If a painting, drawing or sculpture sold at auction for more than seven times its high estimate, you’d read about it, want to see it and want to know what accounted for the gap. But there’s nothing in the newspapers I’ve seen this morning about the silver punch bowl that fetched a record-smashing $5.9 million at Sotheby’s yesterday. The previous record for American silver was $775,750, set twice, once in 2001 and once in 2002. This is the second highest price ever paid for any piece of silver at auction, Sotheby’s said.

Yesterday’s lot was Punch Bowl by Cornelius Kierstede, made in New York between 1700 and 1710, estimated to sell at $400,000 to $800,000.

So what happened? What did the buyers — two at the end, but six at the beginning — know, or believe, that Sotheby’s experts didn’t? Anyone know?

Here’s a picture of the bowl and here’s Sotheby’s description:

The bowl has descended in the family of Commodore Joshua Loring, whose stately home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the Loring-Greenough House, has been preserved as an historic site.  A Royalist, Loring abandoned his residence in August 1774 to take refuge in Boston, and the family emigrated to London in 1776.  According to tradition, the bowl was hidden in a well on the property during the Revolution.  Retrieved by the family, it descended quietly with them in England, completely unknown, until the owners sent a grainy photograph to Sotheby’s London silver department in March of 2009.

It weighs about four pounds and it in “amazing condition,” having never (or rarely) been used, according to a short item in The New York Times’s antiques column last week. A blog called Boston 1775 has more on the bowl (here), but the gap between estimate and price paid suggests there still more we don’t know.

Photo: Courtesy Sotheby’s

 

Thomas Moran, Asher B. Durand, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Hart Benton, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley…those are the kind and caliber of artists whose names have been associated with the collection being assembled by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. You can see the images here.

Here’s another, and it was a bit of a surprise to me: Walton Ford.

This week, the museum announced that it had purchased his 2009 work called The Island, described as a “writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs.”

Size helps: it’s 8 ft by 11.5 ft.

As the press release continues:

The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.

“Thylacines were mysterious terrifying phantoms in the minds of Tasmanian settlers,” Walton Ford said via email. “I wanted to create a delirious image that suggested the thylacine’s doom. The painting could be interpreted as the hallucination of either the man or the beast.”

According to the museum’s website, Alice Walton has purchased a few other contemporary works — one each by James Turrell, Mark di Suvero and Ted Jones.

And so the Crystal Bridges tale gets more and more interesting. Contemporary artists and art dealers could use a big, new, deep-pocketed buyer at the moment; maybe they have a stealth one.

Photo Credit: © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo by Christopher Burke Studio, Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum

Feeling a little low? Ill even? Today Americans for the Arts announced and released its new National Arts Index, and you can see, the latest number isn’t good:

I have several times called on the arts community to produce better statistics — actual, accurate, relevant and up-to-date data (here, here, here and here, for example).

So I’m glad Americans for the Arts is trying something. It devised the National Arts Index by taking into account 76 “equal-weighted, national-level indicators of arts activity.” And the group says that makes it “one of the largest data sets about the arts industries ever assembled.” Americans for the Art intends to make this an annual measure; the first report covers the 11 years from 1998 to 2008.

Along with the index came a 21-page executive summary (here) and a 146-page full report (here). I haven’t had time to read them, but I do intend to look at, at least, the short version. What numbers, their source, and how they are used are important, obviously, and I’d like to know the answers.

Meantime, here are a few conclusions, verbatim:

[Read more…] about How Are The Arts Doing? Not So Well, A New National Arts Index Says

Ukranian billionaire Victor Pinchuk has placed an enormous burden on a Japanese curator name Yuko Hasegawa.

When he announced his $100,000 Pinchuk Prize — aka the Future Generation Art Prize — last month, I complained here that Pinchuk had managed to virtually ignore half the world’s population, namely women. Among the many board members and artist-mentors, he named only one woman, fashion designer/collector Miuccia Prada.

This week, Pinchuk announced the prize’s jury. Among the seven members, again, just one woman — Hasegawa (at right), Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); former Chief Curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

That mix is hardly representative of the art world, and it’s a snub to the talented female curators, museum directors, critics, academics, dealers and collectors that populate the art world. Not to mention female artists.

Let’s hope Hasegawa has a strong voice. She’ll need it among these other jurors:

• Daniel Birnbaum (Sweden) – Director of the Städelschule Art Academy, Frankfurt am Main; Director of the Venice Biennale 2009
• Okwui Enwezor (Nigeria) – Director of Documenta XI; former Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute
• Ivo Mesquita (Brazil) – Chief Curator at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Curator of the 2008 São Paolo Biennial 
• Eckhard Schneider (Germany) – General Director of the PinchukArtCentre       
• Robert Storr (USA) – Dean of the Yale University School of Art; Director of the Venice Biennale 2007
• Ai Weiwei (China) – artist

Artists can apply here until April 18; the winner will be announced in December.

 

If Montclair Art Museum really thought it was taking a big risk to mount Cezanne And American Modernism, the most ambitious, most expensive exhibit in its history, it may develop a taste for gambling.

The show, which ran from Sept. 13 through Jan. 3 (a little less than four months), “far exceeded” the museum’s projections and expectations. Some 30,000 people attended, plus 10,000 in school and adult groups, for a grand total of about 40,000. That was about 360 people per day, on average, vs. a pre-show “push” goal of 190 per day.

The museum’s previous record for an exhibition was 12,000 visitors, plus 5,400 in groups, for Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes, which ran for six months in 2007-08.

The Cezanne crowd was geographically diverse, says museum director Lora Urbanelli. About halfway through the show, the museum had already clocked people from “900 different zip codes,” from states including Connecticut and Maryland.  

Better yet, Montclair’s membership grew 15% during the Cezanne show. Enrollment in the museum’s classes also climbed, and “we set shop records every week,” Urbanelli said.

In fact, she continued, “Cezanne did so well that we brought everyone back to a five-day work week early, in December.” The museum had put staff on a four-day work-week to save money last spring, and at the time Urbanelli warned them that the cutback might last until June of this year. We can all thank Cezanne.

The show (which I reviewed favorably for the Wall Street Journal here) may yet add more to Montclair’s coffers: It is traveling to much bigger Baltimore, where it opens at the Baltimore Museum of Art on Feb. 14, and later to the Phoenix Art Museum, also bigger.

It’s great that Montclair residents — and many others — proved they will turn out for good art, and maybe that they prefer good art to pop culture exhibits. Yes, Cezanne was the draw, but the exhibit contained many more pictures by Americans (like Morgan Russell’s Three Apples, left) than paintings by Cezanne (his Five Apples is on the right), of which there were eighteen.

Urbanelli acknowledges that it is now her challenge to capitalize on the new interest. “We have a responsibility to keep as much energy going, not with blockbuster exhibits necessarily but by creating excitement and interest. We got people in the door to see Cezanne and they learned about Hartley — so we can surprise them. I am thoroughly convinced that we have to think big if we want to survive — and to think differently.”

Amen.

I’ve written about this exhibit here twice before, once a Five Questions for curator Gail Stavitsky (here), and once elaborating on the WSJ review (here).