."

The simple geometry of this structure is brought alive by the presence of Newman's active brushwork throughout the inky-black left side. The oil paint that creates this passage, and the 'zip' to its right, has also been allowed to bleed out from under the tape that formerly masked them off, causing craggy edges and an irregular thickness of line that adds to the painting's sense of brooding vitality. The remainder of the canvas is untouched save for the application of a transparent size. The balance of proportions together with the imposing scale of Black Fire I imbue it with a classical stateliness, while the subtle differences between line and texture in each of the vertical elements lends it a sense of energy. This extremely restricted mode of painting was part of Newman's test to himself to create "the living quality of color without the use of color;" that is, a tonal relationship between the black oil paint and exposed canvas that would cause the ground to appear as if it possessed its own sense of light (B. Newman, quoted in "A Conversation: Barnett Newman and Thomas B. Hess," 1966, in J.P. O'Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writing and Interviews, Los Angeles, 1992, p. 277). Black Fire I is certainly a triumphant realization of this aim as the contrast of the raw canvas against the receding depths of black pigment cause it to emanate a glorious soft, flaxen glow that appears to intensify in brightness between the compressed central band. 

For any American history of art undergraduate or post-graduate who takes a survey course in 20C art, Barnett Newman is right up there with Jackson Pollock (and features as such in the Museum of Modern Art, for example).  In other words, a leading figure in the heroic age of abstract painting as defined and created in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.  This is a very American-oriented perspective on the history of art, of course.  His reputation has lasted this long--your trousers may be in jeopardy.

Am in despair that you claim not to have heard of Newman, but also think you are safe from future trouser-eating.

I have heard of Barnett Newman from when I was about 17 on foundation. As your reader says, he’s pretty big in US centric art history terms. You’re going to need the Rennie’s I’m afraid.

What a Barnett Newman or Jeff Koons will be worth in forty years has mostly to do with what is in fashion then and who is buying.  Currently its a runaway train and some of the smart money has jumped off it recently. 

Van Gogh peaked in constant dollar terms about twenty years ago based on Wikipedia  art record data.  The new museums and their contributors are filling collections with contemporary art.  And there is a lot of liquidity around supporting this.  If the liquidity goes or the fashion changes then there go the self defining values.  

Do you prefer your trousers served sweet or savory.

I'd bet on Francis Bacon keeping value over Koons.

I have no opinion on the edibility of your trousers, but don't let the art-guff put you off abstract art such as Barnett Newman's: his work is vastly superior to Jeff Koons's, in my view at least, and art guff is spouted about even about great representative art, possibly even from time to time about van Dyck's!  Although more by academics concerned with "heuristics" and "contextualizing" and "agency" than by dealers including auctioneers, I expect.

Sounds like you missed the Barnett Newman Exhibition at the Tate Modern.  It was in their main exhibition rooms. (2002-3)

What – seriously – would he make of Tate Modern?

At the old Tate, the one that is now Tate Britain, his paintings had their own room until the end of the 1990s, as quiet as a chapel. You can still contemplate them mystically at Tate Modern, but never as purely. Like everything else they must fit into this museum's nervously unpredictable displays and banal "juxtapositions" of past and present.

The mood of this museum is the antithesis of everything Rothko stood for. It's noisy, riotous, and pop-cultural. Teens in the toilets, art lovers crying in the corner. Interactive art was being stressed at the museum at the time the Rothko was attacked. Did the idiotic vandal, who claims to be an artist, somehow gain courage from that?

Really? Surely you're winding us up? Even I've heard of Newman, and I take great pride in my ignorance of modern art. I seem to recall Robert Hughes speaking highly of Vir Heroicus Sublimis in The Shock of the New (though I might be misremembering). I even quite like Newman. Well worth it, if you move the decimal point five or six places.

I think he will continue to be valued as one of the iconic representatives of an iconic movement. But your bet hinges as much on the fate of the super-rich as on the critical fate of Newman. I just read Sotheby's review of the season 1959-60, when a decent Rembrandt sold for the equivalent of £780k.

Thomas Piketty's much-discussed book Capital speculates that without political action the richest of the rich will continue to move further ahead of everyone else, which would imply further forward march of top prices. I'm not convinced by Piketty, but if the richest get richer you might be eating those trousers!

