Hawking the Auctions: An Irreverent Photo Essay

The most fun about auction press previews is that interested potential bidders start filtering in at the same time, so you get to see the sales specialists romancing potential clients.

This was Lisa Dennison's first chance to work the room for a major sale since she defected from her directorship of the Guggenheim Museum to become a Sotheby's rainmaker.

Here she is in a starring role on the auction house's podcast (running continuously at the presale exhibition), telling us how much she had hoped to show Koons' "Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)" at the museum. "But the show kept getting postponed and postponed and postponed. So when I came to Sotheby's, it gave me great joy to know that it has been consigned." Such joy is fleeting.

She certainly knows her way around the Koons, but how about the Corot that she is discussing, below, with potential clients?

And here's Sotheby's veteran John Tancock, the auction world's reigning Rodin expert, called over to share his connoisseurship about posthumous casts (which, for this artist, are widely accepted by the art market and by major museums). This example of "The Thinker" was cast in the early 1920s, not long after the sculptor's death. Tancock made sure to note the piece's previous owner---Laurance Rockefeller.

Speaking of Rockefeller provenance, you'd think that after selling David's Rothko for $72.8 million last season, Sotheby's would have gotten the cataloguing of this season's Rothko right. Alex Rotter of Sotheby's contemporary department had told Bloomberg: "We were offered Rothkos right, left and center." And also upside down, it seems:

[Please note this work is reproduced upside down in the catalogue.]

David Norman, Impressionist/modern chairman of Sotheby's, noted that he had received many compliments about "Sotheby's Blue," the new color chosen for the walls by senior vice president Emmanuel Di-Donna:

Afterwards, just as I had once been attuned to Christo Gates Orange, I started noticing Sotheby's Blue all over the place---a row of dresses in the window display of a Madison Avenue boutique near the Whitney...

...and, what's that? It's on every front door of every apartment in my own building!

Could it be that Di-Donna resides in my New Jersey apartment complex?

Wait...stop the presses! This just in from Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London:

Many thanks for alerting us that Signac's"Cap Canaille, Cassis" [about to be auctioned by Christie's] is still on our website even though the loan of the painting ended some three months ago. There's supposed to be a system in place to coordinate such things but, as you remind us, it still takes eternal vigilance.

It certainly does.

Okay, so you think these auctions are very important, and you want to us get serious. For that, I refer you to Linda Sandler in today's Bloomberg. Just note (which Sandler doesn't) that the third quarter is traditionally a loser for the auction houses, because there are so few sales scheduled then. (Their officials are all off at the Hamptons, offering big guarantees for major fall consignments.)