The three major auction houses sold 1,980 artworks for a total close to USD 1.7 billion during this Auction season through 16 sales. Under an uncertain macro-economic environment, most market players feared the art market would slow down considerably. Indeed, if the total turnover generated this auction season appears to be substantially lower than the two previous seasons, it is mostly due to the absence of major master pieces breaking auction records.

It is undeniable that the art market has slowed down, and that prices have been adjusted from previous high, but exceptional sales management from all auction houses resulted in a very successful auction season, more diverse than ever, by the number of lots sold, and by the number of artists presented.

 

Table of Content

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1.Key Figures & Takeaways
2. Auction Houses Market Shares
3. Top 10 Lots
4. Top 10 Artists
5. Top 10 Performers
6. Christie’s Auctions
7. Sotheby’s Auctions
8. Phillips Auctions

 

1. Key Figures & Takeaways

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1. Key Figures

Turnover: USD 1,791,058,478

This Auction Season generated a turnover just shy of USD 1.8 billion. This compares to USD 3.2 billion in November 2022 (the sale of the Paul Allen Collection generated over USD 1.6 billion), and to USD 2.7 billion generated in May 2022 (which featured some major record-breaking artworks)

# Lots sold: 1,980

If this season totals substantially lower than the two previous ones, it shows a record number of lots sold. At 1,980 lots sold through the various sales, it compares with 1,603 lots sold in November 2022, and 1,449 lots in May 2022. The market is substantially increasing its offering in the middle market.

Sell-Through rate: 85.9%

The very strong sell-through rate reflects extremely well curated auctions, with a relatively high level of lots withdrawn, and a high level of lots sold within the lower range of estimates.

 

2. Private Collections

3 Evening Sales & 1 Day Sale
Turnover: USD 498,664,320
27.8% of Total
—–
234 Lots sold
Average Price: USD 2,131,044
Adjusted Average Price: USD 5,050,565
(excluding the Gerald Fineberg Day Sale)
Sell-Through Rate: 95.1%

Christie’s dedicated two evening sales to private collections: the S.I. Newhouse and the Gerald Fineberg Private collections, and added one day sale for the latter. Sotheby’s presented the Mo Ostin Collection ahead of its Modern Evening sale. They realized very strong sell-through rates. Christie’s also included some masterpieces from the Paul G Allen collection within its 20th Century Evening sale.

2. Evening Sales

6 Evening Sales
Turnover: USD 1,004,847,650
56.1% of Total
—–
188 Lots sold
Average Price: USD 5,344,934
Sell-Through Rate: 87.4%

Christie’s presented two evening sales: 20th Century and 21st Century evening sales. Sotheby’s presented three evening sales: the Modern Evening Sale, the Now Evening Sale just ahead of the Contemporary Evening sale, whereas Phillips presented one evening sale. Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale achieved the highest total of this season close to USD 330 million, notably thanks to the inclusion of some works from the Paul G Allen Collection, some of the record breaking Georgia O’Keffe for example.

3. Day Sales

6 Day Sales
Turnover: USD 287,546,508
16.1% of Total
—–
1,268 Lots sold
Average Price: USD 226,772
Sell-Through Rate: 84.1%

 

4. Price segmentation

244 Lots sold over USD 1 million
Turnover: USD 1,313,231,600
71.6% of Total

This compares to 336 lots (USD 2.99 billion / 94% of total) in November 2022, and to 275 lots (USD 2.45 billion / 89.6% of total) in May 2022.

37 Lots sold over USD 10 million
Turnover: USD 829,778,800
45.2% of Total

This compares to 54 lots (USD 1.9 billion / 60% of total) in November 2022, and to 55 lots (USD 1.7 billion / 64% of total) in May 2022.

5 Lots sold over USD 40 million
Turnover: USD 247,916,500
13.8% of Total

In May 2022, 16 lots sold for over USD 40 million, contributing over USD 1 billion to the total, whereas 5 lots sold for over USD 100 million in November 2022 contributing over USD 600 million to the total.

 

 

2. Market Shares

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1. Christie’s

Turnover: USD 921,778,966
# Lots sold: 761
Sell-Through Rate: 88.5%
Top Lot: USD 67,110,000
51.5% market share

Christie’s emerges as clear leader for this season with over USD 921 million turnover spread into 4 evening sales: 20th Century and 21st Century Evening Sales and 2 collections (S.I. Newhouse, and Gerald Fineberg), and 4 day sales: Post-War and Contemporary Art, Impressionist and Modern works on paper, Impressionist and Modern Art, and The Gerald Fineberg Collection Part II.

2. Sotheby’s

Turnover: USD 761,058,147
# Lots sold: 615
Sell-Through Rate: 84.1%
Top Lot: USD 53,188,500
42.5% Market Share

Sotheby’s sold 146 less artworks than Christie’s to achieve a turnover just above USD 760 million.

 

3. Phillips

Turnover: USD 108,221,365
# Lots sold: 314
Sell-Through Rate: 83.3%
Top Lot: USD 9,724,500
6% Market Share

 

 

3. Top 10 Lots

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Together, the top 10 lots of this auction season generated USD 403,347,500, which represents 22.5% of the total auction turnover for this season. This compares to USD 957,915,500 in November 2022 which constituted over 30% of total turnover.

#1. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
USD 67,110,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), 1983
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas mounted on wooden supports, in three parts
Overall: 68×141 inches (172.7 x 358 cm.)

#2. Gustav Klimt

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 53,188,500

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862 – 1918)
Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee), 1901-02
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 100.5 cm (39 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches)

#3. Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
USD 43,535,000

HENRI ‘LE DOUANIER’ ROUSSEAU (1844-1910)
Les Flamants, 1910
Oil on canvas
113.8 x 162 cm (44 7/8 x 63 1/4 inches)

#4. Rene Magritte

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 42,273,000

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)
L’Empire des lumières, 1951
Oil on canvas
80.3 x 65.7 cm (31 5/8 x 25 7/8 inches)

#5. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 41,810,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Nature morte à la fenêtre, 1932
Oil on canvas
129.7 x 162.3 cm (51 x 63 7/8 inches)

#6. Francis Bacon

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 34,622,500

FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992)
Self-Portrait, 1969
Oil on canvas
14×12 inches (35.6 x 30.5 cm)

#7. Louise Bourgeois

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 32,804,500

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911 – 2010)
Spider, 1996
Bronze
133x263x249 inches (337.8 x 668 x 632.5 cm)
This work is number 1 from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof

#8. Willem de Kooning

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 30,885,000

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
Orestes, 1947
24 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (61.3 x 91.8 cm)

#9. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 28,634,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Now’s the Time, 1985
Acrylic and oilstick on wood
92 1/4 x 93 1/4 inches (234.3 x 236.9 cm)

#10. Alberto Giacometti

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 28,485,000

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901 – 1966)
Femme Leoni, 1947
Bronze
Height: 153.2 cm (60 1/4 inches)
Conceived in 1947 and cast in bronze by Susse Fondeur in 1960
The present work is part of an edition of eight bronzes cast by Susse between 1957 and 1965

4. Top 10 Artists

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This auction season is more spread-out that previous ones. The top 10 artists contribute USD 666 million to the total turnover (around 37%). Louise Bourgeois and Ed Ruscha are somewhat new to those leading seats in the charts. Andy Warhol, who usually leads the charts is not in the Top 10 even though 23 lots by the artist sold for a total of just over USD 16 million.

This ranking excludes the artists for whom only one painting was sold at a record level such as Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau or Gustav Klimt.

With 9 sold lots, Wayne Thiebaud achieved over USD 24.8 million turnover, whereas Yayoi Kusama realized USD 19.3 million with 12 lots sold.

#1. Pablo Picasso

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Turnover: USD 168,750,800
19 Lots
9.4% market share

With 19 lots sold, Pablo Picasso is the artist who generated the highest turnover for this auction season, just under USD 169 million. This compares to USD 115 million for 18 lots in November 2022, and to USD 194 million for 31 lots in May 2022.

 

#1. Nature morte à la fenêtre, 1932

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 41,810,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Nature morte à la fenêtre, 1932
Oil on canvas
129.7 x 162.3 cm (51 x 63 7/8 inches)

#2. L’Arlesienne, 1937

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 24,560,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
L’Arlésienne (Lee Miller), 1937
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
72.7 x 59.8 cm (28 7/8 x 23 1/2 inches)

#3. Femme nue couchee jouant avec un chat, 1964

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 21,240,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat, 1964
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
130 x 194.7 cm (51 1/8 x 76 5/8 inches)

#4. Femme au chapeau jaune, 1939

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 15,846,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Femme au chapeau jaune (Dora Maar), 1939
Oil on canvas
46.4 x 38.1 cm (18 1/4 x 15 inches)

#5. Cafetiere, tasse, et pipe, 1911

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 11,335,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Cafetière, tasse et pipe, 1911
Oil on canvas
46×27 cm (18 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches)

#6. Nu devant la glace, 1932

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 11,000,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Nu devant la glace, 1932
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
27×35 cm (10 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches)

#7. Buste d’homme laure, 1969

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 8,460,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Buste d’homme lauré, 1969
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
115.7 x 88.8 cm (45 5/8 x 35 inches)

#8. Paysage, 1965

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 7,803,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Paysage, 1965
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
128.3 x 162 cm (50 1/2 x 63 3/4 inches)

#9. Tête de femme au chignon, 1952

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 7,320,000

Pablo Picasso – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 4 May 2023 | Phillips

#2. Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Turnover: USD 118,890,200
11 Lots
6.6% Market Share

More than half of the turnover realized by Jean-Michel Basquiat is generated through one sale.

#1. El Gran Espectaculo, 1983

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
USD 67,110,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), 1983
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas mounted on wooden supports, in three parts
Overall: 68×141 inches (172.7 x 358 cm.)

#2. Now’s the Time, 1983

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 28,634,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Now’s the Time, 1985
Acrylic and oilstick on wood
92 1/4 x 93 1/4 inches (234.3 x 236.9 cm)

#3. Moon View, 1984

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 10,790,400

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Moon View, 1984
Acrylic, colored Xerox paper collage and oilstick on canvas
66 x 60 1/4 inches (167.6 x 153 cm)

#4. Brain, 1987

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 5,616,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Brain, 1985
Acrylic, oilstick, Xerox paper collage and gesso on twenty-seven wood blocks with bootblack stand
Overall: 48 x 43 1/2 x 17 inches (122 x 110.5 x 45.7 cm)

#5. Untitled (Head), 1982

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 3,327,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Untitled (Head), 1982
Oilstick on paper
23 1/8 x 26 inches (58.7 x 66 cm)

#6. Untitled (Cartoon Dog), circa 1983

#3. Rene Magritte

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Turnover: USD 61,851,300
3 Lots
3.5% market share

Rene Magritte was one of the most sold artists in 2022, the appetite of art collectors for the works of the Master of surrealism is fueled by the sale of major masterworks. Two major works were sold from the Mo Ostin Collection.

#1. L’Empire des lumieres, 1951

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 42,273,000

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)
L’Empire des lumières, 1951
Oil on canvas
80.3 x 65.7 cm (31 5/8 x 25 7/8 inches)

#2. Le Domaine d’Arnheim, 1967

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 18,948,300

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)
Le Domaine d’Arnheim, 1949
Oil on canvas
99.7 x 81.3 cm (39 1/4 x 32 inches (99.7 x 81.3 cm)

 

 

#4. Gerhard Richter

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Turnover: USD 58,822,570
11 Lots
3.3% Market Share

Gerhard Richter is one of the most sold living artist today. One of the most important paintings from his celebrated color-chart series was sold at Sotheby’s during this auction season.

#1. 4096 Farben, 1974

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 21,839,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
4096 Farben, 1974
Lacquer on canvas
100×100 inches (254×254 cm)

#2. Spoleto, 1984

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 11,335,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Spoleto, 1984
Oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 71 1/8 inches (200 x 180.7 cm)

#3. Badende, 1967

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 9,610,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Badende, 1967
Oil on canvas
160×200 cm (63 x 78 1/2 inches)

#4. Vesuv, 1976

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 5,849,700

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Vesuv [Vesuvius], 1976
Oil on panel
70×100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches)

#5. Abstraktes Bild, 1990

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 5,505,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 1990
Oil on canvas
62×52 cm (24 3/8 x 20 1/2 inches)

#6. Abstraktes Bild, 1986

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 3,680,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 1986
Oil on canvas
120×80 cm (47 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘593-5 Richter 1986’ (on the reverse)

 

#5. Willem de Kooning

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Turnover: USD 53,346,400
9 Lots
3% Market Share

The offering for de Kooning was led by Orestes, a rare painting dated 1947 which signifies the pivotal moment in the artist’s career when he relinquished figuration and gave himself over to abstraction entirely. This painting was one of the masterpieces sold from the S.I. Newhouse Collection.

#1. Orestes, 1947

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 30,885,000

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
Orestes, 1947
24 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (61.3 x 91.8 cm)

 

#6. David Hockney

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Turnover: USD 50,956,300
8 Lots
2.8% Market Share

David Hockney is one of the world’ most respected living painters, and generations of artists and patrons have been compelled by his singular depiction of the world around him. Characters and friends, detached vistas, and sublime swimming pools, all become vibrant with rippling energy under his steady hand. David Hockney was the subject of intense bidding during this auction season driving selling prices way ahead of pre-sale estimates.

#1. Early Blossom, Woldgate, 2009

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 19,385,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Early Blossom, Woldgate, 2009
Oil on canvas
36×72 inches (91.4 x 182.9 cm)

#2. The Gate, 2000

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 14,670,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
The Gate, 2000
Oil on canvas
60×76 inches (152.4 x 193 cm)

#3. Felled Trees, 2008

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 10,760,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Felled Trees, 2008
Oil on canvas
48×60 inches (121.9 x 152.4 cm)

#4. Drawing of a Pool and Towel, 1971

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 3,085,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937)
Drawing of a Pool and Towel, 1971
Colored crayon, pencil and pastel on paper
43.2 x 35.2 cm (17 x 13 7/8 inches)

#5. Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow (Paper Pool 3), 1978

 

 

#7. Georgia O’Keefe

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Turnover: USD 42,055,000
3 Lots
2.3% Market Share

The sensuous beauty of flowers magnified to large scale has attracted both admiration and notoriety for the artist. Two master pieces from the Paul G Allen Collection attracted vivid bidding and resulted in record prices for the artist.

#1. Black Iris VI, 1936

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 21,110,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
Black Iris VI, 1936
Oil on canvas
36×24 inches (91.4 x 60.9 cm)

#2. White Calico Rose, 1930

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 13,060,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
White Calico Rose, 1930
Oil on canvas
30×36 inches (76.2 x 91.4 cm)

#3. On the Old Santa Fe Road, circa 1930-1931

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
USD 7,885,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
On the Old Santa Fe Road, circa 1930-1931
Oil on canvas
16×30 inches (40.6 x 76.2 cm)

 

 

#8. Louise Bourgeois

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Turnover: USD 38,949,000
4 Lots
2.2% Market Share

The most immediately recognizable and universally familiar of Bourgeois’ signature motifs, the Spider as a sculptural form serves as a surrogate for the maternal figure within the artist’s visual lexicon, as Bourgeois draws on her associations of motherhood with the acts of weaving.

#1. Spider, 1996

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 32,804,500

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911 – 2010)
Spider, 1996
Bronze
133x263x249 inches (337.8 x 668 x 632.5 cm)
This work is number 1 from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof

#2. Listening One, 1947

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 2,540,500

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911 – 2010)
Listening One, 1947
Bronze, painted white
203 x 50.8 x 30.5 cm (79 7/8 x 20 x 12 inches)
Conceived in 1947 and cast in 1982, this work is number 3 from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof

#3. Spring, 1948-1949

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
USD 2,470,000

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010)
Spring, 1948-1949
Bronze, painted white
152.4 x 29.2 x 29.2 cm (60 x 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches)

#9. Ed Ruscha

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Turnover: USD 38,219,800
16 Lots
2.1% Market Share

#1 Burning Gas Station, 1966-1969

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 22,260,000

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Burning Gas Station, 1966-1969
Oil on canvas
20 1/8 x 39 inches (51.1 x 99.1 cm)

#2. Manual Mobility, 1994

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 3,448,000

#3. Radio [#1], 1963

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
USD 2,107,500

#5. Do You Think She “Has It”?, 1974

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
USD 1,865,000

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Do You Think She “Has It”?, 1974
Egg yolk on moiré
35 7/8 x 40 inches (91.1 x 101.6 cm)

#6. Pattern of Lust, 1987

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Pattern of Lust, 1987
Acrylic and oil on canvas
20×24 inches (50.8 x 60.1 cm)

#7. Golden Words, 1985

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
USD 1,451,500

ED RUSCHA (b. 1937)
Golden Words, 1985
Acrylic on paper
40 1/4 x 60 inches (102.2 x 152.4 cm)

#10. Roy Lichtenstein

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Turnover: USD 34,542,700
10 Lots
1.9% Market Share

All the most iconic moments of creativity by Roy Lichtenstein are well represented in this Auction season. Mirrors, homage to Monet, brushtrokes, including an edition sold at a record price.

#1. Rouen Cathedral, Set IV, 1969

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
USD 15,360,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Rouen Cathedral, Set IV, 1969
Oil and Magna on canvas tryptich
Each: 63×42 inches (160 x 106.7 cm)

#2. Girl in Mirror, 1964

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 5,505,000

#3. Sky and Water, 1985

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 3,256,500

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Sky and Water, 1985
Oil and Magna on canvas
66×96 inches (167.6 x 243.8 cm)

#4. Leda and the Swan (Study), 1968

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
USD 2,903,500

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Leda and the Swan (Study), 1968
Acrylic, oil, felt tip pen and graphite on paper
Image: 23 5/8 x 78 1/2 inches (60 x 198.8 cm)
Sheet: 34 3/4 x 84 inches (88.3 x 213.4 cm)

#5. Mirror #7, 1971

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
USD 2,843,000

#6. Water Lily Pond with Reflections, 1992

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
USD 1,875,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Water Lily Pond with Reflections, 1992
Screen-printed enamel on processed and swirled stainless steel, in painted artist’s frame
57 3/4 x 84 1/4 inches (146.7 x 214 cm)
This work is presentation proof 4

#7. Glass III, 1976

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
USD 1,512,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Glass III, 1976
Painted and patinated bronze
33 1/8 x 19 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches (84.1 x 50.2 x 26.7 cm)
IThis work is number 1 from an edition of 3

5. Top 10 Performers

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#1. Robert Longo

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 25,000 – 35,000
USD 441,000

ROBERT LONGO (B. 1953) (christies.com)

ROBERT LONGO (B. 1953)
Study of Eric, 1983
Graphite and Flashe on paper
17 1/2 x 11 inches (43.5 x 27.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Study of Eric Robert Longo 83’ (lower edge)

#2. Grace Hartigan

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 1,197,000

GRACE HARTIGAN (1922-2008) (christies.com)

GRACE HARTIGAN (1922-2008)
On Orchard Street, 1957
Oil, paper and printed paper collage on paper
22×29 inches (55.9 x 73.7 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Hartigan ’57’ (lower right)

#3. Ernie Barnes

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 60,000 – 80,000
USD 567,000

ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009) (christies.com)

ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009)
At Last, 1983
Oil on canvas, in artist’s frame
33 3/8 x 27 1/8 inches (84.6 x 68.8 cm)
Signed ‘ERNIE BARNES’ (lower right)

#4. Lynne Drexler

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
USD 1,381,000

LYNNE DREXLER (1928-1999) (christies.com)

LYNNE DREXLER (1928-1999)
Summer Blossom, 1962
Oil on canvas
30×25 inches (76.2 x 63.5 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘LYNNE DREXLER SUMMER BLOSSOM 1962’ (on the reverse)

#5. Jenna Gribbon

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 60,000
USD 403,200

JENNA GRIBBON (B. 1978) (christies.com)

JENNA GRIBBON (B. 1978)
Set List Focus, 2020
Oil on canvas
48×36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Jenna Gribbon 2020’ (on the overlap)

#6. Noah Davis

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 990,600

Noah Davis – 20th Century & Contemporary … Lot 1 May 2023 | Phillips

6. Christie’s Auctions

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1. Masterpieces from the S.I. Newhouse Collection

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11 May 2023

Masterpieces from the S.I. Newhouse Collection (christies.com)

Christie’s presents 16 masterpieces from the collection of S.I. Newhouse, as the third in a series of historic sales from the legendary Condé Nast co-owner who built one of the greatest art collections of the 20th century. As the long-time chairman of the media empire that included The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, Mr. Newhouse was a hugely influential figure in American cultural life and his collection of modern and contemporary masterworks remains ‘one of the most sought-after groupings of art in private hands.

1. Auction Statistics

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16 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 117,600,000
High Estimate: USD 167,600,000

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Total: USD 177,792,000
# Lots sold: 16 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 100%

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Top Lot: USD 34,622,500
14 Lots sold over USD 1 million
Turnover: USD 176,374,500 (99.2% of total)
7 Lots sold over USD 10 million
Turnover: USD 147,482,500 (82.9% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 5 Lots (31%)
Sold within Estimates: 5 Lots (31%)
Sold below Estimates: 5 Lots (31%)
Estimate on Request: 1 Lot (6%)

 

2. Top 5 Lots

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#1. Francis Bacon

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 22,000,000 – 28,000,000
USD 34,622,500

FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992) (christies.com)

FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992)
Self-Portrait, 1969
Oil on canvas
14×12 inches (35.6 x 30.5 cm)
Signed, dedicated, titled and dated ‘Self-Portrait 1969 Francis Bacon to V with all very best wishes Francis’ (on the reverse)

Painted in 1969, the present work is a masterful and poignant self-portrait from a pivotal moment in Francis Bacon’s career. The artist’s unmistakable countenance emerges in swirling, evanescent strokes of lilac, teal, bone-white and vermillion set against a rich blue backdrop. Flashes of turquoise, orange and magenta halo his silhouette. Bacon has bruised and blushed his features, using a corduroy rag to print delicate, striated impressions across his mouth, nose and shadowed eye sockets. Impastoed sweeps of white convey the sheen of skin under bright electric light. Zones of raw canvas shape his beige trenchcoat and shine through his deftly brushed hair. The artist’s large, hooded eyes gaze out with a subtle glitter. A far cry from some of the more violent distortions of Bacon’s portraiture, it is a remarkably tender self-image. Its warmth may reflect his feelings towards its intended recipient: Bacon presented the work as a gift to Valerie Beston, who had overseen his affairs at London’s Marlborough Gallery since 1958, playing an important role in his personal and professional lives. The 1960s had been a decade of huge success for Bacon, witnessing a flowering of ambition and drama in his painting as he embraced new colors, techniques and subjects. Here, months before his sixtieth birthday, he emerges as a poised and contemplative figure brimming with creative life. Two years later, the work was included in his career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris; it has been shown in a number of major international exhibitions across the decades since.

#2. Willem de Kooning

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimate on Request
USD 30,885,000

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997) (christies.com)

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
Orestes, 1947
24 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (61.3 x 91.8 cm)
Signed ‘de Kooning’ (lower right); signed again ‘de Kooning’ (on the reverse)

One of the most important early paintings by Willem de Kooning to remain in private hands, Orestes was painted during a period which marked the dawn of the artist as an abstract painter. Widely cited in the literature and exhibited in de Kooning’s first solo exhibition, it was with this 1947 painting that the artist abandoned the vestiges of figuration in his work and finally succumbed to abstraction. The predominant black and white palette, the evocative rounded forms, and the painterly surface all mark out this particular work as an example from a pivotal moment in the artist’s career when he was pushing at the accepted boundaries of painting and exploring the full potential of his vital new mode of painting. Transgressing hundreds of years of art history, de Kooning abandons traditional notions of shading, volume and modeling of space, John Elderfield, curator of the artist’s seminal 2011 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, to identity Orestes as unique in the artist’s body of work in affording a primary function to the wide, flat forms that would come to dominate his compositions from this period. Populated by a series of familiar, yet inscrutable, forms set against a pale ground, Orestes belongs to a group of paintings that the artist embarked on in 1947. With their rounded shapes and distinct silhouettes, they resemble letters of the alphabet suspended within the body of the composition; yet their forms are amorphous enough as to eschew definitive comprehension. These cryptic ciphers are separated by brushy passages of black and white pigment laid down one on top of another resulting in a highly active painterly surface.

#3. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 24,560,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
L’Arlésienne (Lee Miller), 1937
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
72.7 x 59.8 cm (28 7/8 x 23 1/2 inches)
Dated and numbered ’11 Septembre 37 (I)’ (on the stretcher)

The product of a heady summer spent in the south of France with a group of Surrealists, Pablo Picasso’s L’Arlésienne (Lee Miller) depicts the famed American photographer, Lee Miller. One of seven portraits that Picasso painted of Miller in the guise of an Arlésienne over the course of this 1937 trip, the dazzling painting emerged during one of the most important years of Picasso’s life. Situated after an intensive period of artistic creation during which he produced Guernica, and before the autumn in which he focused on the haunting motif of the Weeping Woman, this portrait dates from a point of escapism and important creative exchange for Picasso.

Produced in a variety of richly vibrant shades and designed to provide an even, opaque coverage, Ripolin was fast drying and resulted in a smooth, glossy, enamel finish. However, when applied in thicker layers the paint had a tendency to shift during the drying process, often resulting in wrinkling effects that lent the finished compositions a richly textured surface. Such rippling and creasing can be seen in certain passages of L’Arlésienne (Lee Miller), the vibrant yellow pigment subtly crinkling in unexpected ways that interrupt the smooth finish of the semi-gloss material. At one point, the Ripolin layer peels away dramatically, perhaps the result of an errant air bubble, revealing layers of matte paint below, that transition from delicately variegated pink to soft blue hues. Relishing the chance effects that arose from playing with such materials and the presence of his artistic comrades, Picasso’s imagination was stimulated, resulting in an outpouring of richly worked, vibrant portraits.

#4. Cy Twombly

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 18,000,000 – 25,000,000
USD 19,960,000

CY TWOMBLY (1928-2011) (christies.com)

CY TWOMBLY (1928-2011)
Untitled [Bolsena], 1969
78 3/4 x 93 3/8 inches (200 x 237.2 cm)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘BOLSENA Twombly 69’ (lower right)

Painted in Italy during the summer of 1969, Cy Twombly’s Bolsena paintings are regarded by many scholars as the summation of the artist’s exploration of the free-flowing nature of the line. The supple, twisting and unbridled marks that navigate their way across the surface of this elegant canvas are the natural extension of the mark-making that had established Twombly as one of the most inquisitive and innovative artists of his generation. Occupying a place between representation and symbolism, Untitled [Bolsena] is one of just fourteen paintings the artist painted during a stay on the shores of Lake Bolsena (other examples are in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Broad, and Bayerische Staatsgemäldessammlungen—Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Modern München), the present work expresses Twombly’s interest in the expansive nature of history yet also speaks to the contemporary. One of the most evocative and lyrical works in the series, this is a triumphal example of the artist’s exacting contribution to the twentieth-century canon. Twombly’s mastery of his line can be seen in the elegant amalgamation of the lithe traces and symbolic gestures that play out across the surface of this expansive canvas. From free-flowing lines to more torrid loops and swirls, the full repertoire of the artist’s gestures is on display. This multifaceted composition is the result of Twombly’s free-flowing hand tracing out anonymous forms, but it is also populated by signs and symbols infused with meaning. The lines are symbolic of the purity and timelessness of the artist’s mark making, while the scattering of dates, numbers, names, and even the artist’s expansive signature, anchor the work very much in the present.

#5. Roy Lichtenstein

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 18,000,000 – 25,000,000
USD 15,360,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) (christies.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Rouen Cathedral, Set IV, 1969
Oil and Magna on canvas tryptich
Each: 63×42 inches (160 x 106.7 cm)
Signed and dated ‘rf Lichtenstein ’69’ (on the reverse of each canvas)

Rouen Cathedral, Set IV, Roy Lichtenstein’s epic interrogation of art history through the lens of contemporary art, is one of the most perceptive paintings of his career. Fresh from the success of his groundbreaking paintings inspired by comic books, in 1969 the artist turned his attention to the celebrated paintings of Claude Monet, one of the most visionary artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Captivated by the French artist’s investigations into painting light, Lichtenstein took as his inspiration Monet’s famous painting Rouen Cathedral, Façade (1894; Museum of Fine Art Boston). He had seen the painting in a monograph about the artist and began transforming Monet’s ethereal brushstrokes into his signature Ben-Day dots. The result was a group of about half a dozen triptychs (two of which are now in major international museum collections) that demonstrates Lichtenstein’s uniquely academic approach to Pop Art.

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, 1894. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

“I follow Monet’s general idea in a much more mechanical way. Of course, they are different from Monet, but they do deal with the Impressionist cliché of not being able to read the image close up—it becomes clearer as you move away”

Across these three conjoined canvases, Lichtenstein produces a simulacrum of Monet’s famous depiction of the west front of Rouen Cathedral. The French master’s version was a triumphal essay on the Impressionists’ treatment of light, as—over approximately thirty canvases—he painted the same building at different times of day and at different times of the year, replicating the deep shadows cast by the building’s Gothic façade as it changed in the different light conditions. In Rouen Cathedral, Set IV, Lichtenstein swaps Monet’s loaded brushstrokes for the utilitarian nature of his Ben-Day dots, imitating the printing process that has reproduced Monet’s original painting countless times. The result is a Pop painting that dissolves into abstraction before our very eyes.

3. Other Highlights

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Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
USD 11,335,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Cafetière, tasse et pipe, 1911
Oil on canvas
46×27 cm (18 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches)
Signed ‘Picasso’ (on the reverse)

It was predominantly with the still life that Pablo Picasso deconstructed the centuries-long tools of artistic representation in his epoch-defining movement, Cubism. In his desire to unpack and reconfigure the processes of representation, Picasso adopted this genre—one that is based more upon the immutable reality of the everyday world than any other—discovering that it offered him the greatest opportunity for his iconoclastic re-writing of convention. Volumetric vessels were split and rendered as floating compilations of lines, presented from multiple viewpoints at once; flat tabletops were upturned, distorting classical notions of pictorial space; pieces of fruit, so often the motifs with which an artist displayed their verisimitudinal virtuosity became nothing more than playful signs and shapes that alluded to rather than faithfully rendered real life. All of these objects became the protagonists in the new painterly world Picasso created in his cubist compositions. Cafetière, tasse et pipe was painted in 1911, the highpoint of the artist’s Analytical Cubism phase, and captures to great effect the startling pictorial disruptions that Picasso so diligently crafted. Here, the just visible objects of an everyday still-life emerge from a monochrome mist of pigment. As the title denotes, a cafetière, cup and pipe, together with the prominent form of a wineglass, are the protagonists of the scene. Untethered from the tabletop on which they would usually stand, they float apparition-like amid various accumulations of shadows and gleams of light.

George Condo

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 2,712,000

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957) (christies.com)

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957)
Portrait Composition in Blue and Grey, 2012
Oil on canvas
66 x 58 1/8 inches (167.6 x 147.6 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature and date ‘Condo 2012’ (upper left)

At once becoming and dissolving, building and demolishing, materializing and evaporating, George Condo’s Portrait Composition in Blue and Grey both engages an age-old tradition of portraiture and paints a novel path forward in abstract figuration. Blocks of weighty color cram and abut within the contour of a traditional bust against an evanescent background that passes from light blue to grey and back again. Arranged geometrically, these lush passages mimic three-dimensionality—prisms and spheres caught in a moment of expansion—yet a realization of the perspectival impossibilities halts the deception in its tracks. Bricks of white and pastel hues imitate the cool light that would presumably fall on the bridge of the sitter’s nose, the tops of the ears and the proper right clavicle, but their clearly defined edges again belie any sense of illusionism. Similarly, what first appear as shadows quickly dissolve into varying shades of the same palette, citing the Impressionist realization that darkness does not require blackness. The formless, ethereal space enshrouding the figure borrows from the early seventeenth century, when portrait subjects abandoned their luxurious environments for the barren canvas. Thus, Condo obeys the portrait recipe in name alone, following the art historical rules for the express purpose of breaking them.

Andy Warhol

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
USD 1,986,000

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) (christies.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Martinson Coffee, 1962
Silkscreen ink and graphite on canvas
20 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches (51.1 x 41 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Andy Warhol 1962’ (lower turning edge)
Signed again and dated again ‘Andy Warhol 1962’ (on the reverse)

 

2. 20th Century Evening Sale

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11 May 2023

20th Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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56 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 221,800,000
High Estimate: USD 331,850,000
Estimate On Request: 1 Lot

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Total: USD 328,779,600
# Lots withdrawn: 2 Lots
# Lots sold: 44 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 81.5%

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Top Lot: USD 43,535,000
40 Lots sold for over USD 1 million
Turnover: USD 326,562,000 (99.3% of total)
10 Lots sold for over USD 10 million
Turnover: USD 209,835,000 (63.8% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 20 Lots (37%)
Sold within Estimates: 18 Lots (33%)
Sold below Estimates: 5 Lots (9%)
Unsold / EOR : 11 Lots (20%)

1. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 43,535,000

HENRI ‘LE DOUANIER’ ROUSSEAU (1844-1910) (christies.com)

HENRI ‘LE DOUANIER’ ROUSSEAU (1844-1910)
Les Flamants, 1910
Oil on canvas
113.8 x 162 cm (44 7/8 x 63 1/4 inches)
Signed ‘Henri Rousseau’ (lower left)

Painted in 1910, Les Flamants is a rare example of Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau’s renowned jungle paintings, created during the final year of the artist’s life. While Rousseau had first explored the lush, tropical landscape of the jungle in his 1891 composition Surpris! (Tigre dans une tempête tropicale) (Certigny, no. 63; The National Gallery, London), it was not until the opening years of the twentieth century that the subject truly came to dominate his work; over the course of the following decade he would complete almost two dozen compositions devoted to these dramatic, mysterious landscapes, filled with exotic plant life, flowers and animals. Among the artist’s most ambitious compositions, both in scale and subject, these extraordinary wild vistas were essential in cementing Rousseau’s artistic legacy through the twentieth century. From Pablo Picasso to Robert Delaunay, André Breton to Max Ernst, Rousseau’s paintings stood as a standard-bearer for generations of young artists and intellectuals, his singular vision and unwavering faith in his own individuality offering inspiration to those intent on boldly breaking away from tradition.

#2. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimate on Request
USD 41,810,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Nature morte à la fenêtre, 1932
Oil on canvas
129.7 x 162.3 cm (51 x 63 7/8 inches)
Dated ’18-1-XXXII’ (on a section of the original stretcher affixed to the backing board)

Over the course of 1932 Pablo Picasso reached an extraordinary pitch of creativity in his paintings, inspired by the sensuous forms of his young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Brought together by a fortuitous, chance encounter on the streets of Paris five years previously, the pair embarked on a passionate, heady affair that would inspire some of Picasso’s most celebrated works, with Marie-Thérèse’s classical profile, voluptuous curves and short, cropped hair coming to dominate every aspect of his creative output. Painted during the opening weeks of 1932, Nature morte à la fenêtre is one of the first canvases to emerge in an exceptional series of paintings devoted to Marie-Thérèse. Simultaneously looking back to the monumental plaster busts that had occupied the artist over the course of 1931, and forwards to the great outpouring of sensual nudes that would emerge later that spring, Nature morte à la fenêtre holds a pivotal place within the story of Picasso’s annus mirabilis.