I saw a mention of your blog and thought I'd have a read, but on seeing the Barnett Newman discussion, I'm quite shocked – enough so to feel I should stand up for him.

In response to another commenter, I would have thought Newman would be well know to anyone who had studied Art History, whether in the US or the UK or elsewhere (I was at Edinburgh around the same time you were studying). I sympathise with those who don't find him particularly interesting but you can't claim he doesn't have a place in modern art history. It seems to me very misleading to suggest that he's an unknown, rather like writing off Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin, so I'm hoping to redress the balance a little in your polling.

99.9% of people couldn't begin to reproduce a Van Dyck and even many seemingly simple 20thc abstracts would be impossible to copy perfectly. 

But give any vaguely sane adult a brush and two pots of paint (beige and black) and they would be able to accurately reproduce the Newman maybe half an hour at the most.

Is there any point even saying this and isn't that the point - it is just MAD!!!!

Oh dear.  Predictably, I hadn't heard of him, but Mrs W is absolutely SHOCKED that you hadn't.

If I may have a second comment.  We have two discussions here. One regarding Barnett Newman and one discussing art prices.  At the intersection of these Newman achieves remarkable prices based on his name, his position in current art,  two very affluent bidders, and price expectations rather than any refinement of style.  Prices in general depend on the ability and desire of buyers.  If you are buying a Jeff Koons to put in your casino [Steve Wynn bought Koons' Popeye at auction yesterday for $28m] it has an advertising value which is greater if you paid more for it.  

The 1960 Rembrandt price mentioned is consistent with current Rembrandt prices if US inflation is applied and well above current prices if UK inflation is applied especially as compared with other prime assets like London or NYC residential property.

[...] actually I think you are not likely to have to eat your trousers but I am fascinated that Tate Modern's  retrospective of the paintings, sculpture and works on paper of Barnett Newman's works never crossed your radar screen because it made as much of an impression on me as the exhibitions there of Warhol or Lucien Freud and is therefore one of my all time favourite Tate Modern exhibitions; unlike for example the over-hyped Matisse cut-outs. Looking back I am surprised to see that the exhibition was as long ago as 2002.

Not sure where your correspondent is getting his/her data, but £40k in 1960 = $112k USD at exchange rates then prevalent. That's equivalent to $871k applying US inflation rates.

I'd say the 1960 Rembrandt must be worth comfortably seven figures in sterling today. Best comparison is probably the Otterloo portrait (same period/size/format), which I think went for about £20m. The Norton Simon one isn't as attractive, but I can't believe it would make less than half that today. 

Incidentally the comparison with other trophy assets is precisely my point - that today wealth is more unequally distributed and the very rich have more liquid wealth that they're willing to spend on trophy assets, so scarce things that they desire are worth relatively more.

Isn't it funny how misunderstood  and neglected Duchamp was/is especially in the US.

His cynical and witty observations of a declining interest in what Andre Malraux called : La Promesse de Bonheur of the pictorial arts, were succinctly expressed in his en  prevision du bras casse, the snow shovel whose objet trouve title was translated correctly as 'In Advance of a  Broken Arm', i.e. an ABC for new pathways towards future  artforms. 

Instead  this was taken as full license to Anything Goes as Cole Porter wrote,  because artists mistakenly adopted  his wry comment that their  authority determined what is art and what it is not. The elitist character  of much of what is produced today is in direct opposition to Duchamp's  intentions and by its deliberate exclusivity hopes to obtain  significance.

Sotheby’s said on Monday that it had ended its fight with the hedge fund mogul Daniel S. Loeb, agreeing to add his three director nominees to its board.

The last-minute settlement – reached a day before investors were scheduled to vote on the board – represents a clear win for Mr. Loeb, the veteran activist investor who has waged a monthslong fight against Sotheby’s in a bid to shake up the 270-year-old auction house.

The fight had become one of the biggest and most intense battles between a company and an activist this year, with each side hurling insults at the other.

