Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Art Market

The Lock Sells — Very Quickly

Christie’s had John Constable’s “The Lock” on stage at tonight’s auction for just over a minute — and that’s not a plus.

The bidding was started at £17 million, increased by £500,000 increments, and it was all over — two bidders, I think, but it’s hard to tell from viewing online — at £20 million. That was the low estimate, but does not include the premium. I leave that for Christie’s to figure out for us and disclose post-sale.

Why the painting failed to bring more money — and more bids — will have to wait for post-sale analysis. The high estimate was £25 million, and I heard from someone recently in London that “word on the street is that a Russian left a bid of  £25 million.” I’d heard mention of even higher prices. Sometimes rumors like these scare bidders away. Or maybe people don’t like the seller’s motivation.

I watched some other lots sell, and several soared past estimates, though not in the eight-figure range.

 

Norman Rosenthal Quits Thyssen Board, Protesting “Lock” Sale

Well, if you had three luxurious homes, a 125-foot yacht, and an art collection reportedly worth about $1 billion, what would you sell to raise a little cash?

Depends on whom you ask.If you ask Baroness Carmen ‘Tita’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, the answer is John Constable’s The Lock.

If you ask Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions director of the Royal Academy, it’s anything else. On Friday, he quit the board of the Baroness’s museum in Madrid to protest the sale.

The Baroness decided earlier this year that she can live without one of Constable’s most famous paintings and it’s up for sale at Christie’s on Tuesday. Presale estimate?  £20-25 million or about $30- $40 million. The Lock “is one of a celebrated series of six large-scale canvases that also includes “The Hay Wain”, arguably his most famous work that hangs in Britain’s National Gallery in London,” as Reuters says (more details here). Rumors I’ve heard say the price may reach $100 million.

The Lock fetched £10.9 million at Sotheby’s in 1990, when it was purchased by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Not a bad return even at the low end.

Rosenthal, however, called the sale “morally shameful,” and told the Baroness in his resignation letter that she “had no understanding of either art history or art appreciation,” according to London’s Daily Mail.

In response, she told the Mail:  “I cannot afford to keep the painting. People think I am wealthy because I was married to Baron Thyssen. But I have never had a lot of cash because my business is in paintings but the paintings don’t give me any money, they just hang on the walls of the museum for free.” Besides, she said, British paintings do not figure highly in her collection. Most of Thyssen’s collection was sold to the Spanish state, but about 250 works remain in the Baroness’s private collection — including the Constable — and have been lent to Spain for the last 13 years, on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.

“Tita’s” stepdaughter, Francesca Von Habsburg, has also disagreed publicly with the sale. Last week, the Mail said she said that her late father would never have sold it and accused her stepmother of “putting the museum’s international reputation at risk.”

Rosenthal and von Hapsburg say that she doesn’t need the money and/or she should sell other things.

What about those earrings?

Washington’s Constitution Goes Home

No two ways about it, this is a happy-ending story. 

George Washington personal copy of the U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights and dated 1789, which he had annotated, remained at Mount Vernon when he died in 1977, but was inexplicably sold at auction in 1876. Sometime later, the Heritage Foundation of Deerfield, Massachusetts, bought it, but they it sold again at auction in 1964, when it was acquired by an avid Americana collector, Richard Dietrich. On Friday, it was sold by Christie’s on behalf of his estate — and acquired by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, the non-profit that owns and operates Washington’s historic home and museum in Virginia. Back into the library it will go.

The price set a record for an American book or historical document – $9,826,500, including the premium. It was estimated at $2- to $3 million.

The previous record was held by an autograph manuscript of Lincoln’s 1864 electionvictory speech,  sold at Christie’s for $3,442,500 in February 2009. Christie’s says the previous record for a Washington document was $3,218,500 for an autograph letter written in 1787 by him to his nephew Bushrod Washington, on the subject of the ratification of the Constitution, set in December 2009.

Christie’s said the bidding went on for four minutes, and involved “multiple buyers in the room and on the phone.”

The document, it als said, “remains in near-pristine condition, with Washington’s bold signature and his armorial bookplate. Remarkably, in the margins of the Constitution, Washington has added careful brackets and marginal notes. These notations highlight key passages concerning the President’s responsibilities, testifying to Washington’s careful, conscientious approach to his powers and responsibilities in his ground-breaking first term.”