In Nature morte à la fenêtre, Picasso takes one of the more classical of the Boisgeloup sculptures as inspiration—Marie-Thérèse appears as a graceful, feminine figure, her profile a series of soft, flowing lines, without any exaggerated volumes or distortions. Placed atop a tall, wooden plinth, she enjoys an elevated viewpoint from which to gaze over the simple still life on the table, appearing as a serene and composed vision against the subtly variegated light of the window. Each of the elements within the scene appears to hint towards an aspect of Marie-Thérèse’s character, from the sinuous curvature of the jug and softly rounded fruit which may be read as an allusion to her voluptuous form, to the vibrant green leaves of the philodendron, which spring from the vase with a vitality and brightness, that reflects her own youthful exuberance. There is a quiet stillness within Nature morte à la fenêtre, a reflection perhaps of Marie-Thérèse’s ongoing presence in the artist’s life at Boisgeloup, and the simple rhythms of their days together, reading, working, making love, in the secluded surroundings of the chateau. This private, easy way of life would provide an essential counterpoint to the stresses that would consume the artist through the spring, as he prepared to stage the most important exhibition of his career thus far. On 15 June 1932, Picasso: 1901-1932 opened at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris with a lavish white-tie preview.

#3. Ed Ruscha

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 22,260,000

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937) (christies.com)

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Burning Gas Station, 1966-1969
Oil on canvas
20 1/8 x 39 inches (51.1 x 99.1 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘”BURNING GAS STATION” 1966-1969 E. Ruscha’ (on the stretcher)

Painted in 1966-1969, Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station belongs to one of the most iconic series in twentieth-century art. Inspired by the gas stations that punctuated his drives between Los Angeles and his native Oklahoma, the present work is just one of just five Standard Stations the artist painted in the 1960s (a sixth followed in 1986-1987). Collectively, these paintings form one of the most iconic and coherent bodies of work of the postwar period, with only a few remaining in private hands. Collectively, these paintings form one of the most iconic and coherent bodies of work of the postwar period, with only a few remaining in private hands. In Burning Gas Station, a fiery explosion threatens to obliterate the iconic Standard station, as if Ruscha has decided to torch the “standards” by which art itself has been defined. Tinged with anarchist fantasies but also a devotion to the love of painting itself, the present work is an exceptional example of this notorious series, and has not been publicly exhibited since 1976.

Burning Gas Station is the pinnacle of the Standard Station paintings of the 1960s, as it was the last in the series, which he made at the decade’s end in 1968. Here, the gas station has been abstracted down to its barest essentials. The sleek, modern building and its gleaming glass interior is at odds with the chaos of the fiery explosion taking place nearby. This sentiment is ratcheted up to dramatic effect by Ruscha’s ingenious flair for pictorial composition, in which the diagonal format of the building causes it to zoom outward with the unstoppable speed of a roaring freight train. A sleek, ribbon-like border runs along the upper edge, in the form of a shimmering blue line that echoes the diagonal thrust of the painting’s composition. Ruscha has used a mysterious ombre effect to convey the night sky, which ranges from dark black to green and yellow. (This is one of the first instances in which Ruscha employed the ombre background, which ultimately became one of his longest-running visual motifs). The eerie night sky, combined with the explosion that has just rocked through the scene, makes for one of the most visually arresting paintings in the entire series.

In Burning Gas Station it is the tension between the gleaming, white perfection of the gas station and the chaos of the fiery explosion that makes this painting into the apotheosis of the entire series. By invoking the awesome power of fire, the painting leaves the realm of the everyday world to cross over into the uncanny valley of Surrealism. This strategy also touches upon the absurdist nature of Dada and its willingness to incorporate nonsensical objects as the subject of “High” art. So, too, does fire symbolize the transformative power of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic church, which Ruscha knew from his youth in Oklahoma. A powerful, primal entity that has allowed the species to survive for millennia, fire is a life-giving and yet utterly destructive force.

#4. Georgia O’Keefe

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 21,110,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986) (christies.com)

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
Black Iris VI, 1936
Oil on canvas
36×24 inches (91.4 x 60.9 cm)
Signed with initials ‘OK’ in the artist’s star device (on a piece of the original backing)

The sensuous beauty of flowers magnified to large scale has attracted both admiration and notoriety for the artist. Among her most famous and powerful flower subjects is the black iris. The artist painted only seven known oils of this flower between 1926 and 1936. This series includes not only the present work but also one of the most celebrated paintings of her entire career—Black Iris (The Dark Iris No. III) of 1926 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Apart from that work, the present painting is O’Keeffe’s largest representation of the black iris and, dating from 1936, is also among her final depictions of the subject—representing the culmination of her exploration of this iconic motif. O’Keeffe’s innovative renderings of flowers evolved from a passion for sharing through her work the intimate details of nature that she believed many overlooked. She began painting her flower pictures in 1918, and by 1924 her floral subjects exploded into a sensation in the art world. The subject of the black iris was a deliberate choice for O’Keeffe, as the variety was only available in New York flower shops for two weeks each year. When she moved to the Southwest, she even tried to find a bulb to plant in her own garden, but was unable to secure one. In addition to the famed Met work, the series includes The Black Iris (The Dark Iris No. II) of 1926 and the pastel Dark Iris No. III of 1927, both in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, as well as Dark Iris (Dark Iris No. 1) of 1927 in the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. The present version is among the most powerful in the series, executed in large scale with the dark center of the iris directly positioned in the middle of the composition. The delicate petals of the flower range in color from deep purple to the softest pale pink, creating a gradient down the canvas and drawing the viewer into the picture. The hint of green stem at lower center keeps the painting grounded in nature. Yet, at the same time, the background of soft whites and grays envelops the flower, with the organic forms dissolving at their edges into an abstract play with analogous shades of color.

#5. David Hockney

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 19,385,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937) (christies.com)

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Early Blossom, Woldgate, 2009
Oil on canvas
36×72 inches (91.4 x 182.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Early Blossom Woldgate 2009 David Hockney’ (on the reverse)

David Hockney is one of the world’ most respected living painters, and generations of artists and patrons have been compelled by his singular depiction of the world around him. Characters and friends, detached vistas, and sublime swimming pools, all become vibrant with rippling energy under his steady hand. A particularly exhilarating example of his late-career shift into landscape, Early Blossom, Woldgate melds expressive brushwork with a nuanced observation on landscape painting and ideas of place. Part of a substantial series that materialized as the artist returned to his native Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is celebrated not only for its compositional strength but also its virtuosic command of oil.

“The light changes so quickly up here,” Hockney has remarked, “so you have to choose how you want to depict it… Outdoors, especially in northern Europe, the scene is constantly changing because the light conditions seldom stay the same for long. The sun moves, clouds move over the sky.”

An immersive scene of pastoral delight, Early Blossom, Woldgate borrows stylistically from historical precedents but is unabashedly Hockney. Extending from the lower right toward the horizon in a lazy curve, a reddish-orange country lane meanders through a lush landscape. The dark indentations of tire tracks from the various travelers that have passed by are rendered in grayish blue, connecting to the light hues of the cloudy sky overhead. On the right side of the road, tall shrubs and flowering trees wave in the breeze, their green leaves and cream-colored petals tossed in the Yorkshire air. On the left side, a row of flowers peer through thick-bladed grass and follow the path toward distant trees and rolling fields. All of the colors are bright and punchy, their hues teetering between natural splendor and Expressionist exaggeration. At the core though, Hockney is responding to his surroundings as he paints, taking in the real movement and color around him.

#6. David Hockney

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 14,670,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937) (christies.com)

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
The Gate, 2000
Oil on canvas
60×76 inches (152.4 x 193 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘David Hockney 2000 The Gate’ (on the reverse)

Positively bursting with vibrant color and expressive brushwork, The Gate departs from Hockney’s earlier spatial studies in favor of an all-encompassing scene that seems to close in around and envelop the viewer. Depicted from a singular perspective at eye level, a short path runs downhill toward the titular gate, its blue metalwork appearing wispy and delicate against the sprawl of nature beyond. To the right, a glimpse of green picket fencing is visible before giving way to a grand arcing tree trunk that explodes upward into the canopy. Its branches intermingle with those of another nearby, their sinuous tendrils vacillating between representational depictions and the gestural marks of Hockney’s Abstract Expressionist precursors. On the left, a short, red stone wall eases down toward a yellow railing, these architectural elements set the stage for a squat pink house with a roof constructed of primary tones. All of these elements are set against a preponderance of leaves, vines, branches, and stalks. The verdant backdrop filters the sun’s light and casts a tranquil shade upon the scene that suggests peaceful calm and comfortable cool. Hockney’s ability to construct a scene so charged with an all-encompassing feeling is a nod to both his studied respect for the Impressionists and their ilk as well as his careful consideration of minute details that add depth and richness to seemingly innocuous compositions.

Painted in 2000, The Gate is part of a pivotal series that the artist began after a summer sojourn back to his native England. Focusing on the area in and around the garden of his guest house in the Hollywood Hills, these canvases are harbingers of a seismic shift in Hockney’s practice at the turn of the millennium. Eschewing the presence of figures, the painter instead casts his eye toward the dappled light of his California locale while also alluding to the changing weather of his homeland. The meditative depictions of his domicile draw an immediate connection to the work of Claude Monet. The Impressionist’s myriad studies of his own garden at Giverny act as conceptual precursors to Hockney’s work. This association was first reestablished after the latter saw Monet’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. He excitedly noted, “I came out of that exhibition and it made me look everywhere intensely. That little shadow on Michigan Avenue, the light hitting the leaf. I thought: ‘My God, now I’ve seen that. He’s made me see it’. I came out absolutely thrilled” (D. Hockney, quoted in C. S. Sykes, David Hockney: A Pilgrim’s Progress, New York 2014, p. 320). This creative fire was further stoked by his visit to the blockbuster exhibition Monet in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy in 1999. Focusing on the artist’s plein air painting and light studies that gave rise to new ideas of what painting could be, the emphasis on Monet’s later output and its undeniable influence on Modernist movements like Abstract Expressionism highlighted a creative bridge that Hockney eagerly crossed into new territories.

#7. Georgia O’Keefe

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 13,060,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986) (christies.com)

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
White Calico Rose, 1930
Oil on canvas
30×36 inches (76.2 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Georgia O’Keeffe -1930-‘ (on the reverse)

Georgia O’Keeffe’s most iconic paintings distill the artist’s emotional connection to her environment into a single powerful image. Dating to O’Keeffe’s second extended stay in New Mexico in 1930, White Calico Rose not only epitomizes O’Keeffe’s celebrated magnified flower imagery, but also evokes the spirituality reflective of her life in the Southwest. Beyond their practical convenience as ever bright and fresh models for still lifes, the cloth flowers also infuse works like White Calico Rose with layers of meaning beyond O’Keeffe’s usual flower picture. Given their association with celebrations of life and death in the local culture, the painting provides a modern take on the centuries old tradition of memento mori still-life painting—a perfectly preserved, undying specimen of nature that nonetheless evokes reminders of mortality.

O’Keeffe’s technique in White Calico Rose further plays with the theme of painted versus actual reality. In the abstracted background painted in shades of black, gray, cream and dark green, O’Keeffe suggests the texture of perhaps a tree trunk, bone or other found organic material, yet identification remains ethereal. To create this patterning, she both paints to mimic texture, but also may have deliberately manipulated her paint layer in order to create further texture on the surface.

#8. Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 11,910,000

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) (christies.com)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)
Square de la Trinité, 1878-1879
Oil on canvas
5.3 x 65.4 cm (21 3/8 x 25 3/4 inches)
Signed ‘Renoir.’ (lower left)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Square de la Trinité depicts a Parisian park on a gloriously sunny morning. Populated by elegant figures, this verdant park is lush with flowers and plants that overflow their beds and a cluster of tall, leafy trees that provide shady respite from the brilliant light of the day. Beyond the edge of the park, a row of elegant modern apartments—distinguished by their creamy limestone facades, slate mansard roofs and wrought iron balconies—are just visible. Renoir rendered all of this with a rich, jewel-toned color palette of emerald, sapphire and ruby, and a scintillating surface texture with evocative brushwork, alternately fluid and flickering. This picturesque scene of urban leisure, which has featured in a number of major exhibitions throughout the twentieth century, has remained with the same esteemed family of collectors for ninety years.

Aside from its picturesque setting, the primary subject of this painting is the flirtation of the fashionable couple standing in the foreground: a slender blonde Parisienne wearing a pale pink bustled dress and a navy-blue bonnet is accompanied by a dashing gentleman with a top hat and a cigar in hand. Though we can see little of their faces, their animated gestures suggest lively conversation as they watch other couples and families stroll along the winding garden path. Renoir’s depiction of this courtship ritual may have been inspired by the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, who famously depicted lovers cavorting in idyllic landscapes.

#9. Gerhard Richter

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
USD 11,335,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932) (christies.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Spoleto, 1984
Oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 71 1/8 inches (200 x 180.7 cm)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘Richter 1984 565-2’ (on the reverse)

Painted by one of world’s most celebrated living artists, Gerhard Richter’s Spoleto is a sumptuous canvas that serves as testament to his unquenchable thirst for innovation. Executed on an impressive scale, the present work is a vast kaleidoscope of color and mark making that showcases his unique ‘squeegee’ technique, disrupting the previously hallowed status of the painted surface to open up a myriad of conceptual and compositional possibilities. Dazzling fields of emerald green, sapphire blue and ruby red are disrupted by surface interventions as the artist drags various implements across the surface of the paint as it dries. These interruptions first emerged in Richter’s grayscale photo paintings of the 1960s, but abstract canvases, such as the present example, are often regarded as the pinnacle of the artist’s life-long investigation into the visual and philosophical nature of perception and understanding.

At over six feet square, Spoleto envelops the viewer in a rich tapestry of vibrant color. These carefully constructed compositions are the result of a prolonged period of contemplation by the artist. After laying down one area of color, Richter lets the surface begin to dry. As a ‘skin’ forms on the painted surface, the artist will run a hard-edged implement across the surface, opening up the different layers of paint below. Although in control of his implament, there is also a degree of chance as the artist is unable to entirely control the behavior of the paint as he manipulates the surface.

“When I paint an Abstract Picture…I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there.”

As well as being a conceptual study into the possibilities of paint and its physical properties, we can also see multiple veins of art history running throughout the painting, from nineteenth-century verdant European landscapes to the drama of Russian Suprematism, and from German Expressionism to American Color Field painting, all are visible within one canvas. Richter’s bold traversing marks become horizon lines of sorts, offering perspective in an otherwise volatile field of pigment. It is as if these colors have met for the very first time, combining and re-combining into heretofore unconsidered relationships. Richter’s abstract paintings mark an important inflection point in the history of post-war and contemporary art. The artist has always oscillated intentionally between abstraction and figuration, expressiveness and photographic precision, thereby forging a path for himself that is outside of conventional art historical categories. Spoleto could certainly be compared to the abstractions of Willem de Kooning or Helen Frankenthaler, but more pertinent might be the lyrical compositions of Wassily Kandinsky, which have a similarly utopian quality to them. Equally interesting might be a comparison to the chance-based collages of Hans Arp.

#10. David Hockney

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 10,760,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937) (christies.com)

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Felled Trees, 2008
Oil on canvas
48×60 inches (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Felled Trees April 2008 David Hockney’ (on the reverse)

Widely known for his groundbreaking canvases that drew their power from the lustrous glamour of the Hollywood hills and the picturesque vistas of Los Angeles, David Hockney’s career has been highly influential to generations of artists. Still working today, he continues to investigate new modes and styles. Shifting focus in the early 2000s, he became enamored with landscape painting as he returned to the United Kingdom and fell in love with the countryside of his youth. Felled Trees is a stunning example of Hockney’s new approach to painting where English landscape traditions careened into his Pop-inflected California sentiments. In 2008, a year before this painting was realized, he moved into a new, larger studio that afforded him more freedom and allowed for continued exploration of monumental-scale pictures.

“I felt twenty years younger. I stopped feeling frail and started feeling energetic,” he exclaimed, “I think it will make a difference to the work and to me being in a bigger space” 

The exhilaration and lust for innovation are palpable in Felled Trees as vivid colors glow with a neon splendor that elevates what might otherwise be taken for granted to new heights.

Painted in otherworldly tones, Felled Trees elevates the commonplace to something more surreal. Atop a bedding of deep purple undergrowth, a stack of brightly colored logs fills much of the foreground. The bold style in which Hockney renders this lumber detaches it from the rest of the scene, causing it to float visually atop the rest of the composition. The thick brushstrokes and energetic color create a stylistic amalgam that is as much related to the late work of Philip Guston as it might be to the dashing Fauves of the early twentieth century. About his predilection for mixing references and modes in service of a larger understanding of painting, Hockney has noted, “I want to use different styles, or a vocabulary of different styles, the same way a writer uses different words. I think it is part of a technique of painting to be able to adapt yourself to different styles… In a way I would like to paint a picture that was completely anonymous, that no one could tell was by me. Not in the style of another individual, but in the anonymous style of a school, like the Egyptian or byzantine style” (D. Hockney, quoted in P. Melia and U. Luchardt, David Hockney Paintings, London, 2009, p. 39).

n Felled Trees, one sees this convergence in full effect as the more traditional blue and white of the cloudy sky above contrasts with the vibrant red of distant alien forests and the stand of shocking emerald trees in the midground. The latter oscillates between flatly applied paint and an illusionistic layer as the viewer notices and then looks past the thick blue outlines on each trunk and branch that Hockney weaves sinuously into the frame.

 

3. Other Highlights

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Philip Guston

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 12,000,000 – 18,000,000
USD 9,610,000

PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980) (christies.com)

PHILIP GUSTON (1913-1980)
Chair, 1976
Oil on canvas
68 x 80 1/2 inches (172.7 x 204.5 cm)
Signed ‘Philip Guston’ (lower left)

The complexity and sophisticated orchestration of Philip Guston’s personal iconography reaches a crescendo in Chair, an epic painting of 1976 that bristles with so much of the powerful imagery that it becomes one of his most intoxicating works. The tangled limbs, the wooden floor boards, leather shoes and the bricked-up window are some of Guston’s most iconic motifs. In Chair, these poetic harbingers of Guston’s inner world are tinged with a strange and melancholic beauty, painted with care and finesse, as if each fluid brushstroke were an act of love. Similar paintings from the same series can be found in prestigious museum collections, including Green Rug (1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York); Monument (1976, Tate, London); Red Cloth (1976, Brooklyn Museum); and Room (1976, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

In Chair, a jumbled stack of the pink, hairy limbs described above are depicted in a tangled disarray. The legs are bare save for their leather shoes, which have been overturned to reveal the pattern of metal nails lining their soles. (It is unclear if, on the other side of the chair, the bodies to which the legs belong are piled up as well). Another important motif can be found in the plain wood floorboards of this strange interior chamber, which reads almost like an existentialist stage set. In the upper left corner, a green window shade is pulled up to reveal a brick wall. The shade is conveyed by a long cord, which Guston has exaggerated, elongating the length of the cord and enlarging the proportions of the ring used to pull it up or down. Although it is comically oversized, this ring conjures up sinister allusions. It evokes the hangman’s noose, which is obliquely referenced by the Hood paintings, but also the rope that the artist’s father tragically used to commit suicide (Guston was the one who discovered his father’s body hanging from a rope in the family’s home, as a child of only 10 years old).

Georgia O’Keeefe

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 7,885,000

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986) (christies.com)

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986)
On the Old Santa Fe Road, circa 1930-1931
Oil on canvas
16×30 inches (40.6 x 76.2 cm)

In On the Old Santa Fe Road, O’Keeffe conveys her awe with the local landscape in focusing on the intricacies and color variations of a mountain formation. She employs a wide range of yellows, oranges, tans and browns to capture that unique, surprisingly colorful palette of the ridges and hills in the Southwest. Removing all evidence of foliage, wildlife and surface rubble, her subject becomes a play of pure light and shadow. The cropped perspective—showing the mountain as if from below with only a hint of bright blue sky above—decontextualizes the scene and underscores the monumentality and majesty of the setting. On the Old Santa Fe Road particularly delights in the folds and curves of the unusual land formations of the area, outlining the contours of the terrain with the same attention to detail—heightened almost to the point of abstraction—as in O’Keeffe’s famous flower paintings. O’Keeffe united her parallel fascinations with these two subjects in such works as Red Hills with Flowers (1937, Art Institute of Chicago). In On the Old Santa Fe Road, the subtle gradients of color and graduating layers of rounded forms add a petal-like suppleness to the solidity of the mountain, creating a duality that elevates the work beyond its reality. This palpable softness she imbues within the hardness of the desert equates the landscape painting to almost the point of portraiture—and anthropomorphism.

Georg Baselitz

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 2,712,000

GEORG BASELITZ (B. 1938) (christies.com)

GEORG BASELITZ (B. 1938)
Mann mit Tablett, 1982
Oil and charcoal on canvas
250.2 x 200 cm (98 1/2 x 78 3/4 inches)
Signed with the artist’s initials and dated ‘G.B. 20.XI.82’ (lower right)
Signed, titled and dated again ‘G. Baselitz 20.XI.82 Mann mit Tablett’ (on the reverse)

Georg Baselitz has pushed the medium of painting to its limits in a career-long exploration of color, form, and abstraction. Completed just one year after his first solo exhibition in New York, the monumental Mann mit Tablett is awe-inspiring at nearly eight-and-a-half feet by six-and-a-half feet. This life-size, mural-like composition absorbs the viewer in a dance of pigment and charcoal that mesmerizes with its blues, pinks, and reds. It is difficult to overstate Baselitz’s influence, and Mann mit Tablett is among his most technically virtuosic and affecting works. This brave and innovative relationship to painting is strongly felt in Mann mit Tablett. Kept in the same private collection since it was painted, this canvas is the pinnacle of a wildly creative period for the artist.

Completed while Baselitz was living near Arezzo in Tuscany, Mann mit Tablett (translated as Man with a Tray) is a compelling mixture of colors and textures. Bold pigments leap from a field of grey, creating an intriguing contrast. It is as if these lustrous hues have emerged from rainclouds, which are equally stunning in their own right. Composed largely of expertly placed vertical marks, Mann mit Tablett presents the title character as an otherworldly red being, painted upside down in Baselitz’s signature manner. In 1969, Baselitz began painting his canvases upside down so as to oscillate between abstraction and figuration, and to reinvigorate painting with a totally new technique. In Mann mit Tablett, this strategy creates an inverted scene filled with beauty and mystery. The melting figure is holding a tray, and on it resides a small and fantastical still life that recalls Pablo Picasso or Juan Gris. Behind the figure is a gridded entity, perhaps a window-filled building glowing in the night. Mann mit Tablett is a testament to Baselitz’s resolute individuality.

Alex Katz

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,470,000

ALEX KATZ (B. 1927) (christies.com)

ALEX KATZ (B. 1927)
Red Band, 1978
Oil on linen
72 x 47 3/4 inches (182.9 x 121.2 cm)

 

Combining his most recognizable subject with a consummate understanding of art history, Red Band is a definitive example of Alex Katz’s mature work. Exhibiting masterful handling of color, light, and surface,  the monumental portrait delivers an intimate tableau in the artist’s signature style. Known for his flat compositions and highly graphic approach to figuration, Katz has established himself as one of the great American portraitists. The artist’s importance in the history of figurative painting cannot be overstated. Originally influenced by billboard advertisements and their use of bold swaths of color for their immediate visual appeal, he did not align with the fledgling Pop Art movement when he began painting.

“Pop art deals with signs, while my work deals with symbols. Pop art is cynical and ironic. My work is not. Those are big differences. Pop art is modern. My work is traditional.”

Working within an evolution of more conventional portraiture, Katz has pushed figural depictions into a new age.

Rendered on a rich goldenrod ground, Katz paints a close-up portrait of a woman wearing an audacious white hat. Sporting the titular red band wrapped around its crown, the headpiece elongates its wearer’s head to towering proportions while the brim flops over her face. The sitter, her hand resting on her chin, stares out of frame with one auburn eye, the other hidden by her head covering. Her skin sports a golden tan and her light pink lips accent the highlights around the edges of the face, serving to separate the subject from the color field in the background. She wears a simple white blouse with long sleeves buttoned at the wrist in a shade that echoes that of her hat. A shock of neatly cascading brown hair with a single lock of cloudy gray is cut at shoulder length and ends in a line of feathery brushstrokes. In the lower right corner, what appears to be the back of a yellow chair is visible. This dynamic cropping of the scene is pivotal to Katz’s investigation of figures in space and often gives the impression that we are viewing renditions of close-up photographs or single frames from a film. His insistence on painting everyday subjects further emphasizes this feeling as the flat color of the background often gives the impression of cut-out images used for collage.

Louise Bourgeois

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 2,470,000

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010) (christies.com)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010)
Spring, 1948-1949
Bronze, painted white
152.4 x 29.2 x 29.2 cm (60 x 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches)
Incised with the artist’s signature, title and number ‘SPRING LOUISE BOURGEOIS 2/7’ (on the base)
Conceived in 1948-1949 and executed in 1960
This work is number two from an edition of six plus one artist’s proof

Conceived in 1948-1949, just after Louise Bourgeois’s first solo exhibition in 1945 and during her transition to life in New York City, Spring emerged from an already innovative and fearless mind. Bourgeois is undoubtedly one of the most individual and ground-breaking artists of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, and her oeuvre has resonated with multiple generations of artists and thinkers globally. Spring is an example of the unparalleled aesthetic sensibilities that fueled a career of nearly six decades. Though Bourgeois is perhaps best known for her Spider sculptures, works like Spring are equally influential and magnificent in their tender, anthropomorphic presence. Reminiscent of stacked cowry shells or perhaps a totem of the female form, the present work is both accessible and mysterious, tangible and surreal. At six feet tall, it mirrors the viewer, drawing us into a fantastical, primordial composition. Spring is perhaps a portrait, but not of a discernable entity. We see ourselves in the sculpture’s sensuous forms, and yet they are otherworldly at the same time. Rendered in cast bronze with a white patina (it is common for artists to conceive of a sculpture and cast it later), Spring is lustrous and detailed like an ancient bust, even as it simultaneously recalls the towering buildings of Bourgeois’s chosen home of New York. Spring is among the most striking sculptures from Bourgeois’s  Personages  series, which occupied her in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Anticipating both performance and installation art, Bourgeois installed these sculptures in groups directly into the gallery floor, turning the show into what she called an “environment.” The Personages could also refer to the uncanny admixtures of Dada. Though Bourgeois is distinct from the Surrealists, especially interesting in this context are the tactile, bodily objects created by Meret Oppenheim and Salvador Dalí.

Wayne Thiebaud

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,107,000

WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021) (christies.com)

WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021)
Fudge Cakes, 1964
Oil on canvas laid down on aluminum
29 3/4 x 49 3/4 inches (75.6 x 126.4 cm.)
Incised with the artist’s signature and date ‘Thiebaud 1964’ (lower left)

Wayne Thiebaud’s Fudge Cakes is an essential example of the artist’s most celebrated subject matter and highlights not only his painterly abilities but also his groundbreaking investigation of representational subjects. Though initially exhibited with the artists that would herald the coming of Pop in America, Thiebaud’s works shared the interest in the everyday but veered away from the depersonalized handling of paint in favor of rich, emotional brushwork. Influenced by a meeting with Abstract Expressionist painters in New York in the late 1950s, Thiebaud internalized their vigor and respect for formal media, subsequently infusing it into seemingly simple paintings that vibrate with energy.

Presented in two rows of three on an plain white ground, six perfectly iced round cakes gleam with some unseen light. Their sharp edges and rich chocolate brown color are accentuated by Thiebaud’s dexterous brushwork. His ability to make the viewer aware of the thick impasto of his paint while simultaneously creating an illusion of thick cake icing speaks to his interest in the interstitial space between subject and surface. The lower edge of each dessert glows with a white light tinged by red and other colors reminiscent of viewing the scene through a window. Thiebaud referred to it as ‘halation’, and it has the same effect of a frosted cinema lens used to evoke nostalgic feelings. Laid out as if resting in a bakery window, the cakes seem to float and yet still allude to the pristine countertop on which they might be displayed. They are slightly askew, not painted in a rigorous grid. This introduces an element of humanity and makes the confections seem all that more real.

Ed Ruscha

Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2022
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 1,865,000

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937) (christies.com)

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Do You Think She “Has It”?, 1974
Egg yolk on moiré
35 7/8 x 40 inches (91.1 x 101.6 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Edward Ruscha 1974’ (on the overlap)

Conceptually rich and yet visually seductive, Ed Ruscha’s Do You Think She “Has It”? is one of the artist’s most fascinating works, made by painting egg yolk onto moiré silk. The sensual contrast between the yellow egg and the shimmery green silk is what gives this work its visual punch. In 1969, Ruscha had turned away from traditional painting materials and instead innovated with a wide range of organic substances, ranging from cherry juice and tea to salad dressing and vaseline. All of this ultimately led him back to painting again, and in the early 1970s, he incorporated whole phrases into his work, rather than the single words he used in the prior decade. Painted in 1974, Do You Think She “Has It”? is one of the more provocative paintings from the series, featuring one of the longest phrases in the group, in which the artist poses the viewer a direct question. Other examples can be found in major international museums, including Now Then, As I Was About to Say… (1974; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Sand in the Vaseline (1974; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). The years 1971 to 1974 are widely considered to be the golden age of Ruscha’s linguistic exploration. During this era, Ruscha produced a fascinating and mysterious body of work in which the single words of the 1960s proliferate and grow, which Ruscha then gathers into ever more mysterious combinations. Painted in 1974, Do You Think She “Has It”? is an outstanding example of this radical and seductive moment in his career, made by painting raw egg yolk onto a beautiful piece of pale green moiré silk. Here, the effect is oddly beautiful. The textural contrast between the luxurious fabric and the pale yellow egg yolk is visually striking. The color and texture of the moiré silk conjures up the elegant couture of the 1950s and ‘60s, since moiré, along with crinoline and taffeta, was a popular material for gowns and party dresses at the time. Here, Ruscha’s cryptic text has marred the dress—an indelible stain on an otherwise virgin surface.

3. Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale

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12 May 2023

Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale (christies.com)

 

1. Auction Statistics

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Total: USD 80,048,990
# Lots : 252 Lots
# Lots sold: 225Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 89.3%

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Top Lot: USD 6,705,000
16 Lots sold over USD 1 million
Turnover: USD 36,243,200 (45.3% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 95 Lots (38%)
Sold within Estimates: 83 Lots (33%)
Sold below Estimates: 47 Lots (19%)
Unsold: 27 Lots (11%)

 

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Jackson Pollock

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD 6,705,000

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956) (christies.com)

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956)
Number 28, 1949
Oil on canvas
12 7/8 x 13 inches (32.5 x 33 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Jackson Pollock 49’ (lower left)

Exhibited in the artist’s iconic breakthrough show at Betty Parsons Gallery in November of 1949, and coming directly from the esteemed collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, with all proceeds benefiting the family’s philanthropic foundation for arts and science organisations, Jackson Pollock’s Number 28, 1949, represents a body of work that defined the artist’s career and propelled him into great acclaim. Works from this year are considered to be some of the most radical of the 20^th century, as Pollock boldly challenged the boundaries of painting, defining 1949 as one of the most crucial years of the artist’s career. Critics described the paintings exhibited at Betty Parson’s Gallery as “the best painting he has yet done” (R. M. Coates, The New Yorker, December 3, 1949). Rare to the public market, the present example is one of an extremely fine group of twenty-two drip paintings that Pollock completed on canvas in 1949, of which more than half of the examples can be found in institutional collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Prominent in its historical significance, artistic innovation, and stellar provenance, Number 28, 1949, captures every best part of Jackson Pollock’s genius.

#2. Joan Mitchell

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 5,132,000

JOAN MITCHELL (1925-1992) (christies.com)

JOAN MITCHELL (1925-1992)
Untitled, 1959
Oil on canvas
45 1/2 x 34 7/8 inches (115.5 x 88.5 cm)
Signed, dedicated and dated ‘J. Mitchell 59 A Maurice with love Joan’ (lower right)
Signed again and dated again ‘Mitchell 59’ (on the reverse)

In Untitled, the speed and force with which Mitchell wielded her brush is astonishing at times, as she shakes off the last vestiges of the Abstract Expressionist style of her New York years in favor of a lighter and freer style, albeit not without a fight. She presents us with a barrage of tempestuous brushwork, especially in the center of the painting, where the artist creates a wild, visual cacophony of zig-zagging, L-shaped and S-shaped forms. Using a thin brush that she loaded with brilliant, shimmering blue, grassy greens and burgundy, Mitchell attacks the canvas with quick flips of the wrist. There is an almost rhythmic echo amongst these thin wriggles, as they jostle and dance before the eye. Whereas her 1957 paintings were comprised of languorous, horizontal brushstrokes, as in Ladybug (1957; Museum of Modern Art, NY), by the end of 1959, the areas of paint now gather toward the center of the canvas, in thicker, bolder and wider areas of paint, like gathering storm clouds where the heavy impasto and variety of her technique are only outmatched by the gestural force of her brush. In 1959, shortly after it was created, Mitchell gifted the present painting to Maurice Lefèbvre-Foinet, the proprietor of one of the oldest and most important art supply shops in Paris. Located in Montparnasse, “L’Établissement Lefèbvre-Foinet” was a favorite haunt of Mitchell’s, along with artists like Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Zao Wou-Ki, Sam Francis and Mitchell’s partner at the time, Jean-Paul Riopelle.

#3. Helen Frankenthaler

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011)
Genuine Blue, 1970-1971
Oil on canvas
91×93 inches (231.1 x 236.2 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Frankenthaler ’70’ (lower left)

#4. Helen Frankenthaler

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011) (christies.com)

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011)
Earliness, 1972
Oil on canvas
93 3/4 x 99 1/2 inches (237×252 cm)
Signed ‘Frankenthaler’ (lower right)

#5. Helen Frankenthaler

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011) (christies.com)

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928-2011)
The First of the Year, 1976
Oil on canvas
72×138 inches (182.9 x 350.5 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Frankenthaler ’76’ (on the reverse)

 

#6. David Hockney

ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-1991)
The Red Wall, 1972
Oil on canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed with the artist’s initials and dated ‘RM 72’ (upper right)

#8. George Condo

#9. Ed Ruscha

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Pattern of Lust, 1987
Acrylic and oil on canvas
20×24 inches (50.8 x 60.1 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘ED RUSCHA “PATTERN OF LUST” 1987’ (on the stretcher)
Signed again and dated again ‘Ed Ruscha 1987’ (on the reverse)

An intimate, spellbinding creation, Ed Ruscha’s Pattern of Lust is a particularly mesmerizing example of the artist’s celebrated City Lights series (1985-1990). Highly-coveted and ravishingly beautiful, the City Lights paintings are among Ruscha’s most sought-after series, in which a sparkling nocturnal vision of the Los Angeles grid is paired with the cryptic words and phrases for which Ruscha is best known. “The ‘City Lights’ paintings could be said to articulate a noir-ish version of the sublime… they can be seen as part of Ruscha’s ongoing dialogue with contemporary iterations of transcendence…” (R. Rugoff, “Heavenly Noises,” in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 21). Indeed, in Pattern of Lust, Ruscha marries a beautiful, transcendent vision of the heavens with the seedier dark side of Hollywood glamor.

Aerial view of Los Angeles, circa 1962. Photo: Archive Photos / Getty Images.

“A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.  They’re just meant to support the drama, like the ‘Hollywood’ sign being held up by sticks.” 