Under the terms of their agreement, Sotheby’s will expand its board by three, to 15, to take on the activist’s full slate of nominees: Mr. Loeb himself, the restructuring expert Harry Wilson and the former investment banker Olivier Reza.

And Mr. Loeb’s firm, Third Point, will be allowed to raise its stake to 15 percent from its current level of 10 percent. The hedge fund had sued Sotheby’s in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, arguing that a “poison pill” defense plan that limited him to a 10 percent stake while letting mutual funds acquire up to a 20 percent stake was unfair.

The new regulations, part of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, state that dealers who enter into a legitimate agreement must provide details of the contract to the auction house, including the names of the parties involved, the lots being bid on and a description of the arrangement. This could include a percentage breakdown of the financial stakes. Previously, dealers only had to notify the auction house that an agreement was in place, or submit a copy of the contract. New provisions also mean that prosecutors no longer have to prove that members of an auction ring have acted “dishonestly”.

Some in the trade say that dealers may be reluctant to disclose details of such contracts, particularly in the light of the encroachment of auction houses in the private sale market. “Dealers may only agree to act in conjunction with one another immediately before the sale, and possibly only by oral agreement, so for practical reasons it may be difficult to disclose the agreement in time,” [art lawyer Pierre] Valentin says. He says that larger dealers may be at greater risk of prosecution, because it would be more difficult for them to prove that they could not afford a work outright and so any joint agreement might be seen as anti-competitive.

The major auction houses would not be drawn on the number of joint acquisition agreements they receive, but a spokesman for Bonhams said that the practice is “far from unusual”. Dealers contacted by The Art Newspaper would not comment on the matter.

The anti-competitive behaviour which is being opposed with new rules only served to lower auction prices, benefitting all buyers at the expense of the sellers and the auction firms’ commissions and premia.  It might have helped the auction firms convince some sellers that private sales would yield higher prices because of this “market imperfection.”

The result of the new rules, if any result, will be to increase auction prices.  Also, apparently dealers, one step ahead, can still form rings for private sales.

For more than a decade, Tobias Meyer was Sotheby’s field general in the consignment war. A slight man with a square jaw and a magnificent head of hair, he was an outsize figure and the keeper of some of the house’s most important relationships. [...]

Meyer’s overnight disappearance offers another potential area of intrigue. The timing of his resignation led some to conclude that he and his salary were offered up as a sacrifice to Sotheby’s angry shareholders. Though his compensation was never disclosed, it is believed to have been enormous. “They certainly did invest very heavily in keeping him, and keeping him happy,” says David Nash. But Loeb has denied that Meyer was meant to be the target of his pressure. Though no great administrator, Meyer was an ambitious dealmaker in a company that Loeb says should be making bigger deals, and Loeb has told some that he views the departure as a sign Sotheby’s isn’t capable of retaining top talent.

A source familiar with Meyer’s thinking says he had become frustrated with the public company’s bureaucracy and was attempting to negotiate a more influential place in the hierarchy, something like a creative-director role. But Ruprecht wasn’t interested in giving Meyer the power he wanted. Since leaving, Meyer is said to have expressed a desire to become “invisible,” and he recently put his Manhattan condo on the market, for $17 million. His mental map of the world’s art treasures should serve him well as a private dealer. There are, however, those who think that if Loeb were calling the shots at Sotheby’s, Meyer might return in some sort of rainmaking role.

It’s official! The art market has reached a new peak, and it’s good, old-fashioned painting, figurative and abstract, that’s driving it.

London’s auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales over the past two weeks have amassed a record £709.5 million, a 39 per cent increase on last February and a 29 per cent increase over the last highest combined totals for these sales in London, achieved in June 2008. In dollar terms, they breached the $1 billion mark for the first time, reaching $1.2 billion.