Here’s what the Mount Vernon Ladies had to say.

No mention of who funded the purchase or if the money came out of its own resources, nor could I find that information in other reports of the sale. Bloomberg has a few other details, however.

It’s a good day for the first president.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

 

Chinese Painting Soars To $46 Million, But That’s Not The Story

Last week, an auction in China brought to the fore an artist whose name we probably ought to know: Li Keran.

His Thousands of Hills in A Crimsoned View, which was inspired by a poem written by Mao Zedong and was painted in 1964, fetched $46 million at Beijing Poly.

As Jing Daily, which reported the sale, noted, Li is not a household name even in China, and the work was purchased by “a domestic entrepreneur who began buying art two years ago.” It came, however, from “overseas.”

I know some people say, with apparently good reason, that figures coming out of China are not all that they’re cracked up to be. I also know that we should not judge art by a value determined by the marketplace.

But, I think we ought to know about Li because I tend to agree with something I read recently to The New York Times.  In an article published on Apr. 23, headlined “China Extends Reach Into International Art,” Fan Di’an, director of the National Art Museum of China, was quoted saying: “For the Western point of view, the 20th century is Western art, and the art of Modernism. I don’t think that is fair. These days, when Western scholars discuss modernity, they should also discuss Chinese modernity.”

Some people do know Li. In the ArtPrice report on the 2011 art market, which I reported on here (read the comments — some people dispute numbers coming from China), Li Keran was No. 10 on the “Top Ten Artists,” defined as a global ranking of artists by auction revenue during 2011. Here is that list:

  • Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) – $550m
  • Qi Baishi (1864-1957) – $510m
  • Andy Warhol (1928-1987) – $325m
  • Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – $315m
  • Xu Beihong (1895-1953) – $220m
  • Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010) – $212m
  • Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) – $198m
  • Gerhard Richter (1932) – $175m
  • Francis Bacon (1909-1992) – $129m
  • Li Keran (1907-1989) – $115m

How many of the non-Western artists can you call up an image for?

Regarding Li, here’s what ArtPrice wrote:

Just outside the top 10 last year, Li Keran took tenth place in the 2011 ranking. The sixth Chinese artist and perhaps, so far, the least well-known in the West, with only 5 of his works selling outside Asia in 2011. Although there was no new record for Li Keran last year, he generated his fourth and fifth best results (Landscape in 1979 sold for $5.1 million and Maple woods on Mt. Danxia 1963 fetched $5 million) and his works attract a not particularly selective type of demand: only 13% of his lots failed to sell in 2011. One of the Chinese Moderns, Li Keran mixed traditional ink and accumulations of colours, creating a sense of depth and perspective. His technique reflected his apprenticeship and his mastery of Chinese landscape painting, but also Western influences. The artist’s market is primarily in mainland China where 90% of his revenue is generated. Paintings by the artist seldom travel, and should become increasingly rare on the market, especially after the artist’s widow donated over a hundred paintings to the Chinese government. His progress this year is well deserved considering that in 2001, only 12 years after his death, when the National Museum of Hong Kong organised a major retrospective of his work, Li Keran was already in Artprice’s Top 500… at the 345th place. China’s power on the art market has in effect swept Keran all the way to the Top 10.

Now he does have a record price. It’ll be interesting to see next year’s Top Ten from ArtPrice.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jing Daily

Latin American Art Sales Add Evidence To My Theory

Christie’s sold $27.7 million worth of Latin American art this week. There were 299 lots in the evening and day sales combined, and 84% of them sold by value while 74% sold by lot. Matta achieved a world record price, $5 million for a work, La révolte des contraires (at right), which had been estimated at $1.8 million to $2.5 million.

And there’s more, some evidence for the theory I floated in early May about the contemporary sales — that people are literally buying because they can set a record. Not just conspicuous, but ostentatious consumption, in other words. In the evening sale, 13 new records were set. In the day sale, another 20.

That means that almost 17% of the lots were record-setters. Here’s a list of them. The price numbers are obviously much smaller than those in the contemporary art sales, and a couple of the artists had never sold at auction before, so they were bound to set records unless their works were bought in.

I think some of this money is looking for a safer investment home than the rocky stock markets, as well as buying to show you can. Interestingly, Christie’s also observed that in the evening sale, “Brazilian works performed exceptionally well and were 100% sold.” Brazil’s steamy economy has slowed a little of late.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s