Evoking the collective silence of a hushed airplane as it makes its final descent into Los Angeles at night, Pattern of Lust makes for a riveting experience, one that’s made all the more captivating because of the strange words that hover before the eye. As if materializing out of thin air, the phrase “PATTERN OF LUST” rises up from the pictorial ether, rendered by hand in Ruscha’s signature “Boy Scout Utility Modern” font. Ruscha employed an airbrush to create the midnight-blue background and its pattern of twinkling lights, but he painted the text by hand, varying the density of the paint so that the underlying pattern of lights would shine through. The authoritarian nature of Ruscha’s chosen font makes it seem as if an important announcement were being issued, or that the title screen of a major Hollywood film has come up and a hush falls over the crowd.

#10. Wayne Thiebaud

WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021)
Delta Sloughs, 2001
Oil on canvas
24×36 inches (61 x 91.5 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Thiebaud 2001’ (center right)

#10 bis. George Condo

GEORGE CONDO (B. 1957)
Confrontation, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
70×85 inches (177.8 x 215.9 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Condo 99’ (lower right)

 

3. Other Highlights

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Andy Warhol

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Yayoi Kusama

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
High Heels for Going to Heaven, 2013
Urethane paint on FRP and stainless steel, in two parts
Left shoe: 120 x 63.8 x 97.8 cm (47 1/4 x 25 1/8 x 38 1/2 inches)
Right shoe: 170.2 x 67 x 94.9 cm (67 x 26 3/8 x 37 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA 2013’ (on the left shoe)
This work is unique

KAWS

CECILY BROWN (B. 1969)
Untitled (#45), 2007
Oil on canvas
12 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches (31.8 x 44.5 cm)

“You’ve got the same old materials—just oils and a canvas—and you’re trying to do something that’s been done for centuries…
I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention.
The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.” 

Ed Ruscha

ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)
Pools, 1970
Gunpowder and pastel on paper
11 1/2 x 29 inches (29.2 x 73.7 cm)
Signed and dated ‘E. Ruscha 1970’ (lower left)

Andy Warhol

Ernie Barnes

ERNIE BARNES (1938 – 2009)
The Winning Shot, 1970
Acrylic on canvas
23 3/4 x 36 inches (60.3 x 91.4 cm)
Signed ‘ERNIE BARNES’ (lower right)

Stanley Whitney

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 504,000

STANLEY WHITNEY (B. 1946) (christies.com)

STANLEY WHITNEY (B. 1946)
Bertacca, 2017
Oil on canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Stanley Whitney 2017’ (on the reverse)

“I follow the paintings wherever they take me. If the painting goes out the door, I follow it out the door; if it goes out the window, I follow it out the window.”

Kenny Scharf

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 428,400

KENNY SCHARF (B. 1958) (christies.com)

KENNY SCHARF (B. 1958)
Jade Pea God, 1985
Oil on canvas, in artist’s frame
82 x 94 1/2 inches (208.3 x 240 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Jade Pea God Kenny Scharf Sept Dec 85’ (on the reverse)

Jenna Gribbon

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 60,000
USD 403,200

JENNA GRIBBON (B. 1978) (christies.com)

JENNA GRIBBON (B. 1978)
Set List Focus, 2020
Oil on canvas
48×36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Jenna Gribbon 2020’ (on the overlap)

Scott Kahn

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 250,000
USD 378,000

SCOTT KAHN (B. 1946) (christies.com)

SCOTT KAHN (B. 1946)
Carnations, 2003
Oil on canvas
36 1/8 x 40 1/8 inches (91.8 x 101.9 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Scott Kahn ’03’ (lower right)

Salman Toor

Christie’s New-York: 12 May 2023
Estimated: USD 120,000 – 180,000
USD 252,000

SALMAN TOOR (B. 1983) (christies.com)

SALMAN TOOR (B. 1983)
The Happy Servant, 2013
Oil on canvas
45×33 inches (114.3 x 83.8 cm)

 

4. Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper Sale

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13 May 2023

Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper Sale (christies.com)

[This sale is not covered by Moonstar Market Intelligence]

Total: USD 10,684,100
# Lots sold: 90 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 83.3%

#1. Claude Monet

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 2,954,000

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) (christies.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
La Tamise, 1901
Pastel on toned paper
31.5 x 47.6 cm (12 3/8 x 18 3/4 inches)
Signed ‘Claude Monet’ (lower right)

“I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog… I so love London!” 

Monet’s impassioned declaration is masterfully conveyed in La Tamise, which is a pastel study for the artist’s monumental, landmark series of London views, the Vues de Londres. Begun in London in 1899, and continued in two more stays in the city in 1900 and 1901, this series remains one of the artist’s greatest achievements, as he transformed the city and its famed fog-filled skies into ethereal, near abstract visions at once timeless and modern.

#2. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 529,200

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Tête d’homme au chapeau, 1956
Colored wax crayons on paper
31.8 x 23.5 cm (12 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches)
Signed ‘Picasso’ (upper left) and dated and numbered ‘7.11.56. I’ (lower left)

#3. Vincent van Gogh

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 529,200

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890) (christies.com)

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890)
Weesman met een hoge hoed in zijn linkerhand, 1882
Pencil on toned paper
49 x 23.2 cm (19 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches)
Drawn in The Hague in September-December 1882

Van Gogh drew Weesman met een hoge hoed in zijn linkerhand (Orphan man with a top hat in his left hand) in the autumn of 1882, during his stay in The Hague. After a momentous argument with his parents in December of 1881, the artist moved to the coastal town to study with his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve, a Dutch realist painter and leading member of the Hague School. There, Van Gogh set up a small studio and embarked on an exciting experimental journey, fueled by drawing and watercolor studies and the discovery of new painting techniques.

 

5. Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale

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13 May 2023

Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale (christies.com)

[This sale is not covered by Moonstar Market Intelligence]

Total: USD 28,505,006
# Lots sold: 158
Sell-Through Rate: 83.2%

#1. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,317,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Le peintre et son modèle, 1963
Oil on canvas
73×100 cm (28 3/4 x 39 3/8 inches)
Signed ‘Picasso’ (upper left)

At the beginning of 1963, Pablo Picasso became obsessed by a subject that had stood at the heart of his art for the entirety of his career. Over the course of two weeks in February, he filled the pages of a small carnet with more than two dozen sketches of a studio interior in which a painter is seen working at his easel in the presence of a reclining nude model (Musée Picasso, Carnet no. 59).  From this point until 1965 Picasso painted and drew mostly variations on this theme. The artist and model appear together, as in Le peintre et son modèle, or alone as male or female portraits and nude figure paintings. The male subjects are almost invariably stand-ins for Picasso himself—in the present work he is sporting the artist’s signature blue-and-white striped Breton top—and the models are most typically the figure of his wife, Jacqueline. He gave relatively little time to other subjects, and it was not until the musketeers made their appearance in April 1967 that his preoccupation with the artist and model theme appeared to have subsided, although it was still far from having run its course.

#2. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
USD 1,925,500

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Buste de jeune fille (Paloma), 1951
Oil and ripolin on canvas
54.6 x 33 cm (21 1/2 x 13 inches)
Sated ‘7.1.51’ (on the reverse)

Picasso painted this vibrant, bust-length portrait of his daughter Paloma on 7 January 1951, when she was nearly two years old. The artist depicted Paloma as an adorable, chubby toddler with a cheerful expression, outlining her pudgy cheeks, chin and fingers with confident swoops of bright green paint. Her cropped, dark-brown hair and fringe, adorned with a cobalt blue bow, are similarly invoked with simple, striated brushstrokes. Paloma is dressed like a miniature version of her father; she wears a charming Breton sweater, similar to the striped nautical top that formed part of Picasso’s own painterly uniform while living in the south of France. This likeness of Paloma is an expression of paternal tenderness and affection, but also of the joyous energy that suffused the artist’s work in the early 1950s.

#3. Marc Chagall

Christie’s New-York: 13 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 1,865,000

MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985) (christies.com)

MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985)
Autour du coq rouge, 1982
Oil on canvas
92.1 x 64.8 cm (36 1/4 x 25 1/2 inches)
Signed ‘Marc Chagall’ (lower right)

Autour du coq rouge contains several deeply personal symbols, arranged in an idyllic Provençal landscape saturated with sky blue, scarlet red, tangerine orange, lilac purple and hot pink. This complex, multi-figural composition is organized around the titular red rooster. This central protagonist, along with a goat and cow, implies an agrarian theme, informed by Chagall’s rural upbringing in Russia as well as his observations of the French countryside. White, blue or red roosters recur throughout Chagall’s oeuvre; the rooster alternately appears as a monumental spirit animal floating over Paris or Vitebsk, as loyal steed for young lovers, or as an actual farm dweller, as in the present work.

 

 

 

6. 21st Century Evening Sale

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15 May 2023

21st Century Evening Sale (christies.com)

 

1. Auction Statistics

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27 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 23,800,000
High Estimate: USD 34,310,000
Estimate on Request: 1 Lot

———-

Total: USD 98,802,500
# Lots sold: 25 Lots
# Lots withdrawn: 1 Lot
Sell-Through Rate: 96.2%

———-

Top Lot: USD 67,110,000
11 Lots sold over USD 1 million
Turnover: USD 93,353,200 (94.5% of total)

———-

Sold over Estimates: 13 Lots (50%)
Sold within Estimates: 11 Lots (42%)
Sold below Estimates: 0 Lot (0%)
Unsold / EOR: 2 Lots (8%)

 

2. Top 5 Lots

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#1. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimate On Request
USD 67,110,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) (christies.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), 1983
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas mounted on wooden supports, in three parts
Overall: 68×141 inches (172.7 x 358 cm.)
Titled ‘EL GRAN ESPECTACULO’ (upper center)
Signed, titled and dated ‘“THE NILE” 1983 Jean-Michel Basquiat’ (on the reverse)

Painted when the artist was just 22 years-old, El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) stands as one of the most important paintings in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s short but explosive career. It is one of three large-scale canvases executed in 1983 in which the artist ambitiously and audaciously proclaims that his central concern from this point on is to use painting to address issues of representation within the grand theater of world history. Thus, the present work becomes Basquiat’s quintessential history painting, as across its highly animated surface an intoxicating array of signs and signifiers unlocks the history of the Black diaspora. From Ancient Egypt to present day America, Basquiat’s employs his unique visual language to chart the Black experience as part of Western Civilization. “

Previously owned by Enrico Navarra, a prominent collector of the artist’s work and the co-author of what is widely considered to be the most comprehensive catalogue of Basquiat’s paintings, El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) is discussed at length in the wider scholarly literature on the artist. It has been exhibited in numerous critically acclaimed retrospectives including one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1992 and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006. Held in the same private collection for the past fifteen years, this is a rare opportunity to acquire one of Basquiat’s seminal works.

With the present work, Basquiat joins a distinguished group of artists who have confronted humanity’s darkest forces through the power of art. From Picasso’s Guernica to Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, and Andy Warhol’s Race Riot, artists have employed the visual and emotional resonance of art to process events which seem unfathomable. Yet what is remarkable about El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) is that this highly complex and accomplished painting was completed by someone so young; Picasso was 56 years old when he executed his treatise on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Basquiat painted the present work when he was barely out of his teenage years.  Across one of the artist’s hand-constructed canvases, Basquiat choreographs a heady arrangement of evocative graphic symbols, scrawled words, and painterly drips; all characteristic elements of his unique painterly language. Often painting late into—and through—the night, what at first appears to be a chaotic composition, is in fact a highly organized assembly of symbolic signifiers.

#2. Cecily Brown

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 6,705,000

CECILY BROWN (B. 1969) (christies.com)

CECILY BROWN (B. 1969)
Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned), 2013
Oil on linen
109×171 inches (276.9 x 434.3 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Cecily Brown 2013’ (on the reverse)

Featuring a visual symphony of the artist’s masterful brushwork, Cecily Brown’s monumental Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned) is an exemplary canvas that speaks to the very heart of her interrogation of the great themes of Western art. Brown, who is currently the subject of her first fully-fledged museum retrospective in New York, has been pushing the boundaries of the representation of the human body, and indeed the boundaries of painting, for more than twenty-five years. Nowhere is this bravado more evident than in Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned), a painting filled with motion, rigor, and chromatic intensity.

Its fluxing, admixing bodies are larger than life and inspire us to contemplate how art and identity coalesce in unexpected ways. Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned) could therefore be a portrait of humanity itself in all its unpredictability and fluidity. In this context, there are strong correlations—both compositionally and in its palette—between the present work and Matisse’s The Joy of Life (Bonheur de Vivre). The horizontal composition of both works enables the amalgamation of figure and landscape in a flurry of luxurious brushwork. Due to its impressive, mural-like, scale, Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned) becomes an immersive experience, and it happily finds beauty in its apparent chaos. The assembled figures are loosely divided into a darker left side composed of purples, blues, and pinks, and a lighter right side built up from yellows and greens. The latter section contains more bodies that are identifiable as such as they coalesce from Brown’s skillful brushstrokes.

#3. Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 4,890,000

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929) (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Pumpkin, 1993
Acrylic on canvas
73 x 90.8 cm (28 3/4 x 35 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1993’ (on the reverse)

The luxurious curves of Yayoi Kusama’s yellow Pumpkin are subtle, tactile, and evocative. Its vibrant colors resemble the sun and the earth, somewhere peaceful and introspective. This desire for generating reflection in the viewer, especially through unexpected objects and images, has always been Kusama’s practice. Painted almost life size, Pumpkin surges with the artist’s perennial vitality even as it mirrors a natural scale.

Painted in 1993, Pumpkin was executed at a pivotal time for the artist. She was chosen as the first single artist to represent Japan in her country’s pavilion at the Giardini, and the centerpiece of her exhibit was a large yellow pumpkin installed in one of her signature mirrored Infinity Rooms. It also marked her reemergence onto the international art scene after a period of relative isolation. She experienced renewed interest in her work, which resulted in new gallery representation (Ota Fine Art in 1994), and a slew of new installations including a monumental yellow pumpkin installed on the remote Japanese island of Naoshima in 1994, her first outdoor art installation since her iconic “happenings” of the 1960s.

The color yellow has occupied a central place within art history, celebrated for both its visceral and spiritual qualities. The most famous modern example might be Paul Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ (1889), which, like Pumpkin, uses color to ends both surreal and true to life. Given its contemplative, almost spiritual nature, Pumpkin might evoke Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) or Helen Frankenthaler’s Yellow Crater (1963-1964). What these disparate works have in common, if viewed alongside Kusama’s Pumpkin, is a shared optimism, even a utopian quality. For to approach the color of the sun is itself a massive statement that brings art closer to life, which has been Kusama’s goal.  In this way, Yellow Pumpkin combines a personal experience with a universal one. Kusama’s work is sunny indeed, and within that lust for life is an entire history of emotion in art through the centuries. Pumpkin is a generator of passion. It does not present nets meant to capture; they conversely encourage us to feel the deepest emotions without allowing them to be lost to the demands of everyday life. A striking example of Kusama’s sought-after paintings of the 1990s, just as her career was reach the height Western critical acclaim. Each motif, such as the pumpkin and the accompanying Infinity Nets, have their own inimitable presence that speaks both to their skilled making and the emotions they elicit. Pumpkin is a painting that shows light in relief, in three dimensions. It gives us an illuminated path forward into a heretofore unknown and joyful space.

#4. Simone Leigh

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,712,000

SIMONE LEIGH (B. 1967) (christies.com)

SIMONE LEIGH (B. 1967)
Stick, 2019
Bronze
85x63x63 inches (215.9 x 160 x 160 cm)
This work is number two from an edition of three, plus an artist’s proof

The first Black woman to be awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the Venice Biennale, Simone Leigh has irrevocably changed the face of contemporary sculpture, and in doing so has built an unparalleled career spanning multiple media. Stick is undoubtedly one of her most important and timeless works; executed in a small edition of just three plus one artist’s proof, another example was shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is now a promised gift to the museum’s permanent collection. Stick, with its prominent Afro, symbolizes the empowered women of the Civil Rights movement, like Angela Davis. Drawing on Leigh’s Jamaican heritage, it also stands as a monument to the storied history of Black women as leaders, protectors, and healers, and honors their unceasing contributions to art and culture.

Born out of immense skill and ambition, Stick builds on centuries of sculptural tradition, from the Benin Bronzes to Edgar Degas’s cast ballerinas, and Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1996-1997). Stick intensifies the emotional resonance of bronze, and Leigh tenderly amplifies its simultaneous potential for strength and delicacy.The eponymous stick forms, stacked in rows, pierce the figure’s bell-shaped base, which also functions as a skirt, and they generate a desire to touch and behold. They add further tactility to the sculpture, whose variegated exterior is also textured by the marks of the artist’s hand in the clay form that precedes the final bronze sculpture. This skirt, which is over five feet wide, is capacious enough to hold entire worlds, entire histories. The woman’s lithe body, which emerges gracefully from the luminescent base, has the same luxurious curves of Constantin Brancusi’s La jeune fille sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard) (1928/1932). It also evokes the exacting busts of Selma Burke, a Black woman artist and pioneering sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance who created the bas relief portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt that is used on the dime.

#5. Mark Bradford

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 2,591,000

MARK BRADFORD (B. 1961) (christies.com)

MARK BRADFORD (B. 1961)
White Painting, 2009
Mixed media on canvas
102×144 inches (259×366 cm)
Signed with the artist’s initial, titled and dated ‘White Painting 2009 M’ (on the reverse)

A visually condensed and evocative study of personal cartographies, Mark Bradford’s White Painting is a striking testament to the artist’s investigations into the patterns found in social strata, lived experience and the history of art. Sourcing materials and inspiration in equal measure from the streets of Los Angeles where he lives and works, the artist examines urban society through the lens of abstraction. Utilizing a meticulous, labor-intensive process, Bradford builds, subtracts, adds, and excavates until his surfaces are infused with visual artifacts and the traces of his investigative incursions.

“I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end, it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.”

Often pointing toward the practice of recording, both for as a way of experiencing a place and creating a visual record, Bradford constructs vast webs of interconnecting marks like those in White Painting that lead the eye across the painting’s surface through compounded layers of paint and found material. Like main thoroughfares forging across the urban sprawl, these lines splinter, veer, and collide in a systematic crawl that gradually overtakes the entire composition.

At twelve feet across, White Painting is an all-encompassing composition that envelops the viewer with rich surfaces and intricate details. Split into two discrete areas, the artist reveals his hand by juxtaposing an ordered structure with a more abstract realm beneath. The upper portion resembles the ‘dymaxion’ geometry of architect Buckminster Fuller, its lustrous white surface inundated with a web of incisions that create a vast network of triangles and quadrilaterals that spread from edge to edge. In the lower section, the bright white is scraped away to reveal an underlayment of pilfered advertisements, print materials (including an Apple gift card), and other debris that Bradford piles atop a green ground. This verdant underlayer comes through at points where the artist’s scratched and incised line penetrates the uppermost paint.

3. Other Highlights

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 1,008,000

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE (B. 1977) (christies.com)

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE (B. 1977)
Highriser, 2009
Oil on canvas
98 5/8 x 59 inches (250.5 x 150 cm)
Signed with the artist’s initials, titled and dated ‘Highriser LYB 2009’ (on the reverse)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s evocative painting Highriser is emblematic of her desire to understand and celebrate the act of painting. Measuring over eight feet tall, within its epic proportions the artist presents an astute and intense examination of the medium’s component parts: color, light, composition, and gesture. Included in every major exhibition of the artist’s work, including the recent critically acclaimed retrospective at Tate Modern in London, this monumental canvas presents a moment to consider and explore mood, movement and pose worked out on the surface of the canvas. Taking her inspiration from contemporary society as well as art history, Yiadom-Boakye is a collector of images, which she examines, dissects, condenses, and reinterprets to produce portraits of imagined characters, raising questions of identity and representation.

The present canvas presents an intense study of light and shadow, reminiscent of Gustave Courbet or Jean-François Millet. A tall, lean man steps toward us, entering our world or beckoning us to enter his. He is both a monument and a specter, somewhere between the timeless and the ethereal. Yiadom-Boakye skillfully renders affecting details, such as the figure’s white collar and sleeves peeking out from his otherwise black and blue clothes. Surrounding him are browns and blacks subtly deepened or lightened by the artist with skillful mixing. The figure’s blue pants, laden with shadow, become like a sculptural base. This effect recalls the modelling and deep shadows of Surrealist sculpture and photography, such as Man Ray’s Untitled Rayograph (1922) or Le Violon d’Ingres (1924). Yet Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings never feel removed or fantastical. We might recognize someone we know within them, and this familiarity has made the artist’s paintings of single figures, like Highriser, among her most cherished and sought-after works. Highriser, with its expressive and intentionally loose marks, expounds upon the emotional power of Yiadom-Boakye’s process. Working the rapid tradition of celebrated painters like Picasso, she largely creates her paintings in a single day. She relies on scrapbooks of images, along with notes, memory, and stories, rather than biographical details and therefore her work oscillates between the documentary and the imaginary.

Rashid Johnson

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 819,000

RASHID JOHNSON (B. 1977) (christies.com)

RASHID JOHNSON (B. 1977)
Untitled Escape Collage, 2018
Ceramic tile, mirror tile, branded red oak flooring, vinyl, spray enamel, animal skin, black soap and wax, in artist’s frame
Overall: 73×97 inches (185.4 x 264.4 cm)

Layered, complex, and awash in history, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage is a symphony of materials that collaborate to create a mirror that the artist holds up to society. Across its highly active surface, Johnson incorporates disparate materials such as the African beauty staple black soap (a material he has also used in his portraits), ceramic and mirrored tiles, and wax, which he uses to adhere his objects to the support. The choice of black soap as a medium creates heretofore unimagined art historical innovations, while centering the objects of African and African American life within Johnson’s oeuvre. What results is a layered, textural assemblage that embodies the European avant-gardes of Dada and Situationist International, but also the pioneering work of Black artists, like the Gee’s Bend Quilters, Faith Ringgold, and Robert Colescott. Johnson, always unafraid to bare his soul to the viewer, offers an interwoven narrative with Untitled Escape Collage, and invites us to consider under what conditions we might need to escape. Of course, that query has everything to do with racial, gendered, and socioeconomic disparities. Johnson’s work has always been a source of empowerment and social justice, qualities that become even more powerful through the artist’s combination of abstraction and figuration.

Peppered with photographic reproductions of indigenous masks, Untitled Escape Collage celebrates Black history and creativity. Johnson moves seamlessly between the masks and the Ellsworth Kelly-like planar abstractions, reminding us that identity is both legible and opaque. Like Kelly’s series of Parisian windows, Untitled Escape Collage is a sumptuous, kaleidoscopic map of colors that refers to the natural world and transcends it.

“I think about most things that I make as quite topographic. So you imagine a landscape, the different materials in it, then just begin to translate them. Making a painting using a thousand different cuts brings that paint to life. Inside of this exists maybe 300 abstract micro-paintings. And then stepping back, just one large macro.”

This micro-macro interplay is very present in Untitled Escape Collage, which invites detailed inspection even as it aims to be immersive and sublime. Of special note is vibrancy here; Johnson’s work is often spare, but Untitled Escape Collage is filled with color, notably an affecting purple. It reminds one Wassily Kandinsky’s fantastical paintings.

Louise Bonnet

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 403,200

LOUISE BONNET (B. 1970) (christies.com)

LOUISE BONNET (B. 1970)
Interior with Orange Bed, 2021
Oil on linen
72×120 inches (182.9 x 304.8 cm)
Signed with the artist’s initials and dated ‘LB 21’ (on the reverse)

With nods to art history, yet working unapologetically in the present, Louise Bonnet’s paintings are complex considerations of contemporary art. With the same sensitivity to color and the body as the paintings of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, Interior with Orange Bed is a layered, complex, and surreal study of space: it evokes Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) as the supine body pushes at the picture plane, and it is like a painting by Salvador Dalí, with its long, melting forms, or René Magritte, with its interior that seems outside of time. With works like the present example, Bonnet—whose work was selected for inclusion in the most recent Venice Biennale—has become one of the most exciting and innovative painters working today.

Interior with Orange Bed depicts one of Bonnet’s characteristically faceless figures upon the eponymous bed, as if being psychoanalyzed. Clad in light green, its long fingers are intertwined, swirling around each other like a small tornado. Behind it is a small, slanted window that is reminiscent of Robert Irwin’s Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977), which is embedded in the Marcel Breuer building that formerly housed the Whitney Museum and the Met Breuer. Like the diagonal window, Bonnet’s protagonist extends unnaturally into the claustrophobic space. As Artforum observes, “Like the love children of R. Crumb and [Johannes] Vermeer, her subjects are unconstrained by the logic of traditional human anatomy because she shapes her characters more through violent force than through technical precision—flesh is pressed, twisted, gripping”

Andrea Mantegna, Dead Christ (“the foreshortened Christ”), mourned by the Virgin, a pious woman and Saint John the Apostle, circa 1480. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Interior with Orange Bed is part of a series inspired by Agnès Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, a narrative drama with quasi-documentary elements. The story follows a young woman who wanders the south of France, only to die alone. Despite this tragedy, the film is also a celebration of freedom and the possibility of finding community in the loneliest places. Interior with Orange Bed is likewise outside of society, existing in a space that defies the laws of nature and decorum. Interior with Orange Bed is a slice of an unknown life, one we can imagine only with Bonnet’s guidance. She tells the Dodie Bellamy,

“I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is.”

The story of Interior with Orange Bed might just be one of rest, but it could also be something else that we cannot fully grasp, something sinister or hair-raising. Yet in Bonnet’s paintings there is always a sense of wonder and an invitation to dream.

Kenny Scharf

Christie’s New-York: 15 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 252,000

KENNY SCHARF (B. 1958) (christies.com)

KENNY SCHARF (B. 1958)
Judy Butterfly, 1981
Acrylic and spray paint on unstretched canvas mounted on linen, in artist-appointed frame
Overall: 73 1/8 x 56 5/8 inches (185.7 x 143.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Judy Butterfly Kenny Scharf 81’ (on the reverse)

An important early work by Kenny Scharf, Judy Butterfly depicts the cartoon character Judy Jetson from the classic 1960s American cartoon series The Jetsons. Painted in acid-hued tones of blue, green, pink and yellow, this psychedelic portrait flips the usual conventions of Pop Art; following in the footsteps of Warhol, Basquiat, and Haring, Scharf adapts and subverts their visual language as, when viewed under ultra-violet light, the painting’s surface takes on a whole other chromatic dimension. Judy became a central motif for the artist, and in the present work he transforms her from the archetypal sitcom teenage daughter, known for talking on the phone and going shopping, into a psychedelic butterfly, her signature platinum blond hair now a lime green. Scharf’s signature unique style enlivens Judy’s wings and lends a hazy, atmospheric quality to the scene. This texture is amplified by his choice of an unstretched canvas resulting in a unique surface topography. Scharf contains all of these unique media within his own chosen frame. Judy Butterfly is an inventive, funny, and slyly beautiful painting that represents the impetus of Scharf’s forty-year career.

Judy Butterfly is a fantastical landscape that embodies the magic of television. Judy’s multicolored wings are detailed with bold colors evoking a Wassily Kandinsky abstraction. Around her are volcanic rocks, but instead of lava or desolation, we have a delicate green plant springing up from the landscape. The spirals that frame the canvas are evocative symbols for Scharf.

“The spiral is easily understood as a means to other levels (worlds).
For example: the tornado, the bathtub drain spiral…Galaxies are spirals. Suction—black holes? Spirals are universal in space, in nature.”

Judy was important to Scharf’s early work, as was the evolution of technology represented in cultural phenomena like The Jetsons. In the same year as the creation of the present work, he even painted a DIY mural in New York entitled Judy in which the eponymous character floats like a genie. Judy symbolizes this utopian phantasmagoria; she is a teenager who still has all the concerns of high school, despite riding to school in a hovercar, or being turned into a butterfly. Scharf’s manifestos mirror the Situationist International movement, which used public artworks to express solidarity with the demands of the May ’68 protests in France. They were known to use graffiti, with slogans like “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.”

 

7. A Century of Art: The Gerald Fineberg Collection

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This May, Christie’s New York is honored to present A Century of Art: The Gerald Fineberg Collection: a rich and nuanced collection of modern, post-war and contemporary art that will be presented as a standalone two-part auction during the New-York sales season at Christie’s.

In Gerald Fineberg’s wide-ranging trove, modern masterworks by Man Ray and Picasso join the timeless figurative paintings of Alice Neel and Barkley Hendricks and the pioneering artworks of Ruth Asawa and Lee Krasner. This is a momentous collection, the likes of which have been rarely seen before, and one that is in step with today’s changing definition of the traditional 20th century artistic canon.

The Gerald Fineberg Collection Part 1

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17 May 2023

A Century of Art: The Gerald Fineberg Collection Part I (christies.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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65 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 163,000,000
High Estimate: USD 233,450,000

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Total: USD 153,053,300
# Lots sold: 59 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 90.8%

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Top Lot: USD 10,070,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 40 Lots
Turnover: USD 141,297,500 (92.3% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 17 Lots (26%)
Sold within Estimates: 23 Lots (35%)
Sold below Estimates: 19 Lots (29%)
Unsold: 6 Lots (9%)

 

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Christopher Wool

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 15,000,000 – 20,000,000
USD 10,070,000

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955) (christies.com)

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955)
Untitled, 1993
Enamel on aluminum
78×60 inches (198 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled, inscribed and dated ‘WOOL 1993 UNTITLED (P185)’ (on the reverse)

Christopher Wool’s Untitled is an exceedingly rare multi-colored example from the artist’s iconic series of word paintings. While most are rendered in thick black text stenciled on a white aluminum ground, this polychromed panel lays bare the artist’s interest in the perception of both painting and textual information in reaction to daily life and the urban environment. Jeff Koons addressed the complexity of his fellow conceptual artist’s oeuvre, noting, “Wool’s work contains continual internal/external debate within itself. At one moment his work will display self-denial, at the next moment solipsism. Shifting psychological states, false fronts, shadows of themselves, justify their own existence…. Wool’s work locks itself in only to deftly escape through sleight of hand. The necessity to survive the moment at all costs, using its repertoire of false fronts and psychological stances is the work’s lifeblood” (J. Koons, cited in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim (and travelling), 2013, p. 35). Untitled peels away the hard layers of the city to reveal the artist’s hand. Viewed from afar, it retains the shocking immediacy the monochrome word paintings, its slogan cut and rearranged by the artist into a sort of visual poetry. However, upon closer inspection, the subtleties of the painter’s process make themselves known. By allowing for this duality, Wool asks us to reconsider our relationship with text and its link to information while also commenting on the nature of symbols, language, and the art of painting.

Acquired by the present owner just a year after it was painted, Untitled has an especially active surface, a fact that is only further emphasized by Wool’s use of colored paint to render each block letter. Using the whole spectrum, he spells out the phrase “FUCKEM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE”, omitting punctuation and ignoring proper spacing as he does in the rest of the series. The use of color here gives a deeper insight into Wool’s seemingly straightforward process. In the black works, one could be excused for thinking each stenciled glyph was applied in order until the phrase of completed. However, in this particular example, one is rewarded for looking closer. Under higher scrutiny, it becomes clear that Wool painted the letters in one color before returning to overpaint in a different shade. The dripping, pulsating pigment on the surface hides this initial coat in some cases, but in others, like the first ‘K’ and the ‘F’ of the word ‘IF’, the base layer pushes through. In the first ‘C’, a halo of red glows beneath the verdant green, and in the ‘T’ below a yellow aura radiates on the edge of midnight blue. It oozes at the periphery of the otherwise clean and orderly shapes and, juxtaposed with the vertical drips of paint, helps to create a visually dynamic composition that oscillates between being readable as text or image. Furthermore, the grain of the coarse brush is visible in each stroke as light catches darker undercoating peering through thin coverage areas. By creating this visual intrigue, Wool successfully disconnects our normal habit of reading letters for information and instead allows us to explore the pictorial qualities presented.

#2. Gerhard Richter

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 15,000,000 – 20,000,000
USD 9,610,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932) (christies.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Badende, 1967
Oil on canvas
160×200 cm (63 x 78 1/2 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Richter 67’ (on the reverse)

An historic icon within Gerhard Richter’s practice, Badende (Bathers) is a rare work from the artist’s landmark early series of female nudes. Combining extraordinary technical bravura with a powerful commentary on the nature of image consumption, it occupies pivotal territory in his seminal body of photo-paintings. Conjuring the ‘bathers’ of Ingres, Cézanne and others, Badende is the most ambitious and virtuosic in a sequence of paintings made in 1967. The series, created in the wake of major 1966 nudes such as Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Zwei Liebespaare (Daros Collection, Zurich), combined references to art history and mass-produced erotic imagery, chiming with the contemporary currents of Pop Art. Where Richter had previously worked from single sources, here he weaves a dazzling composite vision from multiple photographic images, pushing his figures to the brink of abstraction. In a unique instance of self-quotation, he would later depict the painting in his 1971 portraits of the American artist Brigid Polk (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and Tate, London). Widely exhibited as Richter rose onto the international stage, Badende became a defining canvas of the period, taking its place as a centerpiece of the Gerald Fineberg Collection in 1987.

Gerhard Richter in his studio, Düsseldorf 1967. © Gerhard Richter 2023 (31032023), courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden.

Richter’s 1967 series of nude and semi-nude women formed a vital strand of his early practice: examples have graced institutions including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Neues Museum, Nuremberg, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Olbricht Collection and the Yageo Foundation, Taipei. Comparable in scale to just two other works in the cycle, Badende is distinguished by its subtle tinted palette, indicating Richter’s gradual move away from black and white in his photo-paintings. The rich complexity of its composition, moreover, stands alone within the series. The artist had been fascinated by the historic motif of the bathers since his student days at the Dresden Academy, and particularly admired Ingres’ The Turkish Bath (1862). Shrouded in ambiguity, Richter’s nudes shift in and out of focus, their limbs dissolving into abstract patterns. Their features, blurred to the point of anonymity, place them eternally beyond the viewer’s grasp. In the indeterminate depths of the painting, where reality gives way to illusion, Richter enacts the dynamics of desire, deferral, seduction and misdirection that define our interactions with all imagery.

#3. Pablo Picasso

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 9,000,000 – 12,000,000
USD 8,460,000

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) (christies.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)
Buste d’homme lauré, 1969
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
115.7 x 88.8 cm (45 5/8 x 35 inches)
Dated ‘11.5.69.’ (on the reverse)

In the autumn of 1968, Pablo Picasso turned his eye again toward the figure of the musketeer, a defining subject of his late work. This swashbuckling character first entered Picasso’s œuvre in 1966: during a protracted period of convalescence, he began to re-read many classic works of literature, from Spanish Golden age epics to novels by Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Georges Remi’s serials The Adventures of Tintin. It was Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, however, that he found most captivating, and the novel’s daring, exuberant heroes appealed to the artist emerging from a long illness. Indeed, facing down the last years of his life, Picasso was acutely aware of his own mortality, and the vivacious musketeers proffered a pictorial opportunity to a man who had always lived to the fullest.

Picasso exhibition at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, from May 1 – September 30, 1970. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau.

Set against a pale ground, the frontally-posed musketeer in Buste d’homme lauré is suave and debonair, sporting a lavish vest, thick black hair, and a jaunty mustache. He wears an ostentatious doublet–articulated by decadent swathes of ice blue and red–and the titular laurel crown, a nod to Picasso’s return to fighting form; the laurel wreath has been a symbol of triumph since antiquity. On the figure’s chest, a tiny daub of yellow gleams in the light. This oversized presence is further emphasized by the musketeer’s unwavering gaze and, with hands placed firmly on the arms of the chair, he appears ready to leap into action. Buste d’homme lauré is one of two paintings created on 11 May 1969, both of which feature a man enthroned, an arrangement Picasso had turned to repeatedly throughout this period.