The present lot shows Banksy’s lighthearted attitude as he attaches googly eyes to one of the most famous paintings in art history. Banksy recreates Rembrandt’s well known Self Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669) and covers the expressive eyes, perhaps what Rembrandt’s portraits are best known for, with googly eyes. This simple act undermines the painting itself and encourages the viewer to question the nature of art, creating a piece that is not only witty but visually very amusing. Poignantly, in this case Banksy has altered a work in a similar fashion to his grafti on London’s buildings. However, this practical joke is not without forethought. His appropriation of Rembrandt’s nationally beloved self portrait invites the viewer to question why this act seems so audacious, why this painting is valued so highly and, foremost, what constitutes great art. As a street artist, Banksy is no stranger to graffiti being deemed ‘low art’ or even ‘vandalism’. Consequently, he aims to subvert what we consider ‘high art’ by taking a famous painting, catching the viewer’s interest with attention grabbing googly eyes and creating a piece that is entertaining, thought provoking and progressive.

Lucien Smith’s Feet in the Water, 2012, is part of a series of highly acclaimed rain paintings from the rising talent, whose work is becoming greatly sought after. They represent abstraction, emotion and nature with simple figurative gestures which mimic the rain, an instantly recognisable element fraught with symbolic meaning. Smith ironically pokes at this notion whilst depicting the beauty of the rain and, indeed, nature itself. The rain series was created when Smith, distracted and enclosed by the city, moved upstate. This isolation from the city allowed him to work on a larger scale and, most importantly, reconnect with nature, which Smith used as a catalyst for his art. Additionally, the time spent upstate encouraged Smith to work with different tools, in this case, the fire extinguisher. His innovative use of an old fashioned fire extinguisher filled with paint to spray his canvases is especially effective in this particular case as it physically imitates precipitation with falling droplets of paint. The effect is original and representative yet abstract, referencing the artists Smith was inspired by, from Jackson Pollock to Morris Louis. Rain as a subject matter is not only indicative of his appreciation of nature; it also illustrates a larger metaphor. Smith explains, “When I was looking through comics, I’d run across the same image of characters trapped in the rain. It’s like a universal symbolic image of being sad and alone.” (the artist Lucien Smith and Bill Powers, purple NEWS, 2012) For this reason, Smith progresses towards the use of light blue paint, as in this particular lot, because of the allusions to sadness. Furthermore, Smith noted that rain is often illustrated in light blue, which encouraged him to start using this colour. Consequently, the piece is representative of rain both physically and allegorically, whilst retaining a beautifully simplistic pictorial space.

Polish officials accepted a painting at the Polish consulate in New York that had been stolen from the National Museum of the City of Warsaw in 1944 on Thursday.

“National heritage is a crucial element of every national identity and as such, stolen pieces of history should be returned to their rightful place,” said Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, Consul General of the Republic of Poland at the repatriation ceremony. The painting “St. Philip Baptizing a Servant of Queen Kandaki” by German painter Johann Conrad Seekatz, was looted during the Second World War.

Even before the war, the painting was misidentified as “St. Philip Baptizes the Ethiopian Eunuch” by Dutch artist J.C. Saft, and in 2006 it was sold for $24,000 as “Manner of Theobald Michau St. Philip Baptizing the Ethiopian Eunuch.” Doyle New York, an auction and appraisal company, sold it to Rafael Valls Ltd. gallery in London in October 2006.

The Poland government recognized the piece as one of its lost articles and worked with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to recover it. In 2012 it was verified as a stolen piece of Polish art and Rafael Valls, the current owner, agreed to forfeit it.

Cracked Egg (Magenta) plays with the fragile nature of the egg to explore themes of the ephemeral and the eternal. The fragments of shell emphasize the fusion of opposites, appearing simultaneously organic and synthetic, fragile and resilient. To contrast the vulnerability of the eggshell, Koons managed to perfect casting techniques that result in a mirror-sheen surface that is virtually indestructible. As the artist explains, “I was interested in the dialogue with nature and aspects of the eternal, the here and now, the physical with the ephemeral... the symmetrical and asymmetrical, a sense of the fertile …” 

The Koons Cracked Egg guff would have been even better if they had used "dialogue" as a verb.  Such a missed opportunity on their part.

Reminded by your piece on Koons of this (below) from Lear.  As is often the case, the Fool is wise: as he says earlier in the same scene, 'Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out....'  It's worth noting that, were one available, you could buy a First Folio for significantly less than a Koons 'Egg' (cracked or not).

King Lear Act 4 Scene 1

Fool; Give me an egg, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.

KING LEAR; What two crowns shall they be?

Fool; Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away.