Picasso was deeply fond of his musketeers, attributing identities and temperaments to each and giving them totems to mark out their personalities. In the catalogue to the exhibition Pablo Picasso: 1969-1970, held at the Palais des Papes in Avignon and in which Buste d’homme lauré was shown, Christian Zervos, the curator, wrote, “The feelings that animated his musketeers, for example, expressed the artist’s prevailing concern with inscribing a total affirmation of himself within them. These musketeers, he said to us, are us. They reveal the secret depths of men who, from solitude to solitude, act of courage to act of courage, disappointment to disappointment, know themselves as brothers” (“Pablo Picasso: 1969-1970,” 1970, reprinted in Picasso: Mosqueteros, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, p. 293). As he had done throughout his career with the figure of the minotaur and the Mediterranean sailor, Picasso saw his legion of musketeers–which for centuries had represented masculinity, heroism, wit, and virility–as visual substitutes for his own self. The musketeer, renowned for his rakish looks, courageous feats, and many loves, provided an ideal and attractive image for the artist.

Painted when the artist was only 26 years old, Barkley L. Hendricks’s Stanley is a testament to a formative friendship. Hendricks and Stanley Whitney, the canvas’s eponymous subject, met while studying art at Yale University in the 1970s. Whitney, who would go on to be a legendary painter in his own right, looked up to Hendricks. Their friendship became an aesthetic dialogue, evinced by this striking, monumental painting that presents Whitney as a Byzantine icon or one of Gustav Klimt’s ethereal, allegorical portraits.  Yet Stanley was and remains historic. Both a likeness and a history painting, Stanley is the brainchild an idealistic and gifted student working within a generative moment in art and culture.

The life-size, six-foot-tall Stanley depicts the young Whitney as effortlessly cool, and casually dressed in dark bellbottoms and a forest green jacket. He wears a patterned hat composed of orange, purple, and green that mirrors his striped shirt. Like a Greco-Roman statue, he stands in contrapposto, both relaxed and prepared for motion. Whitney averts his gaze, thereby reminding us of the unknowability of every great portrait, and indeed every person. In fact, a central component of Stanley, perhaps paradoxically for a representational portrait, is the purposeful obscurity. We do not have full access to Whitney’s image or inner life. This is epitomized by Hendricks’s cropping, which, like a candid photograph, cuts off the full length of Whitney’s body. Caught in a cinematic moment, Whitney calmly smokes a cigarette, and he is self-assuredly indifferent to our gaze.

#6. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 5,616,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) (christies.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Brain, 1985
Acrylic, oilstick, Xerox paper collage and gesso on twenty-seven wood blocks with bootblack stand
Overall: 48 x 43 1/2 x 17 inches (122 x 110.5 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated’ Jean-Michel Basquiat 85′ (on the underside of the bootblack stand)

Executed in 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Brain is a significant sculptural work that complements and expands upon his celebrated paintings. It is composed of twenty-seven boxes, each covered with sheets depicting some of the artist’s most celebrated motifs: masks, faces, anatomical drawings, and record labels all combine in an encyclopedic display of the artist’s most celebrated motifs. The structure is then topped with a bootblack stand, of the kind used on the street for shining shoes. Brain transforms this functional object into a readymade sculpture like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, Tate Gallery, London), whose scrawled “R. Mutt” mirrors Basquiat’s redacted “BRAIN ©”. The present work is especially important because of its alignment of Basquiat with a history of sculpture. Indeed, “the critics who pigeonholed Basquiat as a Neo-Expressionist painter were not ready for this aspect of his work,” (E. Fretz, Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, New York, 2010, p. 140). Basquiat balked at the tendency to expect the same, safe thing from a successful artist for every exhibition, as can be seen in the present work.

Shown in his historic retrospective that toured the United States after his death, as well as in the more recent survey Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation (2020-2021), Brain represents Basquiat’s engagement not only with sculpture, but also with music and archiving. Glenn O’Brien, a writer and Basquiat’s close friend, wrote of the artist’s notebooks, “Here are lists of fragments and figments, found objects, ready-made memes. Notes but also art and poetry and memos. What does it all mean? Could it be a self-made grimoire, conjured out of thin air and the electromagnetic signals flowing through it?…He was a medium, a magician. His mission was nothing less than the restoration of a powerful spiritual function to art—a channeling of the eternal through the ephemeral” (G. O’Brien, “Books: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Artforum, April 2015, https://www.artforum.com/print/201504/jean-michel-basquiat-50730). The same could be said of the present work, offering up evidence of Basquiat’s peripatetic imagination which constantly mined television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and nearly everything else around him to produce an intoxicating insight into the artist’s world.

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
Untitled, 1983
Oil on canvas
80×70 inches (203.3 x 177.8 cm)

A vision of sublime elegance and clarity, Untitled is an outstanding work from Willem de Kooning’s majestic series of ‘ribbon’ paintings. Painted in 1983, and shown with de Kooning on the front cover of The New York Times Magazine on November 20 that year, it captures the dazzling elemental rigour and intuitive liberation that defined the extraordinary final phase of the artist’s oeuvre. Stripping away the dramatic excesses of the 1970s, de Kooning reduces his palette to two tones: red and blue. Rendered with near-calligraphic linear brushstrokes, his bands of color undulate across a luminous expanse of white, choreographed with exquisite, balletic precision. With examples held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, these works stand among de Kooning’s most daring, brilliant and enigmatic creations. Selected by the celebrated curator John Elderfield for the 2013 exhibition Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985, the present example is remarkable for its crystalline, reductive power. Four decades of painterly abstraction are distilled into a spectacle of spare, incandescent beauty, all extraneous gesture extinguished in a blaze of light.

Willem de Kooning in his studio, East Hampton, 1983. Photo: Arnold Newman Properties / Getty Images. Artwork: © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The November edition of The New York Times Magazine was headlined by an article entitled “The Indomitable de Kooning”. In it, the writer Curtis Bill Pepper compared the spirit of the artist’s recent work to the grandiose late visions of Titian and Michelangelo. “The effect they gave was one of lightness and joy,” he wrote, at times suggesting “visions of air and water … shot through with transcendental light” (C. B. Pepper, “The Indomitable de Kooning,” The New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1983). The article was a testament to the frenzy surrounding the artist during this period. In the wake of his major international touring retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art that year, de Kooning reached the pinnacle of his celebrity.

The present work eloquently demonstrates this self-assuredness. While some of de Kooning’s later works had featured other colors, here his sparse duet of red and blue sings with the confidence of an artist at the height of his creative abilities. In his essay for the 2013 catalogue, Elderfield writes in depth about its facture, illustrating four remarkable photographs of the painting in progress. Taken between 15 and 18 September 1983, they reveal much about the controlled precision of de Kooning’s process during this period. In its initial state, the canvas lay horizontally, with several areas drawn, shaded and painted. Dissatisfied, explains Elderfield, the artist rotated the canvas to portrait format, eliminating a number of the dense colored passages and adding several new linear elements. Flipping his canvas upside down, he continued to erase and embellish, anchoring his network of calligraphic lines like “billowing drapery” to the pointed red crescent form at the top. “In a brilliant final gesture,” writes Elderfield, he cut apart the two blue lines that had connected at the center of the canvas, “allowing space to flow from one side of the picture to the other” (J. Elderfield, Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2013, pp. 33-35).

#8. Kazuo Shiraga

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 5,132,000

KAZUO SHIRAGA (1924-2008) (christies.com)

KAZUO SHIRAGA (1924-2008)
Hoshōkai (Lop Nur), 1988
Oil on canvas
181×227 cm (71 1/8 x 89 3/8 inches)
Signed in Japanese (lower right)

#9. Richard Prince

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 4,890,000

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949) (christies.com)

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949)
Nurse Kathy, 2004
Inkjet and acrylic on canvas
77×46 inches (195.6 x 116.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Richard Prince 2004 NURSE KATHY’ (on the overlap)

Painted in 2004, Nurse Kathy is an early example of Richard Prince’s iconic paintings that appropriate the covers of popular romance novels. Where his Cowboys set a precedent for the artist’s use of cultural archetypes (in this case, cigarette advertisements) as they came to both assert and reflect on masculinity, this later series of Nurses were potent explorations into archetypal femininity. Approaching this subject with the distance of an outsider looking in, the figure of the nurse is both generalized and an intimate depiction. Nurse Kathy at once embodies a kind of neutrality as a popular culture derivative, while also reflecting personal desires, warring emotions, and an intoxicating sense of drama.

The titular nurse is halo-ed in red and dabs of yellow, which ripple into the muddled blue backdrop. Applied with an action-painting sensibility, this color pallet and its dark depth contrast with her starched white uniform. The matching surgical mask, which eclipses the lower half of her face, shrouds the central figure with a certain mystique. The mask, though not original to the source image, is consistent with the motif of the Nurse series. There is a dreamy glint behind her hooded, downturned eyes, and with the rest of her face concealed, they offer a subtle glimpse into her inner world. The frenetic energy of the brushstrokes that surround the nurse are equally juxtaposed with her soft features and the cinematic blur of her gaze. The sterile white of the hospital uniform, which expands across the center of the composition, is disrupted by thin, translucent drips of paint that cascade over her shoulder, down from her temple, and across her collar. Beginning their descent from the backdrop, the drips carry over some of those same colors along with variations derived from their mingling: a rustier red, an olive green, and an ochre brown.

A ghost of blue, illegible text surfaces from beneath the white passage of her torso. Her lower body is completely obscured by a passage of color that begins as a vibrant red at its upper edge and is then muddled down into that same blue of the backdrop into the lower edge of the composition. To the left of the canvas, the figure of the nurse is partially obstructed by a rectangular form containing the title script of ‘Nurse Kathy,’ with its yellow font taken directly from the cover of the source novel. Though the edges of this shape are primarily the same blue, yellow is applied over the lettering in a way that mimics the glow of a neon sign. The painterly texture and drips that surround the text echo the backdrop, creating a cohesive mood.

#10. Lee Krasner

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 4,285,000

LEE KRASNER (1908-1984) (christies.com)

LEE KRASNER (1908-1984)
Untitled, 1956-1959
Oil on canvas
58×65 inches (147.3 x 165.1 cm)
Signed ‘Lee Krasner’ (lower left)

Like a thriving garden or a cornucopia, Lee Krasner’s Untitled is the result of growth, renewal, and nourishment—even in the face of loss. Upon her husband Jackson Pollock’s death in August 1956, Krasner threw herself into a new era of simultaneous mourning and innovation. Untitled resonates with these conflicting and generative emotional states, and its variegated, hieroglyphic surface fits together in harmony. Untitled is a portrait of a life in transition, akin to the cyclicality of Krasner’s series. As her biographer Gail Levin writes, “After Pollock’s sudden death, she painted bold and upbeat works in a series she called Earth Green. Her impulse was to reach out and boldly embrace life…Her frequent preoccupations include an emphasis on nature, and she sometimes hints of birth, destruction, and regeneration” (G. Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography, New York, 2012, p. 320). These characteristics are evident in Untitled, which masterfully weaves together pain and zeal.

Untitled, at about five feet by five-and-a-half feet, immerses the viewer in Krasner’s emotional and artistic concerns of the late 1950s as she confidently developed her style. The interlocking greens, maroons, and oranges engender a bold color palette with a sculptural quality, as if these bounded fields of color might rise up out of the canvas like reliefs. Branchlike forms frame the canvas’s left edge, guarding the mitochondrial entities within. Concealed in the lower left corner, a progression of loops an swirls evokes her signature, mimicking the burgeoning of the organic forms above. Untitled is both ordered and entropic as Krasner builds up the canvas with bounded marks that each contain their own cosmos. Her brushstrokes are as abstract as they are representational, resulting in an atmospheric, biomorphic scene. The admixture of earthen, natural hues with bursts of color in Untitled is reminiscent of Impressionism, which saw a renewed critical interest in the 1950s.

 

3. Other Highlights

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Gerhard Richter

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 3,680,000

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932) (christies.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 1986
Oil on canvas
120×80 cm (47 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘593-5 Richter 1986’ (on the reverse)

Gerhard Richter began working on his career-defining Abstrakte Bilder paintings in 1976, and the present work is exemplary of the ongoing series’ enormous influence on the history of painting. Its reds, yellows, and oranges collide with a swath of grey, evoking sunshine before a storm. This is not a combative relationship, but rather a symbiotic one. Created at a turning point when Richter began to use a squeegee to manipulate his pigments, Abstraktes Bild epitomizes his innovations of the late 1980s. In 1986, Richter told his frequent interlocutor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “What I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom” (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger and H.U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter—Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961—2007, London, 2009, p. 187). This expansive impulse is certainly evident in Abstraktes Bild, which evinces not only the freedom of the artist, but also the freedom and chance inherent in paint. Indeed, as critic Roberta Smith notes of the artist’s first exhibition with David Zwirner, New York this year, “It may be Richter’s genius to prove that his materials always have more to say,” (R. Smith, “Gerhard Richter Rides Again,” New York Times, March 16, 2023).

Willem de Kooning

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 3,680,000

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997) (christies.com)

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
East Hampton III, 1977
Oil on canvas
30×36 inches (76.2 x 91.4 cm)

Alive with dazzling color, light and movement, East Hampton III is a majestic ode to the Long Island landscape that drove Willem de Kooning’s practice to extraordinary new heights during the late 1970s. Rendered with ribbons and swathes of thick, expressive impasto, its electrifying abstract surface captures the artist at the height of his powers. Fiery passages of yellow, red and orange collide with flesh-toned pinks and peaches; mottled shades of green, grey and blue dance like reflections upon water. Painted in 1977—a year described by the critic David Sylvester as de Kooning’s “annus mirabilis”—the work quivers with newfound freedom. Inspired afresh by the luminous coastal surroundings of his East Hampton home, de Kooning returned to painting with renewed fervor, channelling the influence of Soutine, Matisse and Cézanne into exhilarating abstract visions of nature. Contemporaneous with masterworks such as Untitled XIX (Museum of Modern Art, New York), The North Atlantic Light (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and Untitled V (Buffalo AKG Art Museum), East Hampton III glows with the light of rediscovered passion, capturing the euphoria of this miraculous period.

Mark Rothko

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 3,438,000

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) (christies.com)

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
Untitled, 1964
Oil on paper laid down on canvas
39 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches (101.3 x 64.8 cm)
Signed ‘Mark Rothko’ (on the reverse)

With a dark-keyed palette and a feeling of deep emotional gravitas, Mark Rothko’s Untitled is a striking example of the hovering clouds of color for which he is best known. In these, some of his greatest and most spiritual paintings, Rothko evokes the “tragedy, ecstasy and doom” that he purportedly sought in so much of his work. The present Untitled dates to 1964, the same year that Rothko was commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil to create a suite of paintings for the Rothko Chapel. In that epic project, as in the present work, Rothko explores the spiritual and emotional power of dark colors. Using intense black, Rothko presents the weighty, hovering voids in dark passages that seem to absorb light around them, beckoning the viewer to take a closer look. Paradoxically, it is often Rothko’s darkest paintings that are often infused with the greatest degree of inner light.

Mark Rothko in his studio, New York, 1960. Photo: © 2023 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY Artwork: © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Whereas Rothko turned to acrylic paints in most of his works on paper of the latter 1960s, in Untitled, he has used oil, which imparts luminosity and depth to the black areas of paint, creating a sense of deep recessional space and a soft, velvety finish. As part of his working method, Rothko has thinned down the oil paint with turpentine, which he has applied in a series of successive, gossamer-thin veils of paint. In these and so many of Rothko’s greatest black paintings, he creates an inner light to the darkness of its forms. In Untitled, Rothko has used a dry brush to feather the edges of the black forms, creating a soft edge to the otherwise imposing black fields. At times, the edges of the black seem to crackle and buzz with an almost electric quality. The background is highly nuanced, filled with not just one single color but a multitude of warm hues. This perimeter acts as a foil to the deep, black abyss. Onyx, obsidian, ebony and charcoal—the smoldering cinders of burnt wood and ash—are the means with which Rothko creates the painting, whilst humanizing the rich black tones with a warm exterior, in hues that evoke mahogany and walnut.

Roy Lichtenstein

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 3,256,500

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) (christies.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Sky and Water, 1985
Oil and Magna on canvas
66×96 inches (167.6 x 243.8 cm)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘© rf Lichtenstein ’85’ (on the reverse)

Though best known for his iconic comic book paintings composed of Ben-Day dots, Roy Lichtenstein’s oeuvre developed into equally influential later work which became much more expressive and personal. Sky and Water is unabashedly sincere, exhibiting none of the cool remove of his earlier work. Exhibited in his seminal 1993 retrospective, it is a crucial painting that expands the discourse on the artist’s canonical career. Its five-and-a-half foot by eight-foot canvas allows us to inhabit this landscape, whose atmospheric expanse recalls Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) or Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Sleep (1867-1870). Sky and Water is an expressionistic and painterly work, reminding us that Lichtenstein was always as interested in the medium as he was in his deadpan subject matter. He investigated perception from every angle, all in an effort to expand our collective understanding of how we see and communicate.

With its gestural, semi-abstract marks, Sky and Water stands apart from Lichtenstein’s characteristically crisp, graphic paintings. It is organized around a loose, sliding horizon line. Surrounding it are otherworldly yellows, reds, pinks, greens, and blues that intersect at times with sobering blacks and greys. Regimented, screen-like blue lines that are evocative of Lichtenstein’s signature comic book style come apart at the behest of abstract brushstrokes. In this period, Lichtenstein often applied collaged cutouts of brushstrokes to the canvas as he decided their color and placement. These marks are much looser than his Brushstroke series of 1965-1966, which has been read as an interrogation of Abstract Expressionism. However, there is nothing parodic about Sky and Water, which instead feels earnest and poetic. Relatedly, this is not a unilaterally sunny work, adding to its lyrical power. Lichtenstein captures instead the capricious nature of the sea, with its choppy waves and looming clouds. Water had always interested the artist, and here it becomes its own subject, or even a metaphor for the ebb and flow of paint itself.

Pierre Soulages

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 3,196,000

PIERRE SOULAGES (1919-2022) (christies.com)

PIERRE SOULAGES (1919-2022)
Peinture 130 x 89 cm, 8 mars 1956
Oil on canvas
130×89 cm (51 1/4 x 35 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Soulages 56’ (lower right)

Pierre Soulage’s singular oeuvre bridged the Atlantic at a time when artistic taste was shifting from Europe toward New York. With a consistently dynamic output that elicited visual comparison to the powerful canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, the French artist’s infatuation with the color black established a connecting thread throughout his decades-long career. Peinture 130 x 89 cm, 8 mars 1956 is a striking example of his early works that tempers the darkness of some of his later pitch-black Outrenoir canvases with glowing color and an infusion of light. Taking on some of the chaotic methods and experimental nature of his American colleagues working during the same time, Soulages was forever pushing the limits of his art form.

“I paint by crisis. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If we know exactly what we are going to do before we do it we are not artists but artisans.”

By investigating the intersection of the individual artist with the vastness of history, Soulages harnessed light and darkness to create brooding, immersive work.

Though rendered with thick even strokes of paint, Peinture 130 x 89 cm, 8 mars 1956 exudes an illusionary depth at odds with its abstract nature. The eye first travels to three bold diagonals that zip upward from the lower right to the upper left, starting as a single mark and then splitting into two. Around the center of the composition, Soulages places horizontal strokes that offer a visual anchor. Meanwhile, two rectangular shapes balance the energy of the diagonals in the upper right and lower left quadrants. A smoky gray ground acts to intensify the edges of all of these dark black strokes. Their surprisingly ordered movements are at odds with the perceived kinetic energy bristling below the surface. Beneath this, the artist offers a glimpse of light in the form of glowing aquamarine that peeks from between the heavy darkness like a sunbeam piercing an underwater cavern.

“The juxtaposition of black and blue has always been voluptuous, one gives in to it with a certain sensuality.”

Painted using house painting brushes or scraping tools made from rubber or leather, Soulages’s work veers from the emotive gesture in favor of the resolute mark. Instead of hinging upon fluid movement and amorphous pools of color to enchant the viewer, works like the present example leverage a precise control of light and shadow.

Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 2,046,500

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929) (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Pumpkin, 1991
Acrylic on canvas
72.7 x 90.8 cm (28 5/8 x 35 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1991’ (on the reverse)

Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin is a timeless work that presents a peerless iteration of the artist’s now iconic motif. Intimately scaled, yet gesturing toward big questions, the present work elevates a humble object into something mythic and beautiful. Kusama’s work has always asked us to see life in a new way, and here she has given special attention to something that might initially seem unremarkable. The use of black and white recalls her earlier canvases like No. 2 (1959) and White No. 28 (1960) from her Infinity Net series, and the silver-colored stalk alludes to her use of reflective and mirrored surfaces. Spiritual and cosmic, this black and white composition is exquisite, and offers even more insight into Kusama’s mind and process. Using her signature dots and detailed, interlocking shapes, Kusama engenders a magisterial space with Pumpkin that is as poetic and bold as a canvas by Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning.

Kusama melds the pumpkin with her Infinity Net technique and imagery, revealing her painterly skill as much as her penchant for bold forms. Pumpkin is surrounded by the rhythms of Kusama’s contiguous triangular forms. It is as if the pumpkin is a planet surrounded by stars, its gravitational force exerting its power on the painting itself, as well as on the viewer. Like her mentor Georgia O’Keefe, Kusama uses natural, biomorphic forms to speak to the embodied history of painting.

With its complex references to the body, the present work illustrates Kusama’s empathy. As she says of the pumpkin, “It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect, but I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness” (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net, trans. R. McCarthy, London, 2011, p. 75). Pumpkin shows us that anything that we approach with love and fascination can become art—a Warholian gesture and an act of generosity. The pumpkin functions as a self-portrait for Kusama, and an unexpected symbol of passion and struggle. For her, the pumpkin is a symbol of comfort and optimism.

“I love pumpkins…because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality and form. My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues. I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child.”

Painted during a pivotal moment for the artist, Pumpkin defines Kusama’s meteoric rise within the United States and Europe. In 1989, the artist had her first critical survey at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and in 1993, Kusama was selected to take part in the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a pumpkin-filled Infinity Room. The 1990s concluded with her lauded retrospective, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that travelled to the Walker Art Center Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Jeff Koons

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 1,986,000

JEFF KOONS (B. 1955) (christies.com)

JEFF KOONS (B. 1955)
Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty), 1987
Stainless steel
71x26x37 inches (180.3 x 66 x 94 cm)
This is a unique work, separate from the subsequent edition of three plus one artist’s proof

Executed in 1987, Jeff Koons’s Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty) is a pivotal work in the artist’s oeuvre, the first in which he interrogated established traditions of monumental sculpture. It is also one of the first works in which Koons turned to surface and materials to reflect on fundamental questions about being human. Thus, it becomes the progenitor of the iconic series of balloon animals for which the artist has rightly become celebrated throughout the world. This particular example is a unique work, separate from the subsequent Kiepenkerls in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof, which the artist completed later the same year. Two of these later works are in major museum collections (The Broad, Los Angeles and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.). Thus, Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty) sits as a pivotal work within Koons’s oeuvre when the scale and scope of his ambition  would shift dramatically and pave the way for much of his ensuing career.

The origin of the present work lies in an invitation Koons received to participate in the 1987 edition of Skulptur Projekte, an outdoor sculpture exhibition held once a decade in the German town of Münster. “I displayed a work entitled Kiepenkerl,” the artist recalled. “This work is a recasting of a bronze sculpture which is located in the town center of Münster. The original bronze Kiepenkerl has always been a very meaningful and identity-based sculpture to the people of Münster, symbolizing self-sufficiency, abundance and moral relationship with the world… My idea, on finding the Kiepenkerl in the town center outside a restaurant carrying its name, was to contemporize the public’s symbol of self-sufficiency and economic security—to recreate an icon that could once again meet the needs of the public. I chose to recreate the Kiepenkerl in highly-polished stainless steel, the luxurious material of the proletariat, in order to transform it into a contemporary symbol for a society which itself has transformed from agrarian to economic” (J. Koons, http://www.skulptur-projekte.de/archiv/97/koons/k_e.htm [accessed: 4/18/2023]).

Richard Prince

Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 1,562,500

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949) (christies.com)

RICHARD PRINCE (b. 1949)
Untitled (Cowboy), 1999
Ektacolor print
60×80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
Signed, numbered and dated ‘Prince 1999 1/1’ (on a paper label affixed to the reverse)
This work is the artist’s proof from an edition of two plus one artist’s proof

Part of his breakthrough series of Western-themed appropriations, Untitled (Cowboy) pushes Richard Prince’s provocative use of cigarette advertisements into a more filmic realm. Begun in the 1980s, the artist’s cowboy photographs are a testament to the artist’s sharp wit and intense investigation of image culture and semiotics in American consumerism. The present example was created in a second wave of production that expanded on the original project and increased the use of the source material to epic proportions. Creating wholly absorptive vistas replete with dramatic lighting and wide open spaces, Prince remains staunchly anchored to his conceptual roots. Though he presents these subjects for our viewing, he has never trod the tundra with these icons of masculinity. Instead, working from extant photographs, he manipulates and reframes the scenes in order to problematize their making and use. Devoid of any direct link to a specific branding or the cigarettes they sell, Untitled (Cowboy) and its ilk question the role images play in selling lifestyles, ideas, and products, and how manufactured meaning can become intertwined in the reception of an image in various environments.

Painted during the closing months of 1943, René Magritte’s La femme au miroir highlights the divergent influences that were shaping the Belgian Surrealist’s artistic vision during the turbulent years of the Second World War. Living in the shadow of the conflict, Magritte felt that a new visual idiom was required to adequately respond to the horrors of the war, and began to experiment with a distinctly Impressionistic technique, inspired by the late career of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Creating works filled with light, color and vivid, free brushwork, Magritte called this new style Le Surréalisme en plein soleil (Surrealism in full sunlight), and believed that in combining the aesthetic pleasure of beautiful, color-filled scenes with subversive, mysterious images, he could best reveal the inherent chaos of the world. The female body was a key element within this strategy of disruption, and Magritte celebrated the sensuous, elegant forms of women in numerous paintings throughout this period, his statuesque models evoking classical precedents of the female nude as the embodiment of beauty. Using a range of soft, pastel hues, the figure in La femme au miroir appears wrapped in a plain sheet, as if caught in the midst of her toilette, while behind a great mass of rapid, feathery brushstrokes are woven together to conjure a dream-like space. Contrary to the title, no mirror is glimpsed in the composition—rather, the woman appears to glance down at her own hand, caught in an internal moment of contemplation instead.

The Gerald Fineberg Collection Part 2

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18 May 2023

A Century of Art: The Gerald Fineberg Collection Part II (christies.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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149 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 37,052,000
High Estimate: USD 54,473,000

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Total: USD 44,113,470
# Lots sold: 144 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 96.6%

———-

Top Lot: USD 1,865,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 6 Lots
Turnover: USD 7,845,000 (17.8% of total)

———-

Sold over Estimates: 72 Lots (48%)
Sold within Estimates: 31 Lots (21%)
Sold below Estimates: 41 Lots (28%)
Unsold: 5 Lots (3%)

 

2. Top 3 Lots

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#1. Ed Ruscha

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,865,000

ED RUSCHA (b. 1937) (christies.com)

ED RUSCHA (b. 1937)
The Future, 1981
Oil on canvas
22×80 inches (55.8 x 203.2 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Ed Ruscha 1981’ (on the reverse); dated ‘July 18, ’81’ (on the overlap)

#2. Lynne Drexler

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
USD 1,381,000

LYNNE DREXLER (1928-1999) (christies.com)

LYNNE DREXLER (1928-1999)
Summer Blossom, 1962
Oil on canvas
30×25 inches (76.2 x 63.5 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘LYNNE DREXLER SUMMER BLOSSOM 1962’ (on the reverse)

#3. Grace Hartigan

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 1,197,000

GRACE HARTIGAN (1922-2008) (christies.com)

GRACE HARTIGAN (1922-2008)
On Orchard Street, 1957
Oil, paper and printed paper collage on paper
22×29 inches (55.9 x 73.7 cm)
Signed and dated ‘Hartigan ’57’ (lower right)

3. Other Highlights

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Andy Warhol

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 882,000

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) (christies.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Self-Portrait [Two Works], 1967
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, in two parts
Each: 8×8 inches (20.3 x 20.3 cm)
Overall: 8×16 inches (20.3 x 40.6 cm)
Signed ‘A. Warhol’ (on the overlap of each canvas)
Stamped with the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. stamp and numbered ‘A101.086’
(on the overlap of red canvas)
Stamped with the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. stamp and numbered ‘A100.086’
(on the overlap of pink canvas)

Takashi Murakami

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 756,000

TAKASHI MURAKAMI (B. 1962) (christies.com)

TAKASHI MURAKAMI (B. 1962)
Time Bokan – Pink, 2001
Acrylic and canvas mounted on panel
180×180 cm (70 7/8 x 70 7/8 inches)

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 567,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) (christies.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Untitled (Man with Crown), 1982
oilstick on paper
17×14 inches (43.2 x 35.5 cm)

Jean Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Man with Crown) is striking testament to the artist’s enduring exploration of the power of iconography. Executed in 1982, the present work exemplifies Basquiat’s persistent thematic engagement with sociopolitics through representations of race and power.

Untitled (Man with Crown)’s significant provenance enriches Basquiat’s connection to the downtown New York subculture of the 1980s. First in the collection of fellow artist Brett dePalma, Basquiat drew the present work after both artists had returned from Modena, Italy, in the aftermath of Basquiat’s incendiary first solo exhibition at Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli. Years later, the work then made its way into the stewardship of Diego Cortez – the artist-turned-curator best known for his support of the late artist, along with the epochal exhibition New York/New Wave at MoMA PS1 in 1981, where both Basquiat and dePalma were participating artists in the show. By bringing together “a coalition of punks, No Wave musicians, young painters, graffiti artists, poets, performers, and more radical-type forefathers,” Cortez’s landmark show played a crucial role in defining the sprawling energy of downtown New York art movement that had been brewing since the mid-1970s. (G. O’Brien, Artforum, New York, Vol. 41, no, 7, p. 108). This marked Basquiat’s first inclusion in a museum exhibition and the major launch pad for his breakthrough in the art world.

Cover of Diabolik – La Vittima Accusa, Astorina, 1982. Source image for the present lot.

The present work draws direct inspiration from the front cover of the Italian comic book Diabolik, which Brett dePalma had brought back with him from Modena. The original fumetti neri (Italian for “black comics”), this comic book series is named after its protagonist, an anti-hero who steals and kills but is respected for his high morals. Basquiat reimagined the composition – with the protagonist’s back occupying the foreground – and elevated it with his iconic crown symbol. In doing so, he not only complicates the distinguishment between good and evil, but also plays into the reading of the superhero as a conflicted character. The kinglike figure becomes a literal beacon of Basquiat’s composition – crowned and venerated, he radiates light rendered through energetic marks of yellow pastel. Still, the figure’s face remains unseen. The viewer comes to recognize the near-celestial power of the subject through iconography rather than physiognomic treatment. Here, Basquiat calls upon traditions of the comic book genre yet again. The vigilante superhero – whose ancillary qualities are his simultaneous anonymity and ubiquity – retains power despite and because of his varied identity markers.

Yayoi Kusama

Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 478,800

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929) (christies.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Accretions II, 1967
Oil on canvas
44.8 x 55.2 cm (17 5/8 x 21 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Y. Kusama 67’ (on the reverse)

 

 

7. Sotheby’s Auctions

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1. The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction

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16 May 2023

The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Mo Ostin, the legendary record executive, was best remembered by Neil Young for “supporting artists and their work, all the way through his long life, Mo, the giant among Record Business leaders, backed us all up and let us do what we wanted with our music.” In a rare interview, Ostin echoed this sentiment, explaining that “the artist is the person who should be in the foreground.”

This May, Sotheby’s will offer The Mo Ostin Collection across both a dedicated evening sale and single-owner sequence in the Contemporary Day Auction, allowing for a rare glimpse of the extraordinary art collector behind the more familiar entertainment industry powerhouse. The dedicated evening sale will feature definitive masterworks by artists who, like the musicians Ostin worked with, pushed their practice into new territory, among them René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cecily Brown. An additional group of inventive, boundary-pushing works by Joe Bradley, Jeff Elrod, Richard Estes, Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, and others, will be offered in a dedicated sequence in Sotheby’s Contemporary Day Auction.

1. Auction Statistics

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15 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 103,300,000
High Estimate: USD 155,300,000

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Total: USD 123,705,550
# Lots sold: 14 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 93.3%

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Top Lot: USD 42,273,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 13 Lots
Turnover: USD 122,943,550 (99.4% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 5 Lots (33%)
Sold within Estimates: 7 Lots (47%)
Sold below Estimates: 2 Lots (13%)
Unsold: 1 Lot (7%)

 

2. Top 5 Lots

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#1. Rene Magritte

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 35,000,000 – 55,000,000
USD 42,273,000

L’Empire des lumières | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)
L’Empire des lumières, 1951
Oil on canvas
80.3 x 65.7 cm (31 5/8 x 25 7/8 inches)
Signed (lower right); titled “L’Empire des lumières,” numbered III and dated 1951 (on the reverse)

Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières works reign supreme among the most iconic images in twentieth century art history. The confounding yet subtle juxtapositions that exist within the series coalesce to form the most poetic examples of Magritte’s conceptual oeuvre. Along with his bowler-hatted men and word paintings, Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières series is the most influential and recognizable of the artist’s entire output, leaving an indelible imprint on the generations of Conceptual and Pop artists that followed.

Over time, Magritte explored and adapted the theme within L’Empire des lumières; each masterpiece featuring a quiet home, alternately glowing from within and bathed in lamplight, and yet each with its own distinct aura. Cloaked in the inky darkness of night, the house and surrounding environs are simultaneously set against a bright sky. The uncanny familiarity of such a surreal scene exemplifies Magritte’s sophisticated exploration of representation and reality and his profound insight into human perception.

#2. Rene Magritte

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 15,000,000 – 25,000,000
USD 18,948,300

Le Domaine d’Arnheim | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)
Le Domaine d’Arnheim, 1949
Oil on canvas
99.7 x 81.3 cm (39 1/4 x 32 inches (99.7 x 81.3 cm)
Signed (lower left); signed again, titled “Domaine d’Arnheim” and dated 1949 (on the reverse)

With Le Domaine d’Arnheim, it is Magritte who hovers in that realm of superintendence between man and God, the artist as designer, the architect of dreams and re-creator of realities. Borne from the literary mind of Edgar Allan Poe—a favorite author of the artist’s—the subject of Magritte’s Le Domaine d’Arnheim takes as a point of departure the eponymous short story from 1850. In Poe’s tale, the first-person narrator tells of his friend Ellison, a wealthy aesthete rendered even wealthier by a windfall inheritance, and his “unceasing pursuit.” Ellison spends years seeking “the richest, the truest, and most natural, if not altogether the most extensive province” of all that may be poetic in sentiment, eventually landing on the pastime of “landscape-gardening” as the pinnacle field in which man’s intervention may perfect the natural world (Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim,” 1847, accessed online).

Painted in 1949, Magritte’s Le Domaine d’Arnheim explores similar entanglements of the organic and the contrived. The sculpted mountain range at the aft of the composition implies the intervention of man, while the subsequent thresholds of the window and the interior at the fore confirm it. At once, nature and artifice are separated as well as linked by the broken panes of glass which duplicate the vast landscape beyond.

#3. Cy Twombly

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 14,000,000 – 18,000,000
USD 11,824,500

Untitled | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CY TWOMBLY (1928 – 2011)
Untitled, 1962
Oil, wax crayon and graphite on canvas
49 5/8 by 56 3/4 inches (126×144 cm)

A quintessential expression of Cy Twombly’s evocative, enigmatic, and richly referential praxis, Untitled from 1962 recalls the visceral urgency, grand scale, and intoxicating drama of a Hellenic epic. Executed at the pinnacle of his groundbreaking, self-termed “Baroque period” of the 1960s, the present work features all the frenetic scrawls, urgent smears, and mysterious ciphers that have come to define this critical moment in Twombly’s long and celebrated career. Created in Rome, the legendary epicenter of history and myth, Untitled further bespeaks the artist’s fascination with ancient architecture, poetry, and sagas of the gods. In his signature palette of red, pink, and white, echoing the bodily trinity of blood, flesh, and bone, this canvas displays the carnal physicality and poetic mood that characterize the artist’s best work. Upon its surface he has triumphantly joined in perfect concert the ethereal strokes of graphite, furious graffito scribbles, and visceral burst of impastoed pigment to conjure a plethora of influences and memories. Achieving an exquisite balance between a furious gestural dynamism, a deeply sensual mastery of material, and an enduring engagement with classical influences, Untitled demonstrates the profound force of Twombly’s revolutionary abstract lexicon at its most emphatic and inspired.

#4. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
USD 10,790,400

Moon View | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Moon View, 1984
Acrylic, colored Xerox paper collage and oilstick on canvas
66 x 60 1/4 inches (167.6 x 153 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 1984 (on the reverse)

At once a critical examination of racial politics and a gestural expression of painterly abandon, Moon View from 1984 articulately synthesizes a wealth of divergent influences with the virtuosic ability that has come to define Jean-Michel Basquiat’s singular career. Set against a backdrop of Basquiat’s unique symbolic lexicon and filtered through his experience as a black artist of rising fame, this dynamic composition juxtaposes signs and symbols from such disparate sources as street culture, metaphysics, advertising, theology, hieroglyphs, art history, and his own Puerto Rican and Haitian heritage. The present canvas is dominated by twin orbs: one, the head side of a 1951 dime emblazoned with “LIBERTY;” and two, a flame-orange moon inspired by Galileo. These poles, together with symbolic ladders, graffiti-like gestures, and African-inspired imagery, offer a psychologically coded meditation on consumerism, inequality, and the cyclical nature of history. From the think impasto of luscious brushwork and strident graphic demarcation of oil stick to the layering of collage, washes of abstract effervescence and the timely introduction of his drawings through Xerox copies, Moon View unequivocally demonstrates the revolutionary strides and unmistakable bravado that afforded Basquiat unprecedented international acclaim at this period in his career. Once held in the collection of The Broad Art Foundation, and unseen in public for twenty years, Moon View is a rare and extraordinary example of Basquiat’s signature artistic practice.

With characteristic semiotic flair, Basquiat introduces the central themes of race and capitalism into Moon View by means of the large white coin image. Rather than featuring the image of a white president, however, this coin is dominated by a highly stylized face in profile, mask-like in its construction and featuring the artist’s signature depiction of dreadlocks, reminiscent of the appropriation of African art within the idioms of Western modernism. Haloed by the word “LIBERTY,” prominently placed on several U.S. coins as a reference to the American dream, this Black figure is sardonically equated with a commodity, or a form of currency to be traded. Paralleled by his own recent rapid rise to fame and the surreal experience of witnessing skyrocketing prices for his work after years of struggling with poverty, the coin can also be interpreted as a symbol of Basquiat’s reckoning with feelings of displacement in an almost exclusively white art world and positioning his legacy within the Western art historical tradition. Thus, Basquiat creates an exacting indictment of the commercialization of the black body throughout the centuries, and initiates a dialogue on the economic dimensions of race relations in America and the history of its art.

#5. Joan Mitchell

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
USD 8,147,700

Untitled | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JOAN MITCHELL (1925 – 1992)
Untitled, circa 1958
Oil on canvas
75×71 inches (190.5 x 180.3 cm)

Bursting forth in a torrent of fiercely expressive brushstrokes and lush jewel tones, Joan Mitchell’s captivatingly atmospheric Untitled towers as a transcendent icon, expressing the absolute quintessence of the artist’s painterly vernacular. Across a six-foot expanse of canvas, Mitchell’s unrestrained gestural vocabulary initiates a nuanced dialogue between representation and abstraction, memory and emotion, gesture and color.

Executed circa 1958, during what is widely considered the most formative period in the artist’s career, the present work represents the pinnacle of Mitchell’s unique brand of Abstract Expressionism. A period characterized by critically lauded and commercially successful gallery shows, Mitchell’s paintings of the late 1950s mark the development of her signature mode of abstraction, articulated to magnificent effect within the present work, which has distinguished her as amongst the foremost artists of her generation. Testament to its superlative quality, comparable paintings from the same year belong to some of the world’s most renowned institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The immense scale, dynamic composition, and fervent activity evident in this maelstrom of pigment distinguish Untitled as an outstanding example not only of Mitchell’s prolific career, but also of the heroic sensibilities inherent to Abstract Expressionism.

THE ARTIST IN HER STUDIO, PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1956. PHOTO © LOOMIS DEAN / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES. ART © ESTATE OF JOAN MITCHELL

An airy composition anchored around a central tornado of passion-laden brushstrokes, Untitled veritably hums with artistic fervor. Slashes and smears of emerald, ruby, and amber swirl and gravitate around a vertical axis, while longer tendrils of ebony and umber flare dramatically outward to the edges like visual whip cracks, punctuated by staccato notes of cerulean, plum, and brightest. These concentrated passages of unbridled expression are balanced by strategically placed swathes of soft tawny and cream, lending an unexpected balance to this initially stormy vortex of paint. Alongside this masterful command of her palette, Mitchell employs an incredible range of gestures, from weighty peaks of impasto, to carnal smears of pigment, to delicate passages of thin wash. Indeed, Mitchell’s mark-making is defined by a deep reverence and devotion to gesture – whether as calligraphic, spilled, dotted, thinned, blurred, smudged, or scraped – and its ability to convey the power of memories and experiences, themes she professed as the basis of her painting.

3. Other Highlights

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Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
USD 7,803,000

Paysage | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Paysage, 1965
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
128.3 x 162 cm (50 1/2 x 63 3/4 inches)
Dated 4.5.65. and numbered II (on the reverse)

By the 1960s, Picasso had reached a new echelon of artistic certitude. A rightful modern master and heir to the great painters before him, Picasso has long since necessitated the trappings of a typical studio. In Mougins, where he and his wife Jacqueline had relocated in 1961, the artist was free to unleash his creative fervor when and as he pleased, his privacy and focus devotedly guarded by Jacqueline. Unlike their previous villa in Cannes, which had become increasingly encroached upon with the rise of tourism and new developments, the estate at Mougins became an artistic refuge that gave rise to a wellspring of inventive ideas and the great series of Picasso’s late career. Among the famed musketeers, matadors, painters and models created during this period, Picasso also executed a rare suite of landscapes throughout the month of May 1965. The present work belongs to this limited series of eight oils featuring the sweeping vistas of Mougins, two of which are now held in the collections of the Sprengel Museum, Hannover and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Each work in the series, some of which were completed in the same day, shows an evolution from one canvas to the next. No two oils are exactly the same size or format, displaying the artist’s inventive approach to an internalized and reimagined landscape.

In Paysage, Picasso expands upon Paul Cézanne’s radical reimagining of the picture plane. Like many modern and twentieth century artists, Picasso revered the elder artist for his groundbreaking techniques and ingenious departure from the stylistic norms of the day. During his lifetime, Picasso owned a few of Cézanne’s works, including La Mer à l’Estaque, which highlights the exemplary compression of space and the artist’s ingenious layering of pigment. As Cézanne did, Picasso here builds depth through abutting swathes of color. Subjects like buildings, trees and roads are collapsed within the plane, each fixed according to the artist’s pictorial proclivities. Like Cézanne, Picasso utilizes the faces of the landscape as a framing device for the view in the distance; in both La Mer à l’Estaque and Paysage each artist situates the hilly backdrop between trees on either side, almost as curtains frame a theater’s stage. In eschewing conventional perspective, Picasso channels the Cézanne and anticipates the electric Californian landscapes of David Hockney’s late career, which too features flat expanses delineated by bright color and pattern. Characteristic of his late ‘Heroic Years,’ Paysage abounds in tones of peach, cerulean and celadon, and features a lush array of color not readily seen in his earlier works. Aided by the varied textures of the admixture of oil and Ripolin, the present work exhibits the greatest strengths of Picasso’s expressive and dynamic late oeuvre.

Cecily Brown

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 6,711,450

Free Games for May | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Free Games for May, 2015
Oil on linen
67×65 inches (170.2 x 165.1 cm)
Signed and dated 2015 (on the reverse)

Lush, vibrant, and richly allusive, Free Games for May is a masterful manipulation of body and landscape that evinces Cecily Brown’s commitment to wrestling her subjects free from their conventional contexts, creating paintings that fluctuate between perceptible and imperceptible form and blurring the boundaries between abstract and figurative painting. Brown cemented herself as part of a group of painters in New York reclaiming the figure within the avant-garde, co-opting and luxuriating in a dialogue with art historical antecedents like Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, and Peter Paul Rubens, and ushering in a new era for figurative painting alongside artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. Testament to the artist’s prominence and distinction, Brown is the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened in April of 2023. In Free Games for May, Brown deftly layers sumptuous passages of verdant green and saturated pinks that together crescendo in a burst of painterly energy.

CECILY BROWN, IN HER STUDIO. KEVIN TRAGESER/REDUX. ART © 2023 CECILY BROWN, COURTESY THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Free Games for May envelops the viewer in an all-engulfing textural and chromatic world. In a cacophony of pale fleshy pinks, verdant greens, bright reds, and vivid magenta, Free Games for May capitalizes on the unpredictability of paint, hinting at figuration in unexpected places while ultimately embracing painterly abstraction through swirls, tangles, and marbled blurs of pigment. The slashing and looping marks swirl around the canvas, coalescing into new forms in an endless churning of organic matter. Free Games for May is an alcove for boisterous play, where flashes of form churn through flurries of fragmented scenery, dissolving and cohering from one moment to the next.

Willem de Kooning

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 5,849,700

Two Figures | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904 – 1997)
Two Figures, circa 1946-1947
Charcoal, colored chalks, gouache, graphite and watercolor on paper
11 3/8 x 13 1/8 inches (27.9 x 30.5 cm)
Signed (lower left)

For its vivid painterly coloration, fractured forms, and assertive mastery of line, Two Figures from circa 1946-47 crackles with a potent electricity that stands amongst the very best of Willem de Kooning’s extraordinary output. Tumbling, tussling, and tangling in a passionate embrace, the figures radiate a vital intensity that is equally sexual and violent, graceful and unsettling. Bursting forth from the intimate format of the paper, the small scale belies the energetic vigor of de Kooning’s action, his urgent charcoal lines and searing palette condensed into a gem-like composition that bespeaks the full brilliance of his draftsmanship. Once held in the celebrated Hazen Collection, the exquisite rarity and superlative caliber of Two Figures stands alongside such museum-quality compositions as Judgment Day (1946; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Special Delivery (1946; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), Untitled [Three Figures] (1947; Glenstone, Potomac), and Untitled Study [Women] (c. 1948, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie). An exuberant encapsulation of the formal innovations that would come to define the artist’s singular legacy, Two Figures manifests de Kooning’s unparalleled synthesis of figuration and abstraction at the very nexus of his artistic genius.

Roy Lichtenstein

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 2,903,500

Leda and the Swan (Study) | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Leda and the Swan (Study), 1968
Acrylic, oil, felt tip pen and graphite on paper
Image: 23 5/8 x 78 1/2 inches (60 x 198.8 cm)
Sheet: 34 3/4 x 84 inches (88.3 x 213.4 cm)
Signed and dated ’68 (lower right); variously inscribed (upper right)

A striking composition of saturated colors and entwined forms, Leda and the Swan (Study) from 1968 is an extraordinary example of Roy Lichtenstein’s early depictions of Greek mythology in his iconic Pop aesthetic. Executed during a pivotal decade for Lichtenstein’s artistic emergence, this study for Leda and the Swan preempted an important panel commission for Gunter Sachs’ legendary Pop Art apartment in St. Moritz. The work fabulously illustrates the Queen of Sparta, Leda, seduced by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. As the story results in the birth of Helen of Troy, believed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Lichtenstein presents the bird and female figure with utmost elegance and extravagance. A chromatic vision of overlapping flora, fauna, and figure, Leda and the Swan (Study) showcases the inventive mind of an artist on the cusp of his extraordinary career.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN AT LEO CASTELLI GALLERY, NEW YORK, 1964. PHOTO BY FRED W. MCDARRAH/MUUS COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES. ART © 2023 ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Engaging in and contributing to a timeless dialogue with his art historical forebears, Roy Lichtenstein subverts the tenets and tropes of twentieth century modernism, weaving these archetypes with his own distinctive pioneering style and signature graphic aesthetic. Lichtenstein’s ongoing fascination with the work of Modern artists is demonstrated in Leda and the Swan (Study), with simplified ligaments reminiscent of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso’s figures and obstructing leaves recalling the forests of Henri Rousseau. Lichtenstein was also an admirer of canonical Renaissance and Baroque painters, such as Rembrandt and Michelangelo, whose compositions he often mimicked and manipulated with the inclusion of his trademark Ben-Day dot technique. Developed in the late 19^th century, the small colored dots emphasized Lichtenstein’s esteem for commercial art and aspiration to elevate the genre to the level of high art with inventive, lively compositions.

 

 

2. Modern Evening Auction

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16 May 2023

Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

1. Auction Statistics

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54 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 245,550,000
High Estimate: USD 359,650,000
Estimate on Request: 1 Lot

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Total: USD 303,104,250
# Lots withdrawn: 6 Lots
# Lots sold: 40 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 83.3%

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Top Lot: USD 53,188,500
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 34 Lots
Turnover: USD 299,128,450 (98.7% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 10 Lots (21%)
Sold within Estimates: 21 Lots (44%)
Sold below Estimates: 8 Lots (17%)
Unsold / EOR: 9 Lots (19%)

 

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Gustav Klimt

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimate upon Request
USD 53,188,500

Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee) | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862 – 1918)
Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee), 1901-02
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 100.5 cm (39 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches)
Signed Gustav Klimt (on the stretcher)

Painted at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Insel im Attersee is among Klimt’s most evocative landscapes. Depicting the mesmerizing blue waters of the Attersee (Atter Lake) in Austria, it marks a key moment in Klimt’s career, as he pioneered a new and distinctive approach to landscape painting. In this work, traditional perspective and subject are abandoned to a flood of color and form that borders on the abstract. Klimt creates a composition that immerses the viewer in a contemplation of nature and art that is both timeless and profoundly modern in sensibility.

Klimt’s landscapes form a major part of his oeuvre, though he arrived at them later than other subject matter. From 1898 onwards, when he first began spending summers in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, he was able to paint en plein air for the first time, drawing subjects from the views around him. Over the next two decades landscapes would account for almost half of his output, and they are rightly recognized as a key part of his contribution to modern art. The beauty of the lake, and this connection with nature, initiated a series of paintings that in many ways mark the evolution of his mature artistic style. Indeed, more than the portraits—which were often constrained by the requirements of commission—or his allegorical works with their heavy symbolism, and increasing controversy in public reception, it is in the landscapes that Klimt found the freedom to focus on the act of painting itself. From the more overtly Symbolist compositions of the late nineteenth century to the large-scale late landscapes, it is possible to track important shifts in the artist’s thinking through these works.

#2. Alberto Giacometti

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 25,000,000 – 35,000,000
USD 28,485,000

Femme Leoni | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (1901 – 1966)
Femme Leoni, 1947
Bronze
Height: 153.2 cm (60 1/4 inches)
Inscribed Alberto Giacometti, numbered twice 6/6 and with the foundry mark Susse Fondeur Paris
Conceived in 1947 and cast in bronze by Susse Fondeur in 1960
The present work is part of an edition of eight bronzes cast by Susse between 1957 and 1965

Alberto Giacometti is recognized as the most important sculptor of the twentieth century. More than any other artist his craggy, emaciated figures, lithe with energy yet eternal in their stasis have come to symbolize the human condition. From his earliest days working alongside his father Giovanni Giacometti in Italian-speaking Switzerland to his engagement with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s to his self-imposed exile in Geneva for much of World War II, Giacometti was a man possessed by an urge to create and a man never entirely satisfied with his creations. His return to Paris shortly after the end of the war would not put an end to these aspects of his work but did herald the beginning of a new style—one that would fundamentally change the history of art. Femme Leoni, of 1947 is a masterpiece of Giacometti’s post-war artistic production and one of the first tall, static female sculptures that, along with L’Homme qui marche, would come to symbolize Giacometti’s work for the remainder of his life.

INSTALLATION VIEW OF ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION, 1974, SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK. PHOTOGRAPH © SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, NEW YORK. ART © 2023 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

The year 1947 was of crucial importance for Giacometti and many of his most celebrated creations such as Tête sur tige, L’Homme au doigt, Le Main and Le Nez date from that period. After years of self-imposed exile in his native Switzerland, in 1945 the artist had returned to his spiritual home, Paris. He had spent the preceding years working on an ever-smaller scale as he attempted to render the perspective of distance in sculptural form. It was a period of intense frustration and of destruction as well as creation; when he arrived in Paris he carried an entire three years’ worth of work in six match boxes. Back in the city he had so loved before the war, his spirits were buoyed by the discovery that his old studio was just as he had left it some three years prior, carefully preserved by his brother Diego. The two brothers soon took up their old routines, with Alberto rising at midday and then working late into the night before going out to one of the cafés or bars that he had frequented before the war.

Femme Leoni relates closely to other tall figures of 1947 including Grande figure. These tall figures from the late 1940s were the direct precedent for Giacometti’s well known Femme de Venise sculptures of the mid-1950s and his four Grande Figure of 1960 (see fig. 5). Femme Leoni, when the plaster was first exhibited in Bern in 1956, was in fact grouped “alongside four similar but much later plaster sculptures from the series which subsequently became known as the Women of Venice figures” (Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, op. cit., p. 159). In the fall of 1957, Peggy Guggenheim saw the plaster of the present work in Giacometti’s studio and commissioned the first bronze cast, which was made in November of that same year. Giacometti reworked the feet of the plaster in order to create a more stable base prior to the work being cast in bronze. For Peggy Guggenheim, 1947 too brought significant change—this was the year she moved into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, now the home of her eponymous museum. In honor of the first cast’s new home, Giacometti formally titled the work Femme Leoni.

#3. Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 26,187,000

Portrait of a Man as Mars | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS (1577 – 1640)
Portrait of a Man as Mars, circa 1620
Oil on Baltic oak panel
85.4 x 67.9 cm (33 5/8 x 26 3/4 inches)

This Baroque masterpiece epitomizes the artistic virtuosity for which Sir Peter Paul Rubens has long been celebrated. Painted in Antwerp around 1620 when the Flemish artist was at the height of his creative powers, Portrait of a Man as Mars blends the genres of portraiture, allegory, and mythology. Rubens depicts the armor-clad figure wearing an all’antica helmet once owned by the artist himself. Imbued with a magnetic virility, the man conveys the self-assurance of the classical deity Mars. His dynamic pose is inspired by Titian, whose work Rubens encountered during his stay in Italy at the outset of his career, but the composition’s originality and bravura brushwork are hallmarks of the northern master. Set against a dark background and bathed in golden light shining from the right, the imposing figure, just over life-size, fills the composition. He holds a martial pike and wears a helmet, scarlet tunic, mail shirt, and cuirass, over which a lion’s pelt is draped. Raising his brawny forearm and turning back over his left shoulder, he confronts the viewer with a steadfast gaze. The powerful plasticity of his dynamic pose expresses pride and confidence. His features are rendered with physiognomic precision: his clear grey eyes, subtly curved nose, and bow-shaped lips are offset by tight chestnut curls, a sloping mustache, and a stubbled jawline. He possesses the physical presence of an individual, but conveys the heroism of a god. The intense physicality of the man’s muscularity coupled with his elaborate attire elevate him from the realm of the terrestrial to the divine.

#4. Vincent van Gogh

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 23,314,500

Jardin devant le Mas Debray | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853 – 1890)
Jardin devant le Mas Debray, 1887
Oil on canvas
30.8 x 41 cm (12 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches)

Arriving in Paris on 28 February 1886, Vincent van Gogh wrote a note in haste to his brother Theo. He had come to Paris four months earlier than they had agreed—and wanted to meet at midday in the Musée du Louvre. The brothers were to live together, first in a small apartment on the rue Laval and then in larger quarters on the rue Lepic. Vincent would stay in Paris for nearly two years, departing in February of 1888 for the south of France. While in Paris his artistic practice would undertake a radical shift, embracing a vivid color palette and sharp variations in his handling of oil paint. Jardin devant le Mas Debray captures this pivotal moment in summer of 1887 where color, subject and paint handling crystallized into Van Gogh’s mature style, one that would flourish in the three years remaining of his life in Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise. It was during this period of time, from 1887 to 1890, that Van Gogh’s greatest masterpieces were created, forever changing in the history of modern art.

Within a year of his letter to Livens, Van Gogh had achieved this revolution in palette and paint handling. Jardin devant le Mas Debray exemplifies this radical shift with its bright pigmentation and succulent passages of brushstrokes, conveying the inherent sense of movement found in scenes that, in theory, should be of a static landscape. In fact, the present work contains so many aspects of Van Gogh at his apex—his 1890 works in Auvers—that traditionally the work was thought to belong to the Auvers period. It was only in the early 1990s following a close analysis of the geography and other aspects of Jardin devant le Mas Debray, that this work was re-dated to his Paris period. Contemporaneous photographs by Henri Daudet published collectively as Le Vieux Montmartre show, at far right, the Debray’s farm house that forms the central aspect of the composition of Jardin devant le Mas Debray.

#5. Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 21,240,000

Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat, 1964
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
130 x 194.7 cm (51 1/8 x 76 5/8 inches)
Faintly signed Picasso (upper right); dated 17.2.64. and 7.8.9.3.64. (on the reverse)

Executed across four days in February and March 1964, Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat is an emphatic ode to Picasso’s beloved wife and tribute to the great painters of history. The triumphant work spans nearly two meters in length and encapsulates the greatest elements of the artist’s late career. From its unfettered brushwork and innovative use of materials to the homage to the Old Masters and near-deification of Jacqueline, Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat stands as a testament to the artist’s glorious late oeuvre. Abounding in myriad hues of blue and black, the central figure in Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat. commands the viewer’s attention. The dark contours and labyrinthine valleys of her body are offset by bright white highlights, adding a sense of volume and voluptuousness to the form. The backdrop melts and swirls around Jacqueline’s figure, removing her from any recognizable external context and mythologizing her presence. Only the woman and cat remain, each ensconced in an eddying dream-like oasis.

Much of the circumfluous sensation in the present work is owed to Picasso’s choice of materials. As early as 1912 the artist is known to have included Ripolin in his works, an enamel paint typically used in industrial preparations. The new medium appealed to Picasso for its wide array of colors and quick drying properties, which was especially suited to this period of insatiable creativity and invigorated production in the 1960s. Picasso utilizes Ripolin to great effect in Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat; the aqueous, almost stalactitic forms seen in the icy blue pigment at the top of the painting are a result of the medium’s fluidity and wave-like drying patterns as the artist rotated the orientation of the canvas. Unlike oil paint which hardened slowly and necessitated methodical application, Ripolin allowed Picasso to layer his pigments without fear of mixing new colors into wet paint. In the present work, the commercial medium also provides a glossy contrast to more matte areas of oil paint, adding further textural elements to the composition. Such experimentation would go on to inspire a younger generation of painters in the decades after Picasso first experimented with Ripolin. Industrial mediums like house paint would become staples of artists like Jackson Pollock in his pioneering gestural works.

#6. Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 15,000,000 – 20,000,000
USD 15,846,000

Femme au chapeau jaune (Dora Maar) | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Femme au chapeau jaune (Dora Maar), 1939
Oil on canvas
46.4 x 38.1 cm (18 1/4 x 15 inches)
Signed Picasso (lower left); dated 2.12.39 (lower right)

Executed on 2 December 1939, Femme au chapeau jaune (Dora Maar) embodies one of the most complex periods of Pablo Picasso’s creativity and one of the strongest in terms of the radicalization of his pictorial style. Distinguished by its vibrant palette and boldness of form, the present work is an epitomal portrait of Dora Maar, one of the artist’s most iconic muses. The story of Dora Maar’s relationship with Picasso is among the most storied in the history of twentieth century art. Picasso’s love affair with Maar was a partnership of intellectual exchange as well as of intense passion, and her influence on the artist resulted in some of the most daring and most renowned portraits of his career. Picasso met Maar, the Surrealist photographer, in early 1936, and was immediately enchanted by the young woman’s beauty and commanding presence. Although still involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had recently given birth to their daughter Maya, and still married to Olga Khokhlova at the time, Maar became Picasso’s primary mistress and model. Possessing sharp features and a determined personality, Maar proved to be an opposite of the blonde, sensuous and docile Marie-Thérèse.

LA FEMME QUI PLEURE, 1937, TATE MODERN, LONDON. © 2023 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO
DORA MAAR ASSISE, 1939, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK. © 2023 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS)

As the present work underscores, Maar is immortalized in Picasso’s portraits as the wearer of stylish hats. Ceremoniously placed atop her head like a crown, the titular yellow hat is embellished with a tufted green band; other works of her wearing this particularly distinctive hat belong to the Galerie Beyeler, Basel and the Kreeger Museum, Washington D.C. Precisely dated 2.12.39. and inscribed Royan on the reverse, Femme au chapeau jaune (Dora Maar) is not only a testament to Picasso and Maar’s time in the southerly town, but also a living document of the upheaval and instability in the earliest days of the Second World War.

#7. Isamu Noguchi

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 12,284,400

The Family | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ISAMU NOGUCHI (1904 – 1988)
The Family, 1956-57
Stony Creek granite
Height (of tallest figure): 192 inches (487.7 cm)

A truly monumental expression of the essential tenets at the core of Isamu Noguchi’s singular artistic practice, The Family is an exquisite and breathtaking masterpiece. Commissioned in 1956 by famed Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft as part of an expansive corporate complex, The Family comprised, in Noguchi’s own words, the artist’s “first perfectly realized garden” (the artist cited in Hayden Herrera, Listening to Stone, New York, 2015, p. 321). The three stone figures represent “a sixteen-foot-high father, a twelve-foot mother, and a six-foot child,” each with its own unique shape, yet all united by the distinct character of Noguchi’s unmistakable visual language (ibid.). Placed in close filial proximity, the figures’ current relationships to each other were carefully configured by the artist. As described by his biographer, famed author Hayden Herrera, “Noguchi’s family is at once awe-inspiring in its stark primitivism (he saw the three figures as related to Pacific Island totems and to monuments such as Stonehenge) and whimsical in a way that brings to mind the comic imagery of Paul Klee. The rough unpolished surface … anticipates Noguchi’s late work in which minimal incursions with the chisel allowed stone to speak for itself” (ibid.). Amongst his most ambitious and significant works, The Family elegantly distills the myriad influences and conceptual crosscurrents that defined Noguchi’s prolific output into a powerful masterwork.

THE PRESENT WORK PICTURED IN 1957. PHOTO: EZRA STOLLER © ESTO. ART © ISAMU NOGUCHI / ARS, NEW YORK EZRA STOLLER/EZRA STOLLER

Central to Noguchi’s praxis is the symbiosis between sculpture and surroundings, and the role of art in creating social spaces. Carefully considering the setting of his pieces, Noguchi sought to create a seamless interplay between the work and its environs. The present example for instance is composed from three elements of Stony Creek granite, a local quarry in Connecticut near the original location of the sculpture. Famed for its distinctive pink hue, Stony Creek granite is featured in several landmark monuments, including the original façade of Grand Central Terminal and the floors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, linking The Family to both its immediate location and a wider historical lineage of grand architecture. Noguchi was originally commissioned to create the work by Gordon Bunshaft, the influential architect behind Lever House and the Hirshhorn Museum, and the resulting composition of stone bespeaks Noguchi’s own architectural and philosophical relationship with space.

“The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence. All dimensions are but measures of it, as in relative perspective of our vision lay volume, line, point, giving shape, distance, proportion. Movement, light, and time itself are also qualities of space. Space is otherwise inconceivable. These are the essences of sculpture and as our concepts of them change, so must our sculpture change.” 

Juxtaposing smooth with rough, vertical with horizontal, geometric with organic, Noguchi highlights a remarkable variety of textures and colors within the granite itself. From rosy blush tones to silvery slate, the mutable surface takes on ever-shifting hues and moods with the changing light, season to season. Seeking the inherent spirit and dynamism of each material, the artist strove to reveal his chosen stone’s identity, or the intent of its being; here, the resulting sculptures, with their serene presence in space, exude a remarkable sense of balance and timelessness. In contrast with the sheer magnitude of the towering stones are the delicately carved glyphs marking their faces: Noguchi draws upon the iconography of Surrealist biomorphism, European modernism, and Japanese minimalism, hinting at symbolic meaning yet ultimately resisting legibility. Symbolism on a deeper level was central to Noguchi’s practice.

#8.Claude Monet

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 10,000,000 – 15,000,000
USD 11,479,800

Au Cap Martin | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840 – 1926)
Au Cap Martin, 1884
Oil on canvas
65.2 x v81 cm (25 5/8 x 32 inches)
Signed Claude Monet and dated 84 (lower left)

Au Cap Martin represents the triumphant apex of Claude Monet’s seminal series of works produced as part of his 1884 excursion to the Mediterranean. A iridescent vision of Menton bathed in the potent morning sun, Au Cap Martin brims with the textural richness and chromatic potency that characterizes Monet’s best works. Typifing the signature advancements of the dazzling Mediterranean light upon Monet’s oeuvre, every luminous ridge and shadowed valley of the twin peaks are attentively articulated with energetic brushwork. Such planar contrasts are suggestive of the artistic interchange between Monet and Paul Cézanne during this period. A visit to Cézanne’s Aix-en-Provence studio at the end of Monet and Renoir’s 1883 Mediterranean voyage “had an immediate effect on Monet” (Joachim Pissarro, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, ibid., p. 20). Equally, scholar Charles F. Stuckey observes that Monet’s Cap Martin depictions are, “Surprisingly similar to Cézanne’s Provencal landscapes…it is tempting to suppose that Monet’s [works depicting Cap Martin] may have prompted Cézanne to develop what would eventually become acclaimed as his greatest landscape motif, the many serial views of La Montagne Sainte-Victoire” (Exh. Cat., New York, Wildenstein, Claude Monet (1840-1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff, 2007, p. 62).

Rendered with sumptuous impasto, the intensive interplay of color present in Au Cap Martin captivates the eye of the viewer. The lush turquoise and azure nestled within the expansive coastline of the placid Mediterranean convey Monet’s delight in revisiting the “water, beautiful blue water” that he described as “very much [his] element” after refraining from painting such seascapes in Bordighera (quoted in Éluère, ibid., Paris, 2006, p. 43). A gestural yet rigorous handling of the windswept trees equally reflects his attentive studies of lush vegetation while in Italy. Most strikingly innovative is Monet’s evocation of the Cap Martin’s rocky terrain through textural daubs of supernatural pinks, yellows and oranges. These “brilliant hues,” concludes art historian Joachim Pissarro, “have the intense tonality…announcing, on some level, the art of Munch, or of some of the German Expressionists” (Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, The Kimbell Art Museum, ibid., p. 108; see figs. 4 and 5). Monet’s surrendering of naturalistic representation to the effects of light and color, as epitomized by Au Cap Martin, directly impacted Wassily Kandinsky’s decision to become an artist. Upon viewing the paintings of Monet for the first time at an exhibition in 1896, Kandinsky committed to pursuing a mode of art that similarly eschewed traditional representation. Monet’s pictorial innovations were thus integral to the development of abstract art. Paralleling the present work, Kandinsky employed depictions of the Bavarian Alps near Murnau, Germany, as the basis for his earliest experimentations with color, line and form. He frequently returned to mountains as a motif throughout his journey to full abstraction.

#9. Pablo Picasso

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 12,000,000 – 18,000,000
USD 11,000,000

Nu devant la glace | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)
Nu devant la glace, 1932
Oil and Ripolin on canvas
27×35 cm (10 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches)
Signed Picasso and dated Boisgeloup 26 juin XXXII (upper left)

Over the course of Picasso’s intrepid career, a few singular years stand out in the pantheon of the artist’s achievements. One looks to 1907 for the arrival of Cubism announced by Picasso’s revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or to the 1937 reveal of the monumental and politically charged Guernica, and even to 1966 when parade of matadors and musketeers materialized in the artist’s studio—but there is perhaps no other year which rivals the intensity, ardor and sensuous rapture of 1932.

PASSPORT PHOTO OF MARIE-THÉRÈSE WALTER (DETAIL), 1930, PARIS, PHOTO BY PHOTOMATON
PABLO PICASO, CIRCA 1930, PARIS, PHOTO AFP/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By the time Nu devant la glace was created on June 26, 1932, Picasso’s life (and thereby his art) was consumed by the passions of his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a woman twenty-eight years his junior. As the legend goes, Picasso first met Marie-Thérèse in 1927, having spotted her in the streets of Paris near the Galeries Lafayette. Embolded by the Surrealist notion of l’amour fou—the concept of an obsessive, all-consuming love transcending all reason—Picasso approached the young woman. As Marie-Thérèse later recalled, the artist took her by the arm and said, “’I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together,’” thus setting in motion a love affair which would alter the course of each of their lives and change the face of Modern art history (Marie-Thérèse Walter quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women, 1994, p. 143). The influence of this medium is visible in Nu devant la glace in the undulating sculptural force with which the female body is portrayed. At the same time, the psychological state of the sleeping woman resonates in the soft modeling of the figure, creating an atmosphere of reverie and carefree abandon. Seeking to convey his erotic desire, Picasso generates morphological permutations and distortions of the female anatomy. Abandoning any attempt at naturalism, he creates a figure composed of biomorphic forms, a technique that developed from his earlier, Surrealist works.

As is characteristic of this period, Marie-Thérèse’s skin takes on a dreamy lilac hue, her rolling curves offset in the present work by electric hues of red and reiterated in her multicolored necklace. Repeating the arcs of her body, the necklace also recalls the peter pan collar so often depicted in her seated portraits—the precise object for which she was shopping when she first met Picasso. Rare for this period, the present work also includes the addition of a mirror, further alluding to the famed reclining nudes of Old Masters like Diego Velázquez whom Picasso so admired. However, whereas Velázquez’ Venus (see fig. 4) seems to exist at a distance, one created by divide between her reflection and her turned body, Picasso’s somnolent supine muse is feast for the viewer’s eyes, almost palpable in her immediacy. The intimate scale of the work further enhances the tangibility of his lover, lending an increasingly personal sentiment to the work.

#10. Paul Gauguin

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 10,000,000 – 15,000,000
USD 10,445,700

Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

PAUL GAUGUIN (1848 – 1903)
Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline, 1885
Oil on canvas
61.5 x 51 cm (24 1/4 x 20 inches)
Signed P. Gauguin and dated 85 (lower right)

An exquisite example of Gauguin’s unbound creative spirit, Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline is filled with the sort of rich, jewel-like hues and striking tonal and textural contrasts that characterize the artist’s greatest works. The present painting was executed in 1885 at a watershed moment in Gauguin’s career, during which time he began to move away from the Impressionist aesthetic that had previously influenced his painting toward a new and more expressive stylistic idiom. Expanding upon the bold coloration and defiant brushwork pioneered in works like Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline, Gauguin soon became a leading figure in the Post-Impressionist movement.

3. Other Highlights

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Mark Rothko

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 4,658,000

Untitled | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MARK ROTHKO (1903 – 1970)
Untitled, 1959
Oil on paper laid down on board
29 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches (75.6 x 55.2 cm)
Signed Mark Rothko and dated 1959 (on the reverse)

Revered for his immense, enveloping paintings on canvas, Mark Rothko spent a significant portion of his career focusing on works on paper, more intimate in scale, yet equally poignant and carefully constructed. An exceptionally rare example from the 1950s, Untitled from 1959 stands just shy of 30 inches high yet draws the viewer in with as much magnetism as a monumental canvas, demanding close inspection and contemplation. Rothko scholar Bonnie Clearwater lauds the artist’s works on paper: “Thus with their symmetry, tidy execution, and minimal gesture, the small works on paper often seem to be more quintessential Rothko than many of his canvases” (Bonnie Clearwater in Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, New York, 1984, p. 39). Distinguished by its three stacked bands of color, the present work features a dynamic harmony of hues, as the brilliant, saturated red is balanced by the lower washes of gold; these complementary tones echo to each other across the central band of seafoam green, all together recalling the warm and sunny palette of a seascape. Channeling its elemental power through the constantly shifting tussles of color, texture and form, this work pulsates with energy. Having remained in the esteemed collection of Frances Wells Magee for nearly six decades, Untitled demonstrates the mastery of color, form, and gesture that have defined Rothko’s illustrious oeuvre.

Willem de Kooning

Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,500,000 – 4,500,000
USD 3,327,000

Brown Derby Road | Modern Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904 – 1997)
Brown Derby Road, 1958
Oil on canvas
62 3/4 x 49 1/4 inches (159.3 x 125.1 cm)
Signed de Kooning (lower left)

Executed in 1958, Willem de Kooning’s Brown Derby Road emerges from a radical period of transition for the artist during which he produced the most gesturally expressive paintings he had made to date. In 1957, de Kooning began to shuttle frequently between New York City and Long Island, deriving inspiration from the motorways; his paintings of the late 1950s reflect the landscape as seen from a moving car, evoking the subjective vision of blurred horizons, fields, and intersecting roads. These compositions, including the present work, share a palette of yellow, blue, and ochre, and reveal an artist freeing himself from the constrictions of the city as his sweeping brushstrokes become looser and more powerful. Collectively termed the “abstract parkway landscapes” by editor and curator Thomas Hess, these works were first exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959—a mere six years after de Kooning had caused a sensation with his series of Woman paintings—and the show was an unqualified triumph: lauded by critics and sold out within the first week. Today, abstract parkway landscapes are held in such prominent collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Having remained in the same private collection for over twenty years, the present work is a rare and emblematic example of de Kooning’s masterful painterly practice. The vigorous gestural swathes of navy, gold, and cream in Brown Derby Road’s composition recall the angular shifts in perspective of the Atlantic coastal landscape de Kooning encountered on his weekend drives.

 

 

3. Modern Day Auction

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17 May 2023

Modern Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

[This sale is not covered by Moonstar Market Intelligence]

Total: USD 46,500,960
# Lots: 284 Lots
# Lots sold: 223 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 78.5%

#1. Claude Monet

Sotheby’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 2,177,000

Barques de pêche | Modern Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840 – 1926)
Barques de pêche, 1866
Oil on canvas
46 x 55.5 cm (18 1/8 x 21 7/8 inches)
Bearing the signature Clau (lower left)

Painted when the artist was just twenty-six years old, Barques de pêche is one of Monet’s earliest maritime paintings, executed as one of a series of studies for a larger canvas, Le Port de Honfleur. Measuring over seven feet in length, the final composition was one of the most ambitious undertakings of the artist’s early career, a monumental work which Monet hoped to exhibit at the Salon of 1867. While it was subsequently rejected by the Salon jury and eventually destroyed during the Second World War, its likeness survives in photographs, and through the artist’s handling of the paint and choice of subject, it reveals a great deal about the artistic environment in which the young painter was both immersed and sought to expand.

 

4. The Now Evening Auction

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18 May 2023

The Now Evening Auction | intro | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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25 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 42,400,000
High Estimate: USD 61,900,000

———-

Total: USD 37,164,700
# Lots withdrawn: 2 Lots
# Lots sold: 19 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 82.6%

———-

Top Lot: USD 7,534,800
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 12 Lots
Turnover: USD 33,265,800 (89.5% of total)

———-

Sold over Estimates: 13 Lots (57%)
Sold within Estimates: 5 Lots (22%)
Sold below Estimates: 1 Lots (4%)
Unsold: 1 Lot (17%)

 

2. Top 5 Lots

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#1. Kerry James Marshall

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 5,734,800

Untitled (Mask Boy) | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL (b. 1955)
Untitled (Mask Boy), 2014
Acrylic on PVC panel
35 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches (90.2 x 74.9 cm)
initialed and dated 2014 (lower right)

Embodying the artist’s career-spanning commitment to rewriting the tenets of race and representation, Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Mask Boy) from 2014 exquisitely shares a moment of candor in the tradition of portraiture which has been historically reserved for White subjects in the artistic canon. Emphatically testifying to Marshall’s virtuosic painterly abilities, Untitled (Mask Boy) confronts art history on its own terms, asserting the primacy and presence of an African American narrative within the larger legacy of contemporary American painting. As if a glimpse of everyday life, the subject of Untitled (Mask Boy) stands oblivious to the spectator, confidently admiring himself in a mirror while holding a ritual mask of the Dogon people of Mali in West Africa. In a moment of unveiling, the subject bears himself to the viewer, having just revealed his likeness by removing the mask. The mirrored perspective that stares back at him is obscured, challenging our gaze and approach to the painting. Paired with colorful displays of cheerful patterning, Untitled (Mask Boy)’s depiction of a Black subject admiring himself reinvents the racial and cultural constructions of beauty. One of the most celebrated and influential artists of his generation, and the subject of a major retrospective at The Met Breuer in 2016-2017, Marshall has also exhibited at such prestigious institutions as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Evolving and expanding Black representation, Marshall’s Untitled (Mask Boy) reclaims the Black figure from the appropriative nature of White, Eurocentric painting.

Engaged in an insightful moment of self-assurance and clarity, the figure in Untitled (Mask Boy) reclaims his Blackness and defies constructed stereotypes of the Black experience. A vital, driving force in Marshall’s oeuvre is the repossession of Black figural depictions, often deliberately and dramatically darkening his figures’ skin tone to cast the exclusion of Black individuals from art history into radical relief. Untitled (Mask Boy) exudes an extraordinary presence not only in its skillful technique, but in the blissfully absorbed figure’s apathy for the viewer’s emphatic looking. Having taken off a traditional mask, the subjects asserts himself as an individual associated with, but not defined by, his heritage. Central to the composition of Untitled (Mask Boy) is a ceremonial Dogon mask, strategically placed facing downwards and nearly out of view as if to reserve its sacred qualities. The Dogon mask, traditionally worn by men, is specific to dama, collective funerary rituals to ensure the safe passage of spirits of the deceased to the ancestral world. Marshall’s inclusion of this customary mask further asserts the importance of showcasing both the Black body and the Black experience not only embracing tradition but building an identity distinct from it and its stereotypes. A Brancusi-like, towering floor light in the background is another notable prop, and one which again alludes to the art historical canon. Marshall circumvents this reference by making it diminutive relative to the figure marking his greater importance.

#2. Jonas Wood

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,690,000

Red Pot with White Blouse | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JONAS WOOD (b. 1977)
Red Pot with White Blouse, 2018
Oil and acrylic on canvas
72×70 inches (182.9 x 177.8 cm)
Initialed, titled and dated 2018 (on the reverse)

Drenched in saturated scarlet, Red Pot with White Blouse is Jonas Wood’s homage to artist Henri Matisse, whose flattening of space and graphic application has remained one of Wood’s chief artistic influences. The work is a Matisse painting within another Matisse painting, superimposed on a pot, and graphed back into Wood’s idiosyncratic style. Wood’s pot paintings are highly regarded and sought-after and reside within the collections of esteemed institutions including The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. Red Pot with White Blouse epitomizes Jonas Wood’s masterful fusion of artistic influence and personal significance, transforming the humble pot into a riff on the traditional idea of painting-as-window.

In Red Pot with White Blouse, Wood takes a three-dimensional pot – a key recurring symbol which reflects the influence of his wife Shio Kusaka’s celebrated ceramic practice – and flattens it to accommodate the two-dimensional oil painting medium, accentuating his collage-like style and propensity for spatial distortion. On the surface of the pot, Wood places Matisse’s La Blouse Roumaine, a charming portrait of a woman rendered with graphic detail and vibrant color, as a tableau within Matisse’s Large Red Interior. This act, along with the striking color, simplified forms, and lack of visual depth equally evokes The Red Studio, Matisse’s depiction of his workroom outside of Paris filled with paintings and sculptures, even a plate, all of his own making. Emphasizing both the malleability of image and a lack of fixation on it, the pastiche of images in Red Pot with White Blouse functions like a kind of slippage: Matisse’s meta-inclusion of his own paintings are turned into yet another work by the same artist.

#3. Mark Bradford

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD 3,327,000

I don’t care if he’s Captain America | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MARK BRADFORD (b. 1961)
I don’t care if he’s Captain America, 2018
Mixed media on canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2018 (on the reverse)

In a captivating process of collage and décollage, Mark Bradford produces enrapturing and explosive abstract compositions through which he simultaneously creates profound remappings of urban space and invokes the gesture of Abstract Expressionism. Articulated by bold lacerations emanating across the canvas, exposing areas of vibrant pink, blue, ochre and black, I don’t care if he’s Captain America from 2018 is a superb exemplar of Bradford’s highly celebrated practice. Rooted in an exploration of American urban spaces and the city grid, Bradford has evolved his technique to encompass a highly personal methodology of layering repurposed paper materials found on the city streets and then carving back into his accumulations in an act of archeological reclamation. Borrowing various kinds of urban detritus and drawing inspiration from real city maps, Bradford explores urban space as inherently subjective and responsive to the real people that they encode. Created during a time in which Bradford was exploring notions of the American hero and antihero through archetypes in comics, I don’t care if he is Captain America derives from the artist’s mature body of work and epitomizes Bradford’s use of abstraction to explore larger sociopolitical ideas.

A vivid exemplar of Bradford’s highly textured, dynamic compositions, the present work simultaneously conveys the rigidity of the city grid and the explosive reality of its lived urban experience. Bold lacerations stretch across the entirety of this large-scale composition, creating a lattice-like network. The cleaved surface exposes the highly physical methods of Bradford’s practice. Through his interventions, vibrant blues, pinks, black, ochre, and white rise to the surface. Viewing the composition firsthand, the viewer is transported into an aerial perspective, as if above the network of a city. Descended from the grids created with end papers in his works of the early 2000s, the present work is representative of the recent developments in the artist’s process-driven output, which include varied materials beyond end papers. Through his process, Bradford undertakes a kind of archeological exploration, exposing earlier layers of the artwork’s history in a manner referential to the cumulative histories of American cities. Through this process of excavation, Bradford allows for the oldest layers of the work to interact with the more superficial ones – invoking the way that the present circumstances of a place are acutely informed by its past.

#4. Simone Leigh

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,085,000

Las Meninas II | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

SIMONE LEIGH (b. 1967)
Las Meninas II, 2019
Terracotta, steel, raffia and porcelain
71 1/2 x 77 1/2 x 62 inches (181.6 x 196.9 x 157.5 cm)

Resolute, architectonic, and regal, Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas II is utterly arresting – boldly evocative of the themes of Black female subjectivity, sovereignty, and African diasporic artistic traditions that characterize her acclaimed practice. Executed in 2019, Las Meninas II unifies the most seminal iconography of the artist’s lauded and diverse corpus. Anchored by a dome-like raffia skirt, topped with a defiant ceramic female torso, and crowned with the artist’s signature intricately inlaid rosette motif, Las Meninas II has an entrancing and commanding presence. The sculpture epitomizes Leigh’s unparalleled ability to transport and transform – challenging Western aesthetic hierarchies, enlivening untold histories, and simultaneously redefining our understanding of the present. Evincing the institutional import of the present work, its sister sculpture, Las Meninas, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2019. One of the leading figures in Contemporary art today, Leigh was recently selected as the first Black female artist to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale and was awarded its highest prize, the Golden Lion. The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art has just opened the first museum survey of Leigh’s work, on view from April – September 2023, which will tour the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and California African American Museum through 2024.

#5. George Condo

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
USD 3,085,000

Blue Monumental Head | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GEORGE CONDO (b. 1957)
Blue Monumental Head, 2018
Acrylic, charcoal and pastel on linen
72×65 inches (182.9 x 165.1 cm)
Signed and dated 2018 (upper left)

Visceral in application and metamorphic in composition, Blue Monumental Head powerfully captures the raw painterly dynamism and searing psychic intensity which characterize the very best of George Condo’s celebrated practice. A dizzying assemblage of forms and figures that collide and fragment, Blue Monumental Head obfuscates and blurs the traditional delineations between drawing and painting, finished and unfinished, balanced and unbalanced, flatness and sculptural depth to embody the kaleidoscopic complexities of human emotion. Testament to the lasting impact of Condo’s highly influential and experiential oeuvre, works by the artist reside in permanent collections of esteemed institutions including the Broad Collection, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London.

“The most consistent thing in my work is this idea of humanity. Of finding a way to represent the human consciousness in the representation through a portrait. That portrait could represent not only the exterior appearance of that person, but what’s going through their mind and what emotional states could be happening to them and within them.”

Exaggerated features and disjointed body parts careen across fragmented, abstract planes in Blue Monumental Head and reveal Condo’s most important touchstones–Old Master portraits, Picasso’s cubism, cartoon references. Heralding an unprecedented creative fervor of spontaneous mark-making, Blue Monumental Head departs from Condo’s more carefully planned portrait paintings toward a reckless embrace of the sketchy grit inherent in the alloyed mediums of sooty charcoal and pastel carved into wet acrylic. The painting emerges from Condo’s continued series of Drawing Paintings, in which the artist synergizes the traditionally separate processes of drawing and painting into one fluid gestural expression.

3. Other Highlights

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Henry Taylor

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 2,480,000

From Congo to the Capital, and black again | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

HENRY TAYLOR (b. 1958)
From Congo to the Capital, and black again, 2007
Acrylic and collage on wood panel
80×76 inches (203.2 x 193 cm)
Signed and titled (on the reverse)

Emerging from gestural brushstrokes and dense acrylic impasto, Henry Taylor’s Black demoiselles in From Congo to the Capital, and black again offer a palpable and critical revision to Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Taylor here revisits the canon of Western art history in a striking departure from his genre portraits of Black America in order to valiantly confront this lineage’s colonialist underpinnings. Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Paris in 1907 shortly following a visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, where an encounter with the so-called primitive arts of tribal African and Oceanic sculpture influenced his painting’s revolutionary anti-naturalism. Exactly one century after the revelation of Picasso’s modernist masterpiece, Henry Taylor painted from Congo to back (and black again) in 2007 on a wooden shipping crate in a moment of sudden inspiration shortly upon his arrival in Paris, where he was visiting for his first solo exhibition in Europe at Atelier Cardenas Bellanger. A major highlight of B-Side, Taylor’s critically lauded 2022-2023 hometown retrospective at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which closed in late April, From Congo to the Capital, and black again embodies the artist’s profound reinterpretation and repetition of history. An explicit evaluation of Picasso’s aesthetic influences, the present work forms a powerful tribute to the enduring influence of Black culture through its appropriation of a canonical art historical masterpiece, a critical aesthetic strategy that connects Taylor to contemporaries such as Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Robert Colescott.

PABLO PICASSO, LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON, 1907. MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. IMAGE © SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS, LONDON 2023 / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES. ART © 2023 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Heralding the revolutionary genesis of Western modernism, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 banished all previously known aesthetic conventions with its flattened picture plane and depiction of exposed yet self-possessed women, thus becoming the nascent Cubist painting. If Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is today considered the first unequivocal masterpiece of the Twentieth Century, then From Congo to the Capital, and black again of 2007 inaugurates a new and ongoing generation of contemporary art, one that revisits and reassesses the politics of representation embedded within our foundational narratives. Here, Henry Taylor counters the primitivism of African sculpture unveiled in Picasso’s precursor with the radical primacy of the Black female figure, reclaiming her subjectivity from the annals of art history: their skin bare and gaze blankly open, the women in the present work exude the same radical detachment and self-possession as the prostitutes of Picasso’s painting. In Taylor’s counterpart, however, Blackness prominently shifts from an underlying aesthetic influence symbolized by tribal African masks into the immediate foreground, making it the subject of the painting itself.

Thick daubs of flesh-toned brown layer atop each other to define four women’s figural contours in the style of Picasso’s seminal abstraction, while radiant fractures of turquoise, aquamarine, and teal pigment jettison from the background to evince the artist’s remarkably bright palette. Initially maintaining the flattened and disjunctured picture plane of Picasso’s Cubist icon, Taylor then appropriates the aesthetic foundations it found in African sculpture, affixing a small black plastic tray along the center of the canvas’s right edge, invoking his signature found object assemblage practice to add a new sculptural extension to the painting, while also referencing the lineage of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. From Congo to the Capital, and black again powerfully confronts us with Taylor’s improvisational and expressive process while maintaining the freneticism and flux that pervade his oeuvre.

Nicole Eisenman

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 2,430,000

Night Studio | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

NICOLE EISENMAN (b. 1965)
Night Studio, 2009
Oil on canvas
65×82 inches (165.1 x 208.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2009 (on the reverse)

Strikingly vivid and tender, Night Studio epitomizes Nicole Eisenman’s ability to engage contemporary concerns with an incomparable painterliness, developing a distinct figurative language that combines the dreamlike and the lucid, the absurd and the banal, the stereotypical and the countercultural and queer. Testament to its importance within the artist’s oeuvre, Night Studio was prominently featured in the retrospective Nicole Eisenman: Al-ugh-ories at the New Museum in 2016 and was the cover work for the exhibition Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns: Heads, Kisses, Battles in 2022 which traveled to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Aargauer Kunsthau Aarau, and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. One of the most celebrated painters of their generation, Eisenman’s artworks reside in the collections of esteemed institutions worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate London; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

NICOLE EISENMAN PHOTOGRAPHED IN 2016 IN THEIR STUDIO WITH MORNING STUDIO, THE SISTER PAINTING TO THE PRESENT WORK. IMAGE © ADRIAN GAUT. ART © NICOLE EISENMAN. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

In Night Studio, Eisenman paints a moment of reprieve brought on by flashes of intimacy, evoking a sense of how small the world can be but at the same time how incredibly rich. The painting emerges from a pivotal shift in the artist’s practice as the artist began moving away from types and caricatures towards work that is fundamentally driven by questions of form and a deeply creative interest in the individual. As such, Eisenman’s work is emotionally charged with the radical individualism that is perhaps the defining psycho-social characteristic of the twenty-first century.

Two figures rest on a bed under a cone of light from a nearby floor lamp, their entwined bodies a tender homage to paintings like Gustave Courbet’s Le Sommeil or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Sofa. One figure, naked from the waist down, is positioned on her back. The skin is rendered in a warm, brilliant yellow and the squinted gaze and open mouth give an impression of a face frozen mid conversation. Her lover, fully nude, rests at her side. The figure’s rosy form is etched with markings, lines and scratches that track the movement of the artist’s hand across the body; Eisenman scrapes and carves into the expanse of pink flesh until it is rubbed raw, leaving the canvas abraded and at some points even punctured. The tactile figure lays a hand gently on her partner’s chest and winds their legs together. Her face is pensive, gazing at the other with gentle curiosity. The delicate relationship between the two bodies, the lazy repose of overlapping limbs, is beautifully tender. The scene in Night Studio is a significant subject to the artist, who would continue to rework and reinterpret the images and motifs in the painting Morning Studio seven years later.

Matthew Wong

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
USD 1,754,000

The Jungle | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

MATTHEW WONG (1984 – 2019)
The Jungle, 2017
Oil on canvas
30×40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 2017 (on the reverse)

Shimmering with an array of lustrous chromatic dashes and dabs, The Jungle by Matthew Wong presents a mystical nightscape featuring the artist’s signature lone figure, sailing dreamily across a cascading river. Executed in 2017, The Jungle is an early example of Wong’s celebrated moonlit landscapes, a genre to which he later dedicated his solo show, Blue at Karma Gallery, New York, which opened posthumously in 2019-2020. The solitary, faceless figure is a recurring and significant motif found in Wong’s mature paintings: often interpreted as a surrogate for the artist himself, the lone figure typically wanders winding paths across rolling hills or navigated interminable bodies of water in small row boats, as in the present work. Above this figure, Wong’s bulbous trees line the top edge of the water’s bank, extending beyond the confines of the canvas to suggest a continuous narrative. Intriguing and impactful, The Jungle revels in the artist’s idiosyncratic visual language of texture and color as he evokes in his impasto landscape an inner loneliness and a profound sense of isolation and longing.

Wong’s virtuosic handling of paint in The Jungle draws the viewer into his prismatic nightscape as dots, wiggles, and strokes coalesce with feeling in a somber yet meditatively lustrous symphony. Above a central body of water, Wong conceives a dense jungle of chromatic trees and patches of smaller, thickly applied brushwork that suggests the image of fallen leaves on the jungle floor. The wind seems to whistle through the tress in effervescent speckles of evergreens and oranges, harmonizing with the deep blues and blacks of the nightscape. With his impasto technique, Wong conjures the nocturne rhapsody of the jungle landscape that is interrupted by nothing other than a lone pilgrim clad in red, drifting slowly in his canoe. The pensive figure faces the surrounding wilderness of the jungle, emphasizing the grandeur of the fantastical natural landscape while embodying a stand-in for the viewer.

Jade Fadojutimi

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 952,500

A Toast to…? | The Now Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JADE FADOJUTIMI (b. 1993)
A Toast to…?, 2020
Oil and oil stick on canvas
190×220 cm (74 3/4 x 86 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated July ’20 (on the reverse)

A symphony of vibrant hues, A Toast to… is an electrifying example of Jadé Fadojutimi’s dynamic and intuitive visual practice, which embraces chance and chaos via exuberant, painterly abstraction. Through color and form alone, Fadojutimi evokes compelling, complex feelings and emotions in the viewer, reflective of her own emotions at the time of working. Swathes of seemingly translucent pink, blue, yellow, and green in A Toast to… coalesce in multifarious layers with luminous light and energy to create a visually charged landscape porous to a range of complex ideas and emotions. Fadojutimi’s paintings reside in prestigious museum collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and at just 29 years old, Fadojutimi is the youngest artist in the collection of Tate, London. Now represented globally by Gagosian, Fadojutimi’s recent paintings were a highlight of The Milk of Dreams exhibition at the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Gushing and exploding hues are given center stage on the surface of the canvas. Through lyrical mark-making, Fadojutimi beautifully builds up thin layers of pigment with rhythmic caresses, before intuitively scraping and scratching the painting’s luminous surface to leave a myriad of dancing grooves and sweeping strokes in her wake. The painting bursts with frenetic movement and gesture, as loose sequences of thick brushwork collide with vigorously worked passages. The richly saturated, all-encompassing composition pulses with energy, merging knotted lines and swathes of color to form illuminated layers that echo the aesthetics of stained glass and recall the same sense of entranced absorption associated with Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. There is a buoyancy to Fadojutimi’s brushwork, her markings communicating her connection to memory with figurative punctuations.

 

 

5. Contemporary Evening Auction

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18 May 2023

Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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32 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 124,850,000
High Estimate: USD 179,750,000

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Total: USD 167,453,500
# Lots withdrawn: 5 Lots
# Lots sold: 27 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 100%

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Top Lot: USD 32,804,500
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 23 Lots
Turnover: USD 164,215,000 (98.1% of total)

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Sold over Estimates: 8 Lots (30%)
Sold within Estimates: 16 Lots (59%)
Sold below Estimates: 2 Lots (7%)
Estimate On Request: 1 Lot (4%)

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Louise Bourgeois

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
USD 32,804,500

Spider | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911 – 2010)
Spider, 1996
Bronze
133x263x249 inches (337.8 x 668 x 632.5 cm)
Stamped with artist’s initials, foundry insignia, cast date 96 and number 1/6
This work is number 1 from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof

Fraught with chilling grandeur, Spider from 1996 is the ultimate embodiment of Louise Bourgeois’ singular contribution to the history of Modern Art. Among the earliest monumental iterations of Bourgeois’ Spiders, the present work represents the absolute zenith of her artistic practice and the most ambitious embodiment of her signature motif; decades later, her towering Spiders stand among the most iconic sculptures of the twentieth century. In its elegant yet otherworldly presence, Bourgeois’ spellbinding Spider speaks to the conceptual concerns at the very heart of her oeuvre: an unflinching confrontation of her own emotions and psyche, translated into sculptural form. In tribute to her upbringing, Bourgeois imbues the delicate curves and needle-like limbs of her Spiders with memories of her mother, a tapestry weaver. Achieving a lithe grace that belies its towering scale, Spider is emblematic of the deeply personal visual lexicon that defines Bourgeois’ artistic practice.

LEFT: LOUISE BOURGEOIS, MAMAN, 1999. INSTALLATION OUTSIDE TATE MODERN, LONDON IN 2017. PHOTO © AP PHOTO/NATHAN STRANGE. RIGHT:  LOUISE BOURGEOIS, MAMAN, 1999. INSTALLATION OUTSIDE MUSEUM GUGGENHEIM, BILBAO. ALL ART © 2023 THE EASTON FOUNDATION / LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

The present work emerges from the Instituto Itaú Cultural, having resided in the prestigious museum’s collection in São Paulo for over twenty-five years. Attesting to its seminal importance, Spider was a major highlight of the Twenty-third Bienal de São Paulo in 1996. Exhibited in the Bienal shortly following its execution that same year, Spider was the centerpiece of Bourgeois’ dedicated salon and inspired the artist to create the design for the Bienal. Bearing remarkable and unparalleled exhibition history, Spider remained on permanent display at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art for over twenty years and has been loaned and exhibited extensively across esteemed institutions in South America over the past quarter-century, where it has entranced over two million visitors. Furthermore, editions of this sculpture are held in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. In its uncanny beauty, Bourgeois’ Spider holds an almost magnetic allure: to glimpse its looming silhouette is to be drawn, irresistibly, into the sheltering embrace of its long and many-legged shadow.

The most immediately recognizable and universally familiar of Bourgeois’ signature motifs, the Spider as a sculptural form serves as a surrogate for the maternal figure within the artist’s visual lexicon, as Bourgeois draws on her associations of motherhood with the acts of weaving. Contemplative and methodical, the art of weaving and threading tapestries was a cherished and tender act shared between Bourgeois and her mother, Joséphine. In part a loving homage to her mother and in part to herself, the Spider was, as Bourgeois described, ‘her most successful subject.’ Her mother’s death in 1932 was a trauma that informed the entirety of Bourgeois’ artistic practice, as she sought to negotiate that loss and their relationship through her sculptural creations. Bourgeois simultaneously likens the spider to herself, saying, “What is a drawing? it is a secretion, like a thread in a spider’s web … It is a knitting, a spiral, a spider web and other significant organizations of space.” (Louise Bourgeois quoted in London, Tate, Louise Bourgeois, 2000, p. 50) At once familiar and alien, exquisite and severe, Bourgeois saw Spiders as symbols of her own contradictory associations with motherhood; preventing disease by devouring mosquitoes, the spider represents both dichotomously both a formidable predator and an industrial repairer and protectress. Indeed, standing below the present work, its graceful, Gothically arching form invites both awe and anxiety, reverence and reticence. Suspended on such spindly legs as to suggest weightlessness, Bourgeois’ Spider appears poised for motion, but its purpose – predatory or protective – is unknown.

#2. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimate On Request
USD 28,634,000

Now’s the Time | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Now’s the Time, 1985
Acrylic and oilstick on wood
92 1/4 x 93 1/4 inches (234.3 x 236.9 cm)

An icon of singular, radical artistic genius, Now’s the Time is the ultimate embodiment of the brilliant fusion of music and art which lies at the very heart of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s legendary career. Here, Basquiat recreates the vinyl pressing of Charlie Parker’s 1945 composition Now’s the Time in roughly hewn plywood on a grand scale to form a talismanic monument—both to that revered Jazz musician, who was foremost amongst Basquiat’s icons, and to the greater recognition, admiration and amplification of Black artistry, past and present, that was so central to Basquiat’s own artistic project. Executed in 1985, the present work announces Basquiat’s arrival at the apex of his international success and the very center of New York’s downtown zeitgeist with three emphatic words: Now’s the Time. This phrase – which has become a familiar slogan within the scholarship and cultural vernacular for the artist – holds more resonance now than ever; like the music of Charlie Parker, the impact of Basquiat’s monumental masterwork is immediate, universal, and utterly timeless, the force of his artistic vernacular as explosive today as it was at the moment of execution. With three words, Basquiat declares his place amongst the pantheon of Black artistic icons he admired, claiming the moment as his own and immortalizing the significance of his then radical, now canonical artistic project: Now’s the Time. Now is always the time.

Now’s the Time witnesses Basquiat radically pare down the explosive bravura of his street art-based paintings into an austere composition of inscriptions scribbled upon a tabula rasa of phantom black wood. His Minimalist gesture radically extends the aesthetic ideologies by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd in the contemporaneous mainstream art world into the domains of underground culture and music, while his sculptural gravitas resonates with the revolutionary subversion and heft of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymades. Echoing the irregular silhouette of the wooden support, the lines of his white circles seem to crackle with electricity, vibrating on the surface like a rhythmic bassline. As a final touch, the artist emblazons his signature copyright sign upon the surface: both as a way of giving credit to Parker, and as a means of irrevocably marking the painting and declaration as his own. Testifying to its singular significance in Basquiat’s oeuvre, Now’s the Time has appeared as a major highlight in many of the Basquiat’s most acclaimed international exhibitions and retrospectives, at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Art Gallery of Ontario, where it was the centerpiece of the eponymous exhibition entitled Jean Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time; most recently, Now’s the Time was exhibited in the landmark exhibition at Montreal Museum of Art, Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, where it was also prominently illustrated on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Like a black nova, Now’s the Time asserts its presence with its gravitational pull, luring viewers into Basquiat’s ultimate aesthetic rhapsody on the timeless sensational ecstasy of bebop and jazz.

#3. Gerhard Richter

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 18,000,000 – 25,000,000
USD 21,839,000

4096 Farben | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
4096 Farben, 1974
Lacquer on canvas
100×100 inches (254×254 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 1974 and numbered 359 (on the reverse)

Turquoise, pink, chartreuse, alabaster, periwinkle, moss, and four thousand ninety more: one after the other, each pigment glimmers from the monumental lacquer surface of 4096 Farben as Gerhard Richter deftly refines painting to its simplest and yet most evocative form: color. Executed in 1974, 4096 Farben emerges as the singular milestone and ultimate destination of Richter’s pivotal Color Chart paintings, which stand among the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in not only the artist’s legendary career, but also the tradition of painting within the last century. In this final painting of the series, Richter multiplies each color within his palette fourfold, resulting in the most amount of quadrants he ever arranged in a Color Chart painting at this point and arriving at the moment of visual entropy situated at the threshold between image and abstraction. 4096 Farben also sees Richter valiantly collapse the white margins that had separated the squares of individual color in earlier 1024 Farben paintings, resulting in a triumphant masterpiece in which “each color adapts marvelously to whichever other color is used.” (The artist cited in: “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,” p. 83) 4096 Farben is one of only fourteen monumental Color Chart paintings that Richter executed in his ultimate suite from 1973-1974, the vast majority of which now belong to prestigious institutional collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.

Further testifying to the landmark significance of 4096 Farben, Richter would later return to and expand upon it over three decades later in 2007 with 4900 Farben, now housed in the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and his celebrated stained-glass Cologne Cathedral Window commission in 2007, which he designed by directly referencing its chromaticity and which stands today as amongst Richter’s most ambitious and significant commissions and projects. Representing the ultimate epitome of Gerhard Richter’s lifelong abstractionist interrogation, 4096 Farben is illustrated on the cover of the Catalogue Raisonné for the artist, and has been exhibited as a centerpiece in many of his most significant museum exhibitions – including Gerhard Richter: Paintings at Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1988-1989; and Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern, London, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris from 2011-2012. Previously held in the esteemed collection of Jerry and Emily Spiegel, New York, 4096 Farben has resided in the same private collection for nearly twenty years since.

4096 Farben punctuates the finality of nearly a decade of radical experimentation between 1966 and 1974, during which Gerhard Richter executed three discrete series of Color Chart paintings that each progressed in complexity with the evolution of his conceptual enterprise. Richter’s inaugural Color Chart series – begun with 192 Farben – reflected the ready-made quality of industrial paint charts while maintaining an irreverent Pop Art rejection against the lofty ideals of his Color Theorist contemporaries; as the artist admitted, he intended to extend a defiant “assault on the falsity and religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction, with such phony reverence. Devotional art – all those Church handicrafts” (Gerhard Richter cited in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 41).

“In order to be able to represent all extant color shades in one painting, I worked out a system which – starting with the three primaries plus gray – made possible a continual subdivision (differentiation) through equal gradations. 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 64 x 4 = 256 x 4 = 1024. The multiplier 4 was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the [size of each field], and the number of [fields] in a constant proportion to each other.”

By 1971, Richter abandoned the structure of a traditional paint chart in his second series of Color Charts, instead exploring a mechanically progressive series of grids to contain each cell of color. In this new painterly algorithm, Richter calculated a mathematical system for mixing primary colors in graduating amounts, resulting in a palette of manifold distinct hues that he would then order at random into the gridded framework of the composition.

#4. Wayne Thiebaud

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 10,000,000 – 15,000,000
USD 14,597,000

Candy Counter | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920 – 2021)
Candy Counter, 1969
Oil on canvas
47 1/2 x 36 1/8 inches (120.7 x 91.8 cm)
Signed and dated 1969♡ (upper center)

A masterpiece of 1960s American Pop, Candy Counter is stunning example of Wayne Thiebaud’s signature and iconic confectionary masterpieces executed on an expansive scale. Lush, playful, and powerfully evocative, Candy Counter evinces Thiebaud’s celebrated practice of elevating images of American nostalgia, transforming the quotidian into the iconic through sumptuous imagery and color that evoke both mood and memory. Measuring 47 ½ by 36 ⅛ inches, Candy Counter is amongst the largest paintings Thiebaud produced of this subject matter in the first decade of his mature production; notably, the artist produced only 10 paintings featuring dessert or deli counter imagery of this scale in the 1960s, over half of which reside in permanent museum collections. Even within this rarefied suite, the present work stands out as amongst the most fully resolved and compelling in composition; furthermore, the sister painting, also titled Candy Counter, is already held in the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. With a luscious palette and masterful command of brushstroke and shadow, Candy Counter reimagines and reinvigorates its subject matter, emboldening its presence as a meditative reflection on American life and embodying an enduring tribute to the cultural consciousness of postwar America. A testament to its importance within Thiebaud’s oeuvre, Candy Counter has been included in numerous exhibitions and retrospectives of the artist’s oeuvre, notably Wayne Thiebaud in 1985-1986, the artist’s first major exhibition of his work during his lifetime which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and travelled widely, and Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective in 2000-2001 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and traveling. Candy Counter is further distinguished by its exceptional provenance, having been held in the collection of the Thiebaud family for many years before it’s sale through Paul Thiebaud Gallery to the present owner.

In Candy Counter, a brightly illuminated scale atop the counter radiates warmth and casts a deep blue shadow, while slender-stemmed lollipops playfully mimic their upturned and glistening candy-apple counterparts below. In his signature manner, Thiebaud isolates the subject matter at hand and employs a slightly raised perspectival view–as if gazing through a pastry shop window–that lends the objects a quiet inner power. More than mere compositions, Thiebaud’s dessert and deli counter paintings are experiments in geometrical arrangement that challenge traditionally perceived notions of modern abstraction and classic representation. With a heightened perspective, the objects in Candy Counter press forward against the picture plane as if yearning to be selected by the viewer. Ribbons of color move horizontally across the canvas, and the bands of complimentary colors edging the glass and candy create a flicker reminiscent of fluorescent lighting. Demonstrating an exceptional mastery of color, Thiebaud positions vibrant yellows, reds, pinks, and greens against large expanses of creamy white tinted with hints of yellow or blue. Cobalt shadows accompany the objects, creating a juxtaposition of warm and cool tones that endow the composition with a pulsating energy.

#5. Christopher Wool

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 10,000,000 – 15,000,000
USD 8,377,500

Untitled | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955)
Untitled, 1988
Enamel and Flashe on aluminum
96×60 inches (243.8 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, dated 1988 and numbered P79 (on the reverse) 

A singular word conjures an entire psychological and conceptual revelation as it echoes across the monumental surface of Christopher Wool’s Untitled; repeated six times in emphatic verticality, the artist does not so much request our attention with the courtesy of its plea, but rather demands it, powerfully embodying the rebellious tension at the core of the Wool’s singular oeuvre. Forged in 1988 in the gritty crucible and renegade cultural milieu of downtown Manhattan, Untitled is an early paradigm of Christopher Wool’s anarchic painterly enterprise and witnesses the artist shatter the critical threshold between text and image. Repeated across a canvas towering eight feet tall with seemingly increasing urgency, Wool’s insistent refrain “PLEASE” appropriates the soulful 1956 James Brown single of the same name, intensifying the explosive and visceral lyrics with the painting’s monumental authority and enamel black lettering. The present work belongs to Wool’s iconic and early corpus of 1988 text paintings that unsettle the semantics of popular culture by echoing soundbites from cinema and mass media, such as the refrain “HELTER HELTER” from The Beatles’ Helter Skelter in his Untitled and the punchline “SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS” from Martin Scorsese’s eponymous film in Apocalypse Now. Testifying to its milestone significance in Wool’s career, Untitled was one of two masterpieces by the artist selected for inclusion in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, only one year after its execution. In Untitled, Wool mutates a polite request or a rhythmic lyric into an anxious plea, an imploration teetering on the fragile borderline of hysteria; in other words, “The painting becomes a chant, a rant, a slogan, and a scream” (Jerry Saltz, “This is the End: Christopher Wool’s Apocalypse Now” in Arts Magazine, vol. 63, no. 1, Sept.1988, p. 20).

Emblazoned in black lamina, Christopher Wool’s text in Untitled is a linguistic string that lacks punctuation – an unrelenting imploration from an unnamed narrator for an indeterminate request. His monosyllabic plea is stripped of any context and echoed six times in graphic repetition, its sinister desperation reified by its functional yet stark and stenciled letters. Wool’s dispossessed language is no less abstract than his formal mark-making: like street signs or tabloid headlines, his words are resolutely matter-of-fact in their overall presence. Upon further inspection, drips of ink-like black paint left visible on the aluminum canvas are remnants of the process of its making, serving as evidence of the artist’s own hand within the painting. Untitled is fixed at the precarious brink between automated rigor and handcrafted intimacy, setting into motion an oscillation between order and chaos to subvert the semantics of our quotidian vocabulary.

#6. Blinky Palermo

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,500,000 – 4,500,000
USD 6,309,300

Ohne Titel | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

BLINKY PALERMO (1943 – 1977)
Ohne Titel, 1970
Dyed cotton mounted on muslin
200×200 cm (78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated 70 (on the stretcher)

Resplendent in harmonious color and geometry, Untitled (Stoffbild) is a paragon of Blinky Palermo’s Stoffbilder or ‘”cloth pictures,” a body of work regarded as the apex of the artist’s contribution to both conceptual and minimalist art. Constructed in 1970, Untitled (Stoffbild) manifests the saturated color palette and proportions characteristic of Palermo’s radical early textile pictures, giving pure color a tangible, material weight whilst allowing it to transcend its physical limitations and enter into the viewer’s space. Testifying to the significance of the present work, Untitled (Stoffbild) has been featured in numerous exhibitions of Palermo’s work, including shows at the Museum Haus Lange Krefeld; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Testament to the impact of Palermo’s work on the history of art, Stoffbilder reside in the collections of esteemed institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

#6. Gerhard Richter

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 5,849,700

Vesuv [Vesuvius] | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Vesuv [Vesuvius], 1976
Oil on panel
70×100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches)
Signed, dated 1976 and numbered 404 (on the reverse) 

#7. Gerhard Richter

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 5,505,000

Abstraktes Bild | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

GERHARD RICHTER (b. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 1990
Oil on canvas
62×52 cm (24 3/8 x 20 1/2 inches)
Signed, dated 1990 and numbered 721-4 (on the reverse)

A singularly stunning and jewel-like example of Gerhard Richter’s iconic squeegee crafted abstractions from 1990, the very apex of his seminal 1988 – 1992 period of production, Abstraktes Bild 721-4 features a riotous combination of colors from across the spectrum and a rigorous and distinctive orthogonal composition. The Abstraktes Bilder series represent Richter’s profound rebuttal to the New York School’s brand of post-war modernism and his singular contribution to the canon of abstract painting. In its lush, seductive surface, the present work exemplifies Richter’s deft use of new tools, in particular the squeegee, to explore a new frontier in abstraction. Arguably the most sought-after and highly lauded European painter of his generation, Richter’s sharp intellect and painterly talents are nowhere more evident than in his Abstrakte Bilder, which rank amongst the most pivotal developments in abstract painting of the last century. In Richter’s pantheon of small-scale Abstrakte Bilder paintings, the present work represents the very pinnacle of his output.

Abstraktes Bild evokes powerful emotions from its many layers and hues uncovered and sometimes overpainted by vertical and horizontal drags of the squeegee, with passages of brilliant scarlet, cerulean, cobalt, and violet under and over bright yellow, purple, white and gray. In the slight impasto, we can see the full range of this series’ distinct — and sui generis — surfaces. The sheen of immaculate color and endless permutations mimic the aesthetic of a Cibachrome print, while a distinctly photographic quality is compounded by the out-of-focus consistency of sweeping accretions of paint. Richter’s intense manipulation of the surface in Abstraktes Bild conjures a sensation of infinite paint layering.

#8. Donald Judd

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 5,021,000

Untitled | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DONALD JUDD (1928 – 1994)
Untitled, 1989
Galvanized iron and opaque blue acrylic sheet, in ten parts
Each: 6x27x24 inches (15.2 x 68.6 x 61 cm)
Overall: 126x27x24 inches (320 x 68.6 x 61 cm)
Stamped JO JUDD BERNSTEIN BROS. INC. 89-17 (on the reverse of each unit)

A towering monument to the power of medium, color, and form, Untitled from 1989 is an impressive and striking exemplar of Donald Judd’s iconic stacks. Regarded as the leading figure of Minimalism and amongst the most influential American artists of the Twentieth Century, Judd’s rigorous commitment to the essential, unassailable truths of artistic creation finds brilliant resolution in his iconic stacks; a central pillar in the collection of almost every major museum institution worldwide, their sleek forms endure as the superlative embodiment of his radical vision. A source of ceaseless fascination and inspiration to Judd for almost three decades, the unique specifications of each stack – in material, in scale, in space—presented a limitless wealth of possibility, typifying the pursuit of visual clarity through an elegant repetition which has come to define his legendary practice. Comprised of ten separate components, each precisely placed above the other to rise a total of ten feet the present work exudes an aura of commanding power and authority, magnificently towering over its surroundings. The pristine, geometric form of the elements bespeaks the revolutionary Minimalist aesthetic heralded by Judd’s audaciously innovative sculpture when it first emerged in New York in the 1960s. Here, gleaming silver galvanized steel is contrasted to vivid effect with the brilliant azure blue edges, while the surrounding space is suffused with a mirage-like blue glow as light reflects off the polished Plexiglas surface. The remarkable use of color ensures that Untitled appears to emit an inner energy and luminosity: the result is an installation of profound and meditative grace. A quintessential expression of Judd’s inimitable artistic legacy, the present work stands as an elegant totem to the artist’s complex core ideology.

THE ARTIST AT LEO CASTELLI GALLERY, NEW YORK, 1966. PHOTO © FRED W. MCDARRAH / GETTY IMAGES ART © 2023 JUDD FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

In their austere elegance and rigorous, uncompromising candor, Judd’s stacks epitomize the essential purpose behind the entirety of his artistic output: to determine the boundaries of what art can express as true. First initiated in 1965 – the same year he authored “Specific Objects” – the introduction of these vertical columns of gleaming, cantilevered boxes represents the apex of Judd’s investigation of space as a variable that, in addition to material, shape, color, and form, informs and defines the essential nature of a work of art.

The present work mirrors the galvanized iron Judd used in his very first stack, which he followed over the next three decades with variations including copper, stainless steel, aluminum, and brass, as he explored permutations in a proliferation of closely related works in the tradition of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. Judd’s discovery of Plexiglas, with its vast range of strongly saturated colors, encouraged the production of further Stacks in a range of gloriously vibrant hues. Dietmar Elger records the importance of the discovery of Plexiglas and its impact on Judd’s output: “Plexiglas … would open up a whole range of new possibilities. Almost more than any other material, Plexiglas lived up to Judd’s stipulation that material and color should form a single entity, for color is truly inherent in Plexiglass. It is available in an almost endless variety of factory-made colors, and can, in addition, be opaque or transparent, dull, intensely glowing or even fluorescent” (Ibid., p. 21). This extraordinary variety seems to have acted as a crucial artistic instigator for Judd, and he was to remain loyal to the material for the remainder of his career, glorifying in the endless possibilities offered by the potential of the medium, as exemplified by Untitled.

#9. Helen Frankenthaler

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 3,448,000

Black Touch | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928 – 2011)
Black Touch, 1965
acrylic on canvas
81×59 inches (205.7 x 149.9 cm)

Harmoniously filled with cool-toned hues framed by expanses of vivid yellows, Black Touch is a pivotal example of Helen Frankenthaler’s early 1960s “soak-stain” paintings which powered her to enormous success as a pioneer of the Color Field movement. Executed in 1965, Black Touch is an exceptional presentation of Frankenthaler’s deft use of black paint amongst flowing geometric zones of color accentuating her painterly technique. Later known as the “soak-stain” method, Frankenthaler’s application of thinned acrylic paint gently poured and guided on unprimed canvas generate subtle layers of color that appear simultaneously smooth and three-dimensional while preserving vibrancy. Created on the floor as opposed to an easel or wall, Black Touch achieves a resplendent sense of fluidity within a carefully constructed composition. Closely after the completion of Black Touch, Frankenthaler’s influence as a leading figure within the 1960s Color Field movement was cemented by her selection as one of four artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Other notable “soak-stain” paintings from the remarkable decade reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo. Held in the same private collection for over 50 years, Black Touch represents a critical breakthrough in Frankenthaler’s early career in abstraction where controlled forms and experimentation coalesce.

#10. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 3,327,000

Untitled (Head) | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Untitled (Head), 1982
Oilstick on paper
23 1/8 x 26 inches (58.7 x 66 cm)

Rendered with ferocious intensity, the searing silhouette of Untitled (Head) is a riveting embodiment of the instinctive and unrivalled brilliance which distinguished Jean-Michel Basquiat from the earliest years of his career. The present work is notably large exemplar from a limited suite of drawings that, in their haunting and unique renderings of skull-like heads, powerfully exemplify the extraordinary intensity, focus, and drive which fueled Basquiat at this pivotal moment in his burgeoning career. Executed in 1982, Untitled (Head) dates to the very year that Basquiat’s meteoric ascension from unknown to icon began; indeed, it was in 1982 that Basquiat had his first solo exhibitions with Annina Nosei in New York, Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, establishing the young street artist formerly known as SAMO© as a key contributor to the bustling and competitive New York art scene. Exploding with gestural fervor and featuring a head more muscular than skeletal, Untitled (Head) embodies both the artist’s innate ability to distill angst into dynamism and his newfound maturity as a deftly skilled draftsman.

Holding a graphic power as potent today as the day they were drawn, Basquiat’s works on paper comprise a fundamental element of his prolific oeuvre and are essential to a comprehensive understanding of the diverse signs, symbols, and subjects which make up his staggeringly inventive output. In Untitled (Head), expressionistic strokes of black oil stick congregate against an off-white background to form a disembodied human head. The frenzied potency of Basquiat’s variegated strokes is contained only by the arresting confidence of his bold oil stick outline. As a testament to the importance of the 1982 head studies, at the time of Basquiat’s death in 1988, no fewer than twenty-seven of the studies remained in the artist’s personal collection. Fred Hofmann’s description of the 1982 heads: “These figures are unsettling, leaving the viewer with the feeling that they exist in another realm. Peering out into our space, they are oracles conveying a message from another dimension.” (Fred Hoffman, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 2017, p. 79) In its talismanic rendering of a skull, the present work is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s most iconic motif; compelling as both idiosyncratic self-portrait and shamanistic totem, the fierce character summoned in Untitled (Head) would prevail as a primary graphic anchor for Basquiat throughout his career, appearing in and dominating the majority of his best-known masterworks.

3. Other Highlights

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David Hockney

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 3,085,000

Drawing of a Pool and Towel | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937)
Drawing of a Pool and Towel, 1971
Colored crayon, pencil and pastel on paper
43.2 x 35.2 cm (17 x 13 7/8 inches)
Initialed, dated 1971 and dedicated for Jean (upper right)

Offering a sunlit glimpse of such innately American themes as Hollywood, leisure, sexuality, and suburbia of the 1950s and 1960s, Drawing of a Pool and Towel embodies the essence of Californian life that has inspired David Hockney throughout his illustrious career. Nowhere is Hockney’s genius more evident than in his iconic images of swimming pools, which evoke distinctive and remarkably intimate experiences of reality and memory. Playfully depicting the poolside atmosphere on paper through saturated color, sinuous line, and precise details like a half-full martini glass and open book, Drawing of a Pool and Towel stands as a vivid testament to Hockney’s singular artistic practice, illustrating the rich color palette, complex compositional structure, and intimately significant subject matter that characterize the very best of the artist’s celebrated oeuvre. Within the sundrenched world of Drawing of a Pool and Towel, as in so many of Hockney’s most iconic works, the swimming pool holds a particular significance, both as a visual representation of the very apotheosis of the stylish, American good life and as a key stylistic motif. Some of the most iconic works of the post-war canon, Hockney’s swimming pools reside in the collections of esteemed institutions including the Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Portland Art Museum; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Drawn to all that the swimming pool could represent – from love and lust to tranquility and leisure – Hockney was also intrigued by the formal challenges of depicting water, a subject which is at once unfixed and entirely transparent to the eye. Speaking to his fascination with the subject, the artists reveals, “Water in swimming pools changes its look more than any other form. The color of a river is related to the sky it reflects, and the sea always seems to me to be the same color and have the same dancing patterns. But the look of swimming-pool water is controllable – even its color is man-made—and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well.” (The artist cited in, David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 104) Indeed, the sinuous yellow curls and curves of Drawing of a Pool and Towel depict the pool water as a dancing, twisting web, calling to mind calligraphic and rhythmic compositions of Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain paintings or the thunderous crimson crests and roaring riptides of Cy Twombly’s legendary Bacchus series.

Jeff Koons

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 3,085,000

Swan (Inflatable) | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JEFF KOONS (b. 1955)
Swan (Inflatable), 2011-15
Mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating
32 1/2 x 36 5/16 x 25 15/16 inches (82.6 x 92.2 x 65.9 cm)
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proof

Polished to a lustrous shine and coated in iridescent purple, gold, pink, and blue, Swan (Inflatable) is a sparkling exemplar of Jeff Koons’s career-long reinterpretations of images and objects associated with banality, childhood innocence, and pervasive consumerism. Working in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, Koons is the inimitable twenty-first century interrogator of paradigms of popular taste and widely regarded as one of the world’s most important living artists. In the present work, Koons appropriates the form of an ordinary pool float and deifies it to an object of high art. Swan (Inflatable) follows on the heels of Koons’ iconic Celebration series, joining the playground that is the artist’s sculptural output, inhabited by his famed puppies, rabbits, dolphins, and lobsters. In its witty synthesis of art and kitsch, sincerity and irreverence, purity and perversion, Swan (Inflatable) embodies the clever contradictions that constitute Koons’s conceptual project.

Standing at three feet tall, Swan (Inflatable) boasts the extraordinary technical precision of Koons’ stainless steel sculptural practice, which he began developing decades earlier. In collaboration with physicists and engineers, Koons’ achieves a sense of weightlessness in his metallic creation that defies its medium. Despite the ostensibly simple adoption of the pool float’s image in the present work, every detail has been meticulously accounted for: from the valve and manufacturing label of the pool float, to the gleaming tiara, to the ripples which suggest the form has only recently been filled with air. Koons’ familiar chosen subject, with its saccharine palette and hyperbolic gloss, recalls fond memories of chlorinated pools, suburban summers, and store-bought accessories. His appropriation of a toy from adolescence—one readily purchasable and available in bulk—and subsequent manipulation of it into an adult-scaled sculpture is a decidedly Duchampian gesture. Unlike Duchamp, however, who tended to use “ordinary, everyday objects, with little association beyond their predominant function in the world outside the purview of art—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a urinal…Koons uses objects that are already a little closer to art, or at least to design.” (John Caldwell, “The Way We Live Now,” in Exh. Cat, San Francisco Museum of Art, Jeff Koons, 1992, p. 10) The iconography of childhood and its associations are preserved, monumentalized, and effectively immortalized.

Keith Haring

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,722,000

Untitled | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

KEITH HARING (1958 – 1990)
Untitled, 1982
Spray paint on metal
84x75x2 inches (213.4 x 190.5 x 5.1 cm)

Keith Haring was a master at transforming found objects into jubilant works of art. During the early 1980s while making his way in New York City, Haring was working mostly with found objects as he galvanized his singular style, and it was only later that he began working on canvas in a more ‘formal’ way. In its impressive scale, iconic subject, and sheer graphic force, this rare Untitled (White Happy Face) from 1982 exemplifies the enduring power of Keith Haring’s celebrated artistic vernacular. Spray-painted on the hood of a metal postal van in determined black lines, Untitled (White Happy Face) recalls the frenetic and imaginative nature of Haring’s early graffiti-based practice. Executed at the pinnacle of Haring’s prolific period of drawing and tagging billboards in the New York subway system, the present work references the act of graffiti through material application and performative action. With this work, Haring manifests a recognizable symbol of happiness on an unconventional, utilitarian surface. Rendered with deft gestural dynamism, the caricatured face is immune from the inequity of modern life, instead exuding an overwhelming sense of joy and optimism.

Amongst Haring’s most iconic motifs, the present work is one of only nine single smiley faces in Haring’s practice, three of which are held in the prestigious collection of The Brant Foundation, New York. Contrasting the simplicity and infectious ease of his image, his van hood medium lends the work an immediate conceptual gravitas, recalling both the brazen energy of the Duchampian readymade and formal rigor of the Minimalists. The subject of a major upcoming, career-spanning exhibition at The Broad Museum beginning in May 2023, Haring is celebrated for his extraordinary ability to blur the line between high and low art; nowhere is this ability more evident than Untitled (White Happy Face), where medium, gesture, and image meet in a singular testament to the immediate and enduring power of Haring’s artistic vernacular. Underscoring the significance of the present work, Untitled (White Happy Face) bears a particularly robust exhibition history, and emerges today from a celebrated private collection where it has resided for over four decades.

YVES KLEIN (1928 – 1962)
Anthropométrie Sans Titre (ANT 27), 1960
IKB pigment on paper laid down on canvas
108.3 x 75 cm (42 5/8 x 29 1/2 inches)
Monogrammed, signed and dated 1960 (lower right)

Mesmerizing in its beauty yet dense in its conceptual gravitas, Anthropométrie Sans Titre (ANT 27) exemplifies the spectacular innovation of Yves Klein’s Anthropométries and represents a distillation of the central tenets of his visionary oeuvre. Synthesizing aspects of figuration, abstraction, and performance, the Anthropométries emerged from the artist’s desire to access the spiritual, visceral, and vital nature of the human body, and reveal it on the surface of his paintings. With their highly painterly traces created by the imprint of a painted model’s body, these works provided a new series of powerful and enduring gestural signs of human interaction with the mystic immaterial void. Executed in 1960, the present work is a rare example that the artist has signed on the front, and further bears a singular provenance, having previously been held in the celebrated collection of the Durand-Ruel family. Demonstrating exquisite vibrancy and movement, Anthropométrie Sans Titre (ANT 27) deftly flits between the ephemeral and everlasting, presenting a timeless relic of performance in Klein’s signature International Klein Blue (IKB) pigment.

“It was the block of the body itself, that is to say the trunk and part of the thighs that fascinated me… Only the body is alive, all-powerful, and non-thinking.”

YVES KLEIN DURING AN ANTHROPOMETRY PERFORMANCE IN PARIS, FEBRUARY 1960. PHOTOS © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST/ HARRY SHUNK. ART © 2023 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS

At a time when Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme reigned supreme, Klein marked a daring reintroduction of the human figure with his Anthropométries. Contrary to those artistic movements based on the fetishism of an individual artist’s personal and emotive gesture, Klein chose an opposite approach, completely removing his own hand from the creation of a painting through use of his “human brushes.” Moreover, by imprinting the human body directly upon the canvas, he created a sublimely paired figural and abstract work, as subject, medium, and application became one and the same. In these paintings, Klein appropriates the trope of the nude – a subject which for centuries had been treated with idealized sensuality – splashes it with blue pigment and pushes it up against the picture plane with brazen immediacy and radical intimacy. Defying a historical convention in which the nude had offered a test of painterly skill and draftsmanship, Klein here achieves it without lifting a finger. In this regard, a comparable can be drawn between Klein’s innovative art historical approach with Henri Matisse’s seminal series of Blue Nude paper cutouts, which similarly offer radically new representations of the female corporeality through simple yet effective compositions of paper cutouts, also in the color blue. In his Anthropométries, Klein deliberately references tradition only to challenge it, transform it, and reintroduce it as uniquely his own.

Louise Bourgeois

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,540,500

Listening One | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911 – 2010)
Listening One, 1947
Bronze, painted white
203 x 50.8 x 30.5 cm (79 7/8 x 20 x 12 inches)
Incised with the artist’s signature, titled and numbered 3/7 (on the base)
Conceived in 1947 and cast in 1982, this work is number 3 from an edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof

During the 1940s, Louise Bourgeois embarked upon her first major body of work: the Personages. Slender, straight-backed, and precariously balanced upon a tapering point, these solemn and spare sculptures arose from a unique set of emotional and artistic circumstances that would lay the groundwork for the next seventy years of Bourgeois’ career. First conceived in wood between 1945 and 1955, Bourgeois initiated the Personages in the years directly following her immigration to New York City from France in 1938; in their poignant sculptural presence, these figures served as a source of comfort for Bourgeois, acting as the physical and emotional personifications of the family and home she left behind in France. A testament to their centrality and significance to her, Bourgeois always intended to cast the Personages in bronze; but as an expensive material for an artist operating under the radar of the male-dominated commercial arena, Listening One did not find expression in bronze until 1977, when the first work from an edition of six was cast. Indeed, it was only with a long-overdue recognition brought on by a reappraisal of Bourgeois’ oeuvre in the late 1970s and early 1980s that she was finally afforded the opportunity to fully realize this incredibly significant early body of work. A notably significant and double-totem example from this series, Listening One is thus not only among the first of the Personages to be cast in bronze, but it encapsulates the very essence of Bourgeois’ series – a body of work that today is rightfully considered a landmark of Twentieth Century sculpture. The celebrated Personages are today housed in every major museum collection worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; and Fondation Beyeler, Basel; to name only a few.

Ed Ruscha

Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,107,500

Radio [#1] | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

Barreling out of an expanse of black is a graphic shock of letters, their blocky forms spelling out “RADIO” in a warm yellow ochre. The forms float on a depthless plane, echoing the opening credits to a film or a fleeting glimpse of a roadside billboard designed to captivate the viewer’s attention in one compelling instant. Beams of white emanate like sound waves or radio antennae from the letters, reaching towards a far-off horizon. The letters are transformed and abstracted, and one is reminded of the blurring of words during a poor radio transmission. Meticulously and elegantly rendered, each letter is even and structured with an almost mechanical zeal. Ruscha stencils the word with careful precision, opting for a bold, clean typography that mimics the lettering found in advertisements, deconstructing the barriers between “high” and “low” art. In Radio, Ruscha employs the graphic tension of the text against the dark background as both object and illusion to create an optical effect that teeters between specificity and abstraction, the recognizable and the thrillingly elusive.

AN ENTRY FROM ED RUSCHA’S STUDIO NOTEBOOK, 1962. PHOTO © PAUL RUSCHA. ART © 2023 ED RUSCHA

By the time Ruscha painted Radio in 1963, the years of family radio were over and the technology had found a new home in the cars of every American, becoming inextricably linked to the culture of freedom, youth, and individualism associated with automobiles. The open roads of Los Angeles promised adventure, excitement, fast speeds, and independence, thus capturing a fundamental piece of the southern California identity. Radio encapsulates both the sound and the idea of the freedom of the open road, the memory of driving with the radio blaring and watching a stream of advertisements and signs pass by. References to electricity, noise, and car culture are common in Ruscha’s paintings from this innovative period, which evoke a quintessentially American nostalgia.

“You can turn on the radio and the radio becomes the soundtrack for what you see out the window. And somehow I get more from doing this in Los Angeles than I do in another city.” 

Listening to the radio along Route 66, Ruscha would’ve also heard the sequences of letters spelled out over and over in every station ID and promo, concrete punctuations in the static-infused AM aural stream.

Encapsulating Ruscha’s career-long exploration of semiotics and text, Radio embodies in vivid color and graphic form the conceptual rigor and signature style that have come to the artist’s celebrated oeuvre. Influenced by his surroundings, popular culture, and advertisements, Ruscha’s portrayal of quotidian ephemera parallels Warhol’s trademark Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell soup cans, or Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic comic book inspired blondes.

“There are things that I’m constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status”, says the artist, “That’s why taking things out of context is a useful tool to an artist. It’s the concept of taking something that’s not subject matter and making it subject matter.”

Aggrandized and isolated in Ruscha’s paintings, words and phrases are stripped of context, imploring the viewer to contemplate the transcendent power of language.

CHRISTOPHER WOOL (b. 1955)
Untitled, 1988
Enamel and Flashe on aluminum
84×60 inches (213.4 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled, dated 1988 and numbered P57 (on the reverse)

An arresting fusion of baroque ornamentation and mechanical iteration, Untitled (P57) is an unparalleled early work emerging from a pivotal moment in Christopher Wool’s inventive career. Untitled (P57) emerges from Wool’s groundbreaking “pattern paintings”, a body of work long considered among Wool’s most conceptually rich, disruptive, and profound contributions to the medium of painting. Resurrecting, reinvigorating, and boldly driving the medium of painting to new heights. Untitled (P57) collapses the binaries of abstraction and figuration, style and content, surface and depth, encouraging all sets of differences to coexist on the aluminum surface. Testament to the lasting impact of this body of work, Wool’s pattern paintings reside in the permanent collections of esteemed institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Broad, Los Angeles; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

The monochromatic palette of Untitled (P57) creates a stunning painterly distillation. Autographic black stamped patterns march across a stark white surface, creating a swirl of layered forms that project an aura at once fully resolved and utterly dynamic. Repeated row after row, Wool’s black stamps create new forms in their juxtaposition, counter images within the negative white voids. Wool’s hypnotic process is closely aligned with that of Andy Warhol; both emphasize seriality by utilizing repeated motifs subtly contrasting one another with chance striations in black and white. “Wool’s detached acts of painting still suggest a strong sensibility —a Warholian stylistic mark of a personality that impiously emerges through rendered anonymity.” (Bruce W. Ferguson, “Patterns of Intent: Christopher Wool,” Artforum, September 1991, vol. 30, no. 1, p. 96) As motifs build, collide, and overlap, individual components skip and stutter in turbulent growth. Within the deep marks are chance imperfections, the blurring of an edge or the lifting of the stencil slightly too soon that leaves the acrylic dappled and fuzzy. These imperfections imbue the work with fragility, as the seemingly decorative patterns are rendered imperfect, and thus vulnerable. Untitled (P57) is a dialectical tension between opposing forces: black and white, order and chaos, choice and accident, mechanical and gestural.

 

 

 

 

6. Contemporary Day Auction

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19 May 2023

Contemporary Day Auction | intro | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

1. Auction Statistics

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Total: USD 83,129,187
# Lots: 333 Lots
# Lots sold: 291 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 87.4%

———-

Top Lot: USD 2,964,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 13 Lots
Turnover: USD 21,244,500 (25.5% of total)

———-

Sold over Estimates: 111 Lots (33%)
Sold within Estimates: 111 Lots (33%)
Sold below Estimates: 69 Lots (21%)
Estimate On Request: 42 Lots (13%)

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
USD 2,964,000

INFINITY-NETS (TWXOB) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b.1929)
INFINITY-NETS (TWXOB), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
130.5 x 130.5 cm (51 3/8 x 51 3/8 inches)
Signed, titled, titled in Japanese and dated 2014 (on the reverse)

Pulsating and dancing with rhythmic motion, INFINITY-NETS (TWXOB) from 2014 is testament to Yayoi Kusama’s captivating mastery of spatial abstraction from the artist’s most celebrated body of paintings which established her position as one of the most influential living artists. Exemplifying Kusama’s iconic approach to abstraction, the present work depicts an endless maze of oscillating, kaleidoscopic clusters made up of intricately undulating pinks, reds, and white lines atop an electrifying black ground. Executed in 2014, the present work continues the legacy of Kusama’s iconic series of Infinity Nets, employing the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that functions as the conceptual nexus of the artist’s obsession and unconscious, ultimately culminating in a canvas of peak visual and psychological intensity.

In INFINITY-NETS (TWXOB), Kusama’s restricted palette imparts a sense of ethereality onto the canvas. The surface is vaporous, texturally anomalous and bursting with depth. The artist’s labyrinthine web of mesmeric pigment loops display irrepressible force, drawing the viewer irresistibly towards the intimate spaces contained within the tightly woven blanket of paint. The flowing, almost topographical surface of the work hypnotically meanders across the extent of the picture plane, mirroring the process in which it is created. Kusama’s innumerable brushstrokes pile onto one another, culminating in mounds of expressive form and radiating planes of pigment. Each dab of paint is laid with a punctilious devotion to the act of mark-making, subsuming the entire surface into a field of texture. For all the flurry of countless brushstrokes across this square canvas, with its elegant palette and intricate construction, the work remains entirely serene and utterly spellbinding to the artist and viewer alike.

#2. Fairfield Porter

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 2,843,000

Girl in a Landscape | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

FAIRFIELD PORTER (1907 – 1975)
Girl in a Landscape, 1965
Oil on canvas
45 3/4 x 44 inches (116.2 x 111.8 cm)
Signed and dated 1965 (upper right)

Painted during one of the artist’s summers on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, Girl in a Landscape perfectly exemplifies the vibrant realism that characterizes Fairfield Porter’s mature style. The painting portrays the artist’s eldest daughter Katie, who appears in numerous other works from the period but is rarely identified by her father in his titles. Dating to 1965, the present work was painted shortly after a near fatal automobile accident in which Porter accelerated through a railroad crossing in an attempt to avoid stopping, but was instead struck by the locomotive. Although the artist escaped with only mild injuries, Porter recounted that a friend visiting him in the hospital described the event as “the most interesting thing I had ever done in my life—which I suppose is true” (quoted in ibid., p. 198). Despite the artist’s apparent air of nonchalance, one wonders if the event might have led him to take stock of his life and family, providing an explanation for the latter’s especially frequent appearance in his work, which his wife has described as “a sort of family album” (quoted in Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: a life in art, New Haven, 2000, p. 203). In any case, his family certainly recognized his miraculous survival; the artist’s son Laurence wrote ten years later, upon that artist’s death, that “When I drove his coffin to the graveyard in the station wagon he had bought after the crash, I thought of it as symbolizing a gift of an extra decade of life” (quoted in ibid., p. 275).

#3. Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 2,601,000

Birth of Venus (After Botticelli) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Birth of Venus (After Botticelli), 1984
Silkscreen ink on paper
58 7/8 x 82 inches (152.1 x 208.3 cm)
Executed circa 1984, this work is unique

In 1984, Andy Warhol turned his focus away from his ubiquitous silkscreens of brand name objects and society portraits and instead looked for inspiration to the History of Art itself. During this period he embarked on the Details of Renaissance Paintings series, depicting cropped images of universally recognized Old Master paintings from the 15th century. The present work depicts the unmistakable figure of Venus plucked from Sandro Botticelli’s ethereal and monumental masterpiece, The Birth of Venus from 1486. Both radical and breathtaking in its enveloping scale and graphic immediacy, Warhol effectively pays homage to this monumental painting and its radiating romanticism. Recreating the masterpiece with intricate draftsmanship and dynamic strokes punctuated by vibrant yellows, reds and oranges, Warhol crops the original painting down to just the head of Venus using his characteristic medium of silkscreen.

ANDY WARHOL’S STUDIO IN NEW YORK CITY WITH ONE OF HIS LAST SUPPER PAINTINGS IN THE BACKGROUND, 1987. PHOTO BY EVELYN HOFER/GETTY IMAGES.

Within this work, and the Details of Renaissance Paintings series at large, as well as in his works inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1519) and Last Supper (1498), Warhol confronted these ubiquitous images of Art History by intentionally stripping them of their artistic qualities and intent, instead highlighting their innate value as a pop cultural symbols. There is certainly an odd irony in appropriating Botticelli’s – or any Old Master’s – laborious, detailed and painstaking painting process into a silkscreen, a mechanical process for mass production that essentially removes the hand of the artist. Subsequently, Warhol presents this work as an easily reproducible commodity, subverting not only Botticelli’s intention, but the very principles of the art historical tradition. Just as Warhol’s silkscreened works from the 1960s radically exalted, and simultaneously mocked, the commodification of American consumer brands and products, his works from Details of Renaissance Paintings point to the similar way in which we consume artistic masterpieces.

#4. Roy Lichtenstein

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 400,000
USD 1,875,000

Water Lily Pond with Reflections | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Water Lily Pond with Reflections, 1992
Screen-printed enamel on processed and swirled stainless steel, in painted artist’s frame
57 3/4 x 84 1/4 inches (146.7 x 214 cm)
Signed, dated ’92 and numbered PP IV (on the reverse)
This work is presentation proof 4
An edition of 23 plus 7 artist’s proofs, 1 bon à tirer, 4 presentation proofs, 1 NGA and 2 STA.

 

“[W]hen I did paintings based on Monet’s I realized everyone would think that Monet was someone I could never do because his work has no outlines and it’s so Impressionistic. It’s laden with incredible nuance and a sense of the different times of day and it’s just completely different from my art. So, I don’t know, I smiled at the idea of making a mechanical Monet.”

CLAUDE MONET, WATER LILIES, 1906. ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO. IMAGE © THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO / ART RESOURCE, NY

#5. Roy Lichtenstein

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 350,000 – 450,000
USD 1,512,000

Glass III | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Glass III, 1976
Painted and patinated bronze
33 1/8 x 19 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches (84.1 x 50.2 x 26.7 cm)
Incised with the artist’s signature and number 1/3 (lower edge)
This work is number 1 from an edition of 3

#6. Ed Ruscha

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 1,451,500

Golden Words | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ED RUSCHA (b. 1937)
Golden Words, 1985
Acrylic on paper
40 1/4 x 60 inches (102.2 x 152.4 cm)
Signed and dated 1985 (lower right)

Executed in 1985, Golden Words is a quintessential example of Ed Ruscha’s expert use of semantics in his practice to create works that are splendidly spellbinding and deeply captivating. Golden Words is part of a series of works Ruscha embarked on in 1985 after being commissioned to create murals inside the Miami-Dade’s County Public Library. Within the library, designed by Philip Johnson, Ruscha created an impressive circular frieze with the painted phrase, “Words without thought never to heaven go” – a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the present work, the phrase “Words without thought never to heaven go” emerges from a golden halo that encircles the composition, standing in contrast to the vibrant and saturated crimson background. Taken from King Claudius’ monologue where he concludes: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thought never to heaven go,” uttering these words as he meditates on his sins and comes to realize he has not been praying in earnest when asking God for forgiveness for his brother’s murder. An acknowledgement of the dual power of words, both for damnation and absolution, Ruscha draws on this Shakespearean aphorism, and enacts this significance further by isolating the phrase, employing it within the composition to create a spiritual landscape that conveys an indefinite sensation that is central to the artist’s practice. The letters ebb and flow rhythmically across the sheet, appearing suspended, almost trapped within a golden halo that represents an infinite cycle. Exemplary of Ruscha’s most iconic works on paper in which imagery and semantics coexist in an irresistibly seductive composition, Golden Words, brilliantly engages with and probes the interplay between image, symbol, and text.

#7. Yayoi Kusama

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 1,330,500

Door to the Universe | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Door to the Universe, 1995
Acrylic on canvas
130.2 x 97.2 cm (51 1/4 x 38 1/4 inches)
Signed, dated 1995 and inscribed Cosmic Door in Japanese (on the reverse)

Yayoi Kusama’s Door to the Universe from 1995 beautifully encapsulates the artist’s iconic and uniquely obsessive language. The present work was painted at the height of Kusama’s newfound critical and public acclaim, created just two years after her groundbreaking exhibition at the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale. Painted with a highly measured combination of white and gray, Door to the Universe pulsates with organic, meticulously applied constellation of small circles and curvaceous shapes. The circular shapes, which could be seen as an evolution of the artist’s signature motif – the polka dot – covers the entire canvas, injecting a feeling of movement into the composition. Kusama’s works, originate from a deeply personal and intimate place; at her arrival in New York in 1957 the artist encountered a tough, competitive city. Having been blighted by hallucinations since she was a child, Kusama used art making to channel and work through psychological hardship exacerbated by tough living conditions and an entirely alien environment.

“Unable to sleep, I would get out of bed and paint. There was no other way to endure the cold and the hunger so I pushed myself on to ever more intense work […] I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room.” 

The present work was created in Kusama’s native Japan, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s. Trained classically in Nihonga technique, the artist’s early work is inhabited by cell like structures, flowers and other shapes reminiscent of living organisms. Over time Kusama would refine these shapes, as shown by the rhythmic amalgamation of dots in the present work. Moreover, Kusama is fascinated by the idea of the universe and what lies within it. Indeed, the work’s title Door to the Universe, can be interpreted as a meditation on the nature of existence.

“My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots – an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among millions.”

Extensively considered Japan’s greatest living artist today, Kusama reveals her singular vision through various forms and media, exploring dot-like patterns in sculptures, paintings, happenings and films. A striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s work for decades, Door to the Universe is an archetypal example from one of the most influential artists working today.

#8. Julian Schnabel

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,500,000 – 2,500,000
USD 1,270,000

Divan | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JULIAN SCHNABEL (b. 1951)
Divan, 1979
Oil, ceramic and Bondo on wood, in 3 parts
96x96x15 inches (243.8 x 243.8 x 38.1 cm)

A monumental tour-de-force of painterly skill, Julian Schnabel’s Divan of 1979 is an exceptional, early example of the artist’s groundbreaking series of Plate Paintings. In the present work, shattered pieces of tableware became a key element of Schnabel’s intricate composition. Divan is the third of only five works completed from 1978-1979, which mark the artist’s first foray into the iconic medium for which he is now heavily acclaimed. Affixed like puzzle pieces to the wooden canvas, Schnabel’s broken plates fill the pictorial space, creating an abstracted composition that is playful and dynamic, ultimately underscoring Schnabel’s creative power.

#9. Sam Gilliam

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 1,143,000

Orion | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

SAM GILLIAM (1933 – 2022)
Orion, 1972
Acrylic on beveled edge canvas
72×72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 1972 (on the reverse)

A visual symphony of color and form, Orion stands as a stunning testament to Sam Gilliam’s pioneering contributions to the genre of painting. Deftly negotiating the boundaries between painting and sculpture, Orion epitomizes Gilliam’s highly acclaimed beveled edge canvas from the early 1970s. Painted in the same year that Sam Gilliam became the first African American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, Orion was produced during a critical period of remarkable creativity and artistic innovation for the artist. Bearing exceptional provenance, the present work was acquired directly from the artist’s studio by a Private Washington D.C. area collection and patron of Sam Gilliam’s work in 1976, where it has lovingly been installed as a centerpiece of their home for nearly 50 years. As the captivating title suggests, Orion reveals a brilliant constellation of saturated hues and rich textures which unfold vividly across variating spatial planes with resplendent chromatic intensity. The midnight blue, verdant green, lilacs, vibrant yellows and oranges in Orion appear to pay homage to the recognizable constellation, scattering like stars across the canvas. A testament to its transformative presence within the history of painting, Gilliam’s work resides in permanent collections within institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago. Executed at the apex of his artistic practice, Orion is a paragon of Sam Gilliam’s signature beveled canvases, distinguished by its compositional complexity, the rich balance of hues, and remarkable provenance.

#10. Joan Mitchell

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 1,079,500

Untitled | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JOAN MITCHELL (1925 – 1992)
Untitled, 1974
Oil on canvas
Diameter: 31 1/4 inches (79.4 cm)

Exuberant ribbons of color leap and vault with unbridled energy across the surface of Joan Mitchell’s Untitled from 1974, a rare example of a tondo from the artist’s diverse oeuvre that reveals a veritable tour de force of painterly mark-making. Executed the same year as Mitchell’s major mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, the present work represents a pinnacle in Mitchell’s unique brand of Abstract Expressionism at an apex of her critical success. Captivatingly atmospheric, the present work brings together the visual languages of abstraction and landscape in a maelstrom of pigment framed within a circular canvas. Painted at an early market peak in Mitchell’s long and varied career, characterized by critically lauded and commercially successful gallery shows, the present work endures as a beacon of chromatic and textural expression, played out throughout the canvas with an entrancing sense of intimacy and urgency that is singular to the artist. Through this rhythmic and instinctual extension of the artist’s gesture, Untitled conveys the power of memory, experience, and sensory engagement with nature, themes that are at the essential core of Mitchell’s practice. Having remained in the collection of the same Chicago family since its initial acquisition the year it was executed, this rarefied treasure has never before appeared at auction. The work has been exhibited twice in Mitchell’s home town of Chicago, first at the Arts Club of Chicago in an exhibition of Recent Paintings in 1984, and then at the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned both her BFA and MFA.

3. Other Highlights

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Fernando Botero

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 900,000
USD 825,500

Dancing Couple | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

FERNANDO BOTERO (b. 1932)
Dancing Couple, 2006
Bronze
110.2 x 66 x 53.3 cm (43 3/8 x 26 x 21 inches)
Incised with the artist’s signature and numbered 2/6
Stamped with the foundry mark Fonderia d’Arte del Chiaro Pietrasanta Lucca – Italy (on the base)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 6 plus 2 artist’s proofs

Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 730,250

Ladies and Gentlemen (Alphanso Panell) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Ladies and Gentlemen (Alphanso Panell), 1975
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
32×26 inches (81.3 x 66 cm)
Stamped twice by the Estate of Andy Warhol and stamped twice by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and numbered PA 35.001 VF on the overlap and on the stretcher.

ndy Warhol was relentlessly attracted to superstar luster. In his portraits, he sought to relay the processes by which ‘celebrity,’ ‘beauty,’ and ‘identity’ are manufactured in a commercial world. His iconic Ladies and Gentlemen series from 1975 cites his earlier iconic silkscreen portraits of Liz, Jackie, and Marilyn that radiate the allure of a highly constructed ideal. In the present work, Warhol arrestingly captures the visage of drag queen Alphanso Panell with the same penetrating examination into public persona that he previously reserved for the most quintessential grandes-dames of glamor. Like many of Warhol’s most renowned series, the genesis of the Ladies and Gentlemen—first commissioned in 1975 by Warhol’s Turin-based dealer, Luciano Anselmino—has become legend. Warhol’s friend and the future editor of Interview magazine, Bob Colacello, made repeated trips to The Gilded Grape at 8th Avenue and West 45th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, recruiting primarily black and Hispanic drag queens to pose for Polaroids back at the studio. Dolled up and carefully modeled before Warhol’s watchful lens for a scant fee of fifty dollars, the anonymous transvestites fashioned themselves after iconic chanteuses ranging from Diana Ross to Lena Horne. Unlike the mechanical, untouched surfaces of many of Warhol’s earlier silkscreens, the surface of the present work is thickly painted in lush sweeps of pigment, evocative of his earlier hand-painted pictures. Vibrant swathes of green and red color the image screened from Warhol’s initial Polaroid, leaving dense impasto that abstractly emphasizes the mask worn by drag queens to adopt their feminine personas. This formal exaggeration mirrors the artifice of the larger than life subjects who costume themselves in stereotypical signs of feminine beauty.

Damien Hirst

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 698,500

A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAMIEN HIRST (b.1965)
A Collection of Helmets and Swords (with Scabbards) from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2010
Glass, powder-coated aluminum, painted MDF, silicone, stainless steel and bronze
94 1/2 x 122 x 20 3/4 inches (240x310x53 cm)
This work is number 2 from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs

FERNANDO BOTERO (b. 1932)
Adam and Eve, 1993
Oil on canvas
114.3 x 89.5 cm (45 x 35 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 93 (lower right)

Alex Katz

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 685,800

Sunny 4 | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ALEX KATZ (b. 1927)
Sunny 4, 1971
Oil on linen
47 3/4 x 72 inches (121.2 x 182.9 cm)

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 635,000

Untitled | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Untitled, 1981
Chalk on paper
20 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches (52.1 x 34.3 cm)

Andy Warhol

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 508,000

Dollar Sign | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

ANDY WARHOL (1928 – 1987)
Dollar Sign, 1981
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
20×16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Signed twice (on the overlap)

Dollar Sign perfectly captures Andy Warhol’s extraordinary ability to appropriate, subvert, and reinvent the motifs of consumer culture using his inimitable Pop aesthetic. Money became an obsession for Warhol: “I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a… painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is money on the wall” (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York and London 1975, p. 180). Perhaps, it was Warhol’s personal biography that drew him to the subject; the artist’s childhood was spent in depression-era Pittsburgh before fleeing to New York City. Created in 1981, the work captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s, a decade in which financial wealth surged after the dispiriting economic recession of the 1970s. Residing in the same permanent collection for over 10 years, Warhol presents an equally painterly and graphic depiction of the American symbol of currency in sky blue, deep red, and black. A playful and colorful distillation of Warhol’s core artistic concerns, Dollar Sign mirrors the artist’s own transformation into an icon of contemporary art and international commercial success.

Keith Haring

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 482,600

Untitled | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

KEITH HARING (1958 – 1990)
Untitled, 1984
Acrylic on canvas
19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (50.2 x 50.2 cm)
Signed, dated 1984 and dedicated To Gail (on the overlap)

Damien Hirst

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 180,000 – 250,000
USD 381,000

Beautiful Dance with the Devil Painting | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

DAMIEN HIRST (b. 1965)
Beautiful Dance with the Devil Painting, 2007
Household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 48 inches (121.9 cm)
Signed (on the stretcher); signed, titled and dated 2007 (on the reverse)

David Hockney

Sotheby’s New-York: 19 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 215,900

Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes | Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

DAVID HOCKNEY (b.1937)
Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes, 1978-80
Lithograph printed in colors on TGL handmade paper
Sheet: 29 3/4 x 33 5/8 inches (75.6 x 85.4 cm)
Signed in pencil and dated 1978-80 (lower right); numbered 11/85 (lower left)
This impression is number 11 from the edition of 85 plus 18 artist’s proofs

 

 

8. Phillips’ Auctions

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1. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

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17 May 2023

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale: New York May 2023 (phillips.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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40 Lots
Low Estimate: USD 63,240,000
High Estimate: USD 89,950,000

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Total: USD 69,543,100
# Lots withdrawn:
# Lots sold: 33 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 89.2%

———-

Top Lot: USD 9,724,500
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 17 Lots
Turnover: USD 60,081,600 (86.4% of total)

———-

Sold over Estimates: 9 Lots (24%)
Sold within Estimates: 19 Lots (51%)
Sold below Estimates: 5 Lots (14%)
Unsold: 4 Lots (11%)

 

2. Top 10 Lots

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#1. BANKSY

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
USD 9,724,500

Banksy – 20th Century & Contemporary Art… Lot 13 May 2023 | Phillips

In the early hours of September 17, 2017, Banksy paid a clandestine visit to the Barbican in Central London. That morning, as The Londonist shares, Banksy’s newest image caught museum staff by surprise: “a brilliant homage” to Jean-Michel Basquiat, stenciled on the wall in Golden Lane.ⁱ As The New York Times reported: “Banksy Strikes Again.”ⁱⁱ

Banksy timed the creation of his intervention to the opening of Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican, the first comprehensive exhibition of the influential street artist in the United Kingdom since his untimely death in 1988. The present work, Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search, executed on panel in 2018, features two figures from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, being frisked by members of London’s Metropolitan Police. Basquiat’s boy and dog are rendered in the late artist’s gestural painterly style, while the police officers are executed using Banksy’s signature black-and-white stencil technique. A collaboration beyond space and time, the work unites two street art giants from either side of the Atlantic in a cogent commentary on commodification and privilege in contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, 1982. Private Collection. Image: akg-images, Artwork: © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

Banksy’s signature stenciling technique—which the artist facetiously calls “cheating”—allows him to create works with a level of detail and precision that is difficult (if not impossible) to achieve otherwise in the inherently quick, covert practice of graffiti.ⁱⁱⁱ These stencils appropriate images or motifs from popular culture, but reinterpret them into novel settings, a shift that imbues the imagery with new, often confrontational, and deeply ironic meaning. For instance, Kissing Coppers, 2004, executed on the wall of a pub in Brighton, a historically gay-friendly city in England, calls to attention lingering homophobia and the history of police crackdowns on LBGTQ+ people (most famously, in the United States, at Stonewall). Banksy’s stenciled interventions, Kissing Coppers and the present work included, separate him out from the crowd, as a stylistic fingerprint that unites his graffiti works around the world.

 

While Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search finds its visual basis in Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, Banksy reinterprets Basquiat’s imagery—and rewrites his title—to shift the meaning of the work. Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump is a blistering summer scene, with the boy and dog posing in the red-hot water of a johnnypump, slang for an opened fire hydrant that turns the street into an impromptu (and technically illegal) water park. Spike Lee famously captures the raucous joy of this summertime activity in his 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, which focuses on residents of Bedford Stuyvesant, a historically Black neighborhood in Basquiat’s native Brooklyn. Basquiat paints his figures against a vibrant background of red, green, and yellow, colors which commonly feature on Caribbean and African textiles, like rastacaps, kente cloth, and the traditional Ethiopian flag. These colors, in place of the white spray of rushing water, underscore the localized connection of the visuals of Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump to the lived experience and material existence of Black Brooklynites.

If Basquiat’s painting, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, lives in the joyous outset of Spike Lee’s scene, as residents jump and play in the open fire hydrant, then Banksquiat lives in the aftermath, once a white man calls the police on the Black residents. Spike Lee masterfully navigates the precarious joy of the johnnypump in the narrative of the film; Banksy, too, makes careful artistic choices to adapt Basquiat’s work to the presence of his stenciled Metropolitan Police. Banksy removes the majority of Basquiat’s tricolor, Pan-African background, leaving only a thin grey-scaled outline around the figures in the present work. The male figure’s hands, raised perhaps in play or celebration in Basquiat’s original, become a clear “hands up” gesture in the presence of the police. As in Spike Lee’s film, Banksy’s artistic choices show how quickly a playful moment can become a tense encounter for Black Americans; the Johnnypump transforms into a Stop and Search.

#2. Pablo Picasso

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 7,320,000

Pablo Picasso – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 4 May 2023 | Phillips

One of the great portraitists of the 20^th century, Picasso painted Tête de femme au chignon in 1952, the final year of his pivotal relationship with the artist Françoise Gilot. Facing to the left, the figure here sits with her hair pulled back in the titular chignon style, and gazes out a grey window marked by black bars. Growing out of a decade’s worth of portraiture of Gilot, Tête de femme au chignon works in a visual idiom inspired by two of Picasso’s greatest post-war influences, Henri Matisse and the wider history of portraiture in Western art. With her sculptural, immutable expression, the figure in Tête de femme au chignon reaches beyond any specific model to reveal an artist disassembling the inherited norms of representation into an inventive and colorful portrait.

The personal and art historical collide in Tête de femme au chignon, a consummate example of Picasso’s post-war approach to portraiture. The artist deftly navigates his inheritance of Western tropes, such as the woman at the window, and reinterprets them through his personal muse, Gilot, and friendly rival, Matisse. The unified result is a testament to Picasso’s innovation; a mark that an art historical reputation is not given, but earned.

#3. Roy Lichtenstein

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,500,000 – 5,500,000
USD 5,505,000

Roy Lichtenstein – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 35 May 2023 | Phillips

Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (the Rokeby Venus), 1647-1651. The National Gallery, London. Image: © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Within Girl in Mirror, the girl’s face is only visible in the cosmetic mirror she holds towards the viewer, a compositional move which places the visual interest on her body, rather than her face—the girl herself is, quite literally, in the mirror. Her blonde hair, which dominates the left half of the composition, is intentionally artificial, its classic 1960s swoop echoing the curve of the mirror. Even her hand is perfectly manicured, to an unreal degree. As Lichtenstein explained, the artificiality of his characters is part of his artistic experiment.

#4. Mark Grotjahn

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,500,000 – 4,500,000
USD 4,295,000

Mark Grotjahn – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 25 May 2023 | Phillips

Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15) embodies the signature art-historical inspirations of Grotjahn’s oeuvre. There’s a visual similarity between Grotjahn’s expressive brushstrokes and the practices of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, and a textural parallel to Pierre Soulages’ richly impastoed black paintings in Grotjahn’s thick, overlapping lines. Grotjahn calls on the practices of these artists’ Modernist ancestors, as well, by taking the human form as the starting point for his abstract practice. In particular, Cubism and German Expressionism are key Modernist referents for Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15). The Cubist sense of fragmentation, and the German Expressionists’ rich, yet dark, color combinations come together in Untitled (Standard Lotus XVI Face 44.15)’s partial face, and the jarring combination of a blue eye and red pupil in the darkness.

#5. Robert Ryman

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD 3,811,000

Robert Ryman – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 20 May 2023 | Phillips

ROBERT RYMAN
Mark, 2002
Oil on linen
40×40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
Signed, titled and dated “RYMAN02 “MARK”” on the overlap

Robert Ryman’s signature minimalism belies a richness of texture in Mark, 2002. The support is a medium-weight linen with a cool, natural flax tone that contrasts the warmer, sand-colored underpainting of Mark. Over this base, Ryman fills the picture plane, almost to the corners, with thick, white oil paint, applied with short, curving marks. This treatment of paint adds texture to the otherwise monochrome surface, as light catches the peaks of paint and casts shadows on the valleys. The linen base of Mark is stretched in a perfect square, 40 x 40 in. (just over one meter square), but the composition itself is not-quite-square. Instead, the artist has chosen, as indicated by the boundaries of the sand-colored underpainting, to apply paint in a trapezoidal shape, that comes almost, but not quite, to the edges of the picture plane; the white paint draws tangent to the sides of the stretcher, but curls away at the corners, like seafoam receding on a beach. This artistic choice emphasizes the fact that this painted surface is exactly that—a surface—an illusion, crafted in oil paint, and placed on the wall before us.

#6. Ed Ruscha

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
USD 3,448,000

Ed Ruscha – 20th Century & Contemporary … Lot 29 May 2023 | Phillips

Manual Mobility, 1994, is an iconic example of Ed Ruscha’s career-defining text painting. Known for a body of work that falls between the Pop and Conceptual art movements, Ruscha got his start in advertising before switching to fine art, and like his peers Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, his commercial beginnings had a strong influence on his art practice. The lines MANUAL MOBILITY and OPERATION OF VEHICLES are stenciled larger than the rest, creating a hierarchy of text that suggests these two lines are the most important textual elements. The words sit in front of a cloudy blue sky, and the shadow of a window frame hangs in front of them. Manual Mobility brings Ruscha’s early Surrealist, trompe l’oeil interest together with his career-long fascinations with the Western United States, the aesthetics of Hollywood films, and the relationship between text and image. Manual Mobility is a prime example of Ruscha’s use of an airbrush, a tool he began using in the mid-1980s to achieve a “strokeless,” photorealistic quality in his paintings. Ruscha begins compositions like Manual Mobility by first blocking off the letter forms with tape, a process he calls “reverse-stenciling.” He then uses the airbrush to paint the background (in this case, the cloudy sky), and removes the tape to reveal the letter forms, crisp and strong against the wispy, sfumato effect of the airbrush. In Manual Mobility, however, Ruscha picks up the airbrush one more time, and paints the shadowy window shape over the lettering. The microscopic spray of the airbrushed black paint along the lines of the windowpanes makes the view into the sky beyond seem hazy. The image softens and sharpens depending on the viewer’s distance from the canvas, like a camera lens snapping into focus.

#7. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 3,206,000

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 8 May 2023 | Phillips

Red Stripes and Blue Spots are some of Kusama’s earliest extant soft sculptures, and their tuberous motif anticipates her very first mirrored infinity room, Phalli’s Field, executed the same year as these two works. Recognizable worldwide, Red Stripes and Blue Spots are absolutely iconic early works by an international superstar.

Red Stripes and Blue Spots have always toured as a set, from their earliest exhibition in 1968, up to their most recent turn in a Yayoi Kusama retrospective in Berlin and Tel Aviv last year. The pair have been part of many major Kusama exhibitions, including the blockbuster retrospective tours, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, 1998-1999, and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, 2017-2019, which combined saw millions of visitors. Red Stripes and Blue Spots are iconic early Kusama works, recognizable worldwide, and they are an integral part of Kusama’s story as an artist.

#9. Roy Lichtenstein

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD 2,843,000

Roy Lichtenstein – 20th Century & Contem… Lot 18 May 2023 | Phillips

With its opaque white surface of red and blue dots, meticulously rendered by hand and clustered into carefully aligned sequences of varying thicknesses, Mirror #7, 1971, both evokes and obfuscates our notions of the form and function of the mirror. In his seminal series of mirror paintings, executed between 1969 and 1972, Roy Lichtenstein sought to create works that could be “moved as far as possible from realism…as stylized as you can get it.”In the process, he found a complex formal and symbolic reflection of his own art practice, keyed to the minimalist language of post-Pop American art.

 

Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Image: Heritage Images / Fine Art Images / akg-images

“There’s no simple way to draw a mirror, so cartoonists invented dashed or diagonal lines to signify mirror. Now, you see those lines and you know it means mirror, even though there are obviously no such lines in reality. If you put horizontal, instead of diagonal, lines across the same object, it wouldn’t say ‘mirror’.”

The mirror, as an art historical symbol, enjoys a richness of meanings, representing vanity, beauty, the transience of life, and the fickleness of reality. The mirror itself, too, is a potent symbol of painterly skill. Historically, commercial artists would subtly advertise their talents in realist representation by painting complex mirrors or glassware into their work; a self-portrait with a mirror was their most effective business card. Lichtenstein, too, draws on more commercial meanings of mirrors with Mirror #7. He found his inspiration for the present series in brochures found in the window displays of glass stores on the Bowery on New York’s Lower East Side. He was fascinated by these depictions of mirrors as “air-brushed mirror symbols, reflecting nothing.” Lichtenstein’s perennial muse, cartoon art, provided further inspiration for Mirror #7. As with the advertising brochures found on the Bowery, cartoonists had their own, not-quite-realistic way of drawing mirrors.

#10. Yayoi Kusama

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 2,722,000

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 7 May 2023 | Phillips

Red Stripes and Blue Spots are some of the earliest extant examples of the artist’s soft-sculpture motif of tuberous forms that smother the surface, which she began exploring in 1962, and brought to infinite expression in her first mirrored infinity room, Phalli’s Field, 1965. Red Stripes and Blue Spots concentrate Phalli’s Field onto squared boards; hung on the wall like paintings, the soft, cloth-covered striped and spotted forms reach out towards the viewer. Red Stripes brings together perhaps her most iconic color combination of red and white, as seen in the contemporary Phalli’s Field, while Blue Spots provides an early example of the polka dots which would come to define Kusama’s career.

While some critics demur, and describe the shapes of Red Stripes and Blue Spots as resembling coral or sausages, the artist herself has explicitly stated their phallic referent. She explained that the work “thickly covered in phalluses was my psychosomatic work done when I had a fear of sexual vision.” Just as her use of dots and nets allows her to obliterate anxiety through repetition, so sewing endless phalluses enabled the artist to overwhelm her fear. In her autobiography, Kusama wrote that the process “turns the frightening thing into something funny, something amusing. I’m able to revel in my illness in the dazzling light of day.” The knowing, brave expansion of fear and anxiety into a repetitive, obliterative surface, as in Red Stripes and Blue Spots, is a hallmark of Kusama’s practice.

Kusama with Red Stripes and Blue Spots, 1965. Image: Marianne Dommisse / 0-INSTITUTE, Artwork: © YAYOI KUSAMA

Agnes and Frits Becht were not afraid of the avant-garde. The sole couple among their friends in the 1960s to collect work by an up-and-coming Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, the Dutch pair traveled to attend contemporary art events around Europe, from the Venice Biennale to conceptual gallery shows, including one of Kusama’s legendary naked Happenings, at the Birds Club in Amsterdam, in 1967. With a collection concentrated around Nouveau Réalisme, Pop Art, and Italian Conceptual Minimalism, the Bechts treasured personal relationships with the artists they collected, including Lucio Fontana, Jan Dibbets, and Kusama. As their granddaughter, Eline Becht, wrote in the curatorial note to accompany the exhibition, Personal Reflection: Works and Stories from the Agnes and Frits Becht Collection, The Parts Project, The Hague, 2022, Agnes and Frits took “a special approach to collecting, close to patronage, where the collector wishes to financially support the artist whilst giving them creative freedom and trusting their process. The two works have remained in the family collection ever since, an exceptional provenance for works by this artist, and they have featured in five major international Kusama retrospectives, among other exhibitions.

3. Other Highlights

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Yoshitomo Nara

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,480,000

Yoshitomo Nara – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 12 May 2023 | Phillips

YOSHITOMO NARA
Guitar Girl, 2019
Acrylic on wood, in artist’s frame
118.1 x 94.9 x 7.9 cm (46 1/2 x 37 3/8 x 3 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated “2019 Nara” on the reverse

A young girl in a blue dress snarls and shreds her guitar in Yoshitomo Nara’s Guitar Girl, 2019. The determined, yet strikingly cherubic figure epitomizes Nara’s classic type, the “Ramona” (named for the Ramones, a punk rock band, and sporting the group’s signature, shaggy hairstyle), a feisty character who embodies youthful rebellion and ferocious self-determination. As a child, Nara’s first exposure to art came through the album covers of his favorite records.

“There was no museum where I grew up. As a teenager a song that played from the radio blew my mind… my whole precocious self was blown away! That song lit a fire in my raw teenage emotion. It was the Ramones! And then the Sex Pistols, and The Clash, and Bob Marley… They gave me an answer to how I’d live my life from then on.”

The Ramones playing the Phase V club in New Jersey, 1976. Image: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

One can imagine Guitar Girl as a female avatar of Nara’s own teenaged self, listening to the Ramones’ guitar-heavy music on the radio, and practicing the riffs on her own. Nara’s simplified, expressive characters, reminiscent of children’s book illustrations and cartoons, reveal how deeply the visuals from Nara’s childhood influence his work. However, the artist is quick to reject manga, anime, and kawaii culture as visual referents; the influence of music and illustration is much more meaningful. That is not to say, of course, that Nara’s work is not without Japanese visual antecedents. The rounded facial features of Guitar Girl harken back to traditional otafuku (or okame) theatrical masks. The otafuku mask, worn in Noh theater performances, represents the Goddess of Mirth, an ever-smiling, rosy cheeked woman, who brings good luck to the man she marries (the word otafuku literally meaning “much good fortune”). Nara applies otafuku facial features—round cheeks, upturned eyes, and small lips—to his Guitar Girl, but crucially, he transforms the Goddess of Mirth’s eternal grin into a ferocious snarl. Guitar Girl seems to bite her lip as she bares her teeth, an aggressive gesture that speaks to the counter-cultural edge of Nara’s work. This punk rock ethos is reflected in the Tokyo street style fashion photography of Nara’s contemporary, Shoichi Aoki, for FRUiTS magazine. Nara’s Guitar Girl, like Aoki’s teenage models, captures the stylish dissatisfaction and malaise of a generation of young Japanese people navigating the lasting effects of Western culture on Japan after World War II.

Andy Warhol

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 2,359,000

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 28 May 2023 | Phillips

At first glance, the four Mona Lisas of Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisa Four Times, 1973, seem identical. The two bust-length portraits and two close-ups of Mona Lisa are silkscreened on a ground of thick, near-black paint, which gives the work a mysterious aura akin to that of the original. And like Leonardo da Vinci’s 1503 portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, Mona Lisa Four Times rewards close looking. Diligent inspection reveals how the amount of ink used for each print shifts the shadows of Mona Lisa’s face, creating the illusion of an enigmatic expression: that infamous Mona Lisa smile.

Warhol revisited the Mona Lisa motif repeatedly over the course of his career, beginning in 1963, the year da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This historic loan was facilitated by another famous Warholian subject, First Lady Jackie Kennedy, who personally convinced the French Cultural Minister to send the work across the ocean. The present work dates to the midpoint of Warhol’s sustained artistic investigation into the Renaissance subject matter, which lasted into the late 1970s. Mona Lisa Four Times engages Warhol’s key artistic pursuits of celebrity, pop culture, and seriality at a grand art historical scale, while at the same time grounding the iconic image in the visual language of his early 1970s art practice.

 

Sturtevant

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 2,419,500

Sturtevant – 20th Century & Contemporary… Lot 41 May 2023 | Phillips

Study for Warhol Marilyn, 1973, presents three large panels with Andy Warhol’s iconic screenprinted representation of Marilyn Monroe gridded across the surfaces. The work repeats these multiples in a variety of arrangements: at the right, Marilyn is repeated twenty-five times in black and white; at center, she’s in yellow and pink against a teal ground, again twenty-five times; and at left, there is just one Marilyn, floating in metallic gold like a Byzantine icon. At first glance, Study for Warhol Marilyn appears like any other Warhol. But is it?

Sturtevant created Study for Warhol Marilyn concurrent to her 1973 exhibition, Sturtevant: Studies for Warhol’s Marilyns, Beuys’ Actions and Objects, Duchamp’s etc. Including Film, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Sturtevant, who preferred to be known by her (ex-husband’s) surname, was a controversial figure in New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s, as her practice—creating works that are near-copies of other artists’ work—bruised egos and raised wider questions of the importance of originality and creative genius in art, ideas inherited from the Italian Renaissance that still held merit in mid-20^th century art discourse.

Andy Warhol

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,633,000

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 10 May 2023 | Phillips

Andy Warhol’s final series of self-portraits, created in the months before his untimely death in 1986, are the culmination of the artist’s lifelong fascinations with fame and death in the cult of celebrity. Self-Portrait (Fright Wig), 1986, is named for the spiky, peroxide blonde wig Warhol wears in the original Polaroid image. Warhol’s final self-portraits encapsulate the enigmatic celebrity persona Warhol cultivated throughout his career, reminding us that Warhol’s own performance of celebrity is an artistic feat on par with his accomplishments in silkscreen, portraiture, and film.

[Left] Self-Portrait, 1964. Private Collection. Artwork: © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
[Center] Self-Portrait, 1964. Museum Brandhorst, Munich. Image: akg-images, Artwork: © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
[Right] Self-Portrait, 1967. San Francsisco Museum of Modern Art. Image: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The 1986 Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) series builds upon Warhol’s previous explorations of self-portraiture over the course of his career. Reaching as far back as the artist’s student work, such as Nosepicker I, 1948, Warhol’s identity as an artist is predicated on his self-representation in an artful manner. In each set of portraits, he takes on a persona of himself as an artist: the cool trench coat and sunglasses of his photographic 1964 portrait series; his features subsumed into blocks of color as the haughty King of Pop in the silkscreen portraits of the same year. The 1966 silkscreens show Warhol the mysterious artist, hand to chin in a contemplative gesture, features partially obscured by shadow. In each set, Warhol carefully constructs himself as an artist, and the 1986 group is no exception. In the present work, Warhol stares out at the viewer, the pallor of his skin and blonde wig rendered in a shocking green hue against the black background. By rendering the rest of his body invisible, Warhol elevates his self-representation to that of an icon. But the term “icon,” as applied to Warhol, is a deceptively nuanced term. Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) recalls both Warhol’s own pop cultural icons—presenting Warhol-as-artist on the same level as famous subjects like Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong in the same signature silkscreen technique—and religious portrait icons familiar to Warhol from his Byzantine Catholic upbringing.

Andy Warhol

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,117,600

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 27 May 2023 | Phillips

Noah Davis

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 990,600

Noah Davis – 20th Century & Contemporary … Lot 1 May 2023 | Phillips

Damien Hirst

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 927,100

Damien Hirst – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 19 May 2023 | Phillips

 

Ewa Juszkiewicz

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 635,000

Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 9 May 2023 | Phillips

Ewa Juszkiewicz’s paintings engage the long history of artifice and concealment in Western portraiture. Working from traditional portraits of upper-class women, dating from the Renaissance to the 19^th century, Juszkiewicz deftly reproduces the conventional settings and poses, but with a Surrealist twist: she completely covers the faces of her sitters, with drapery, florae and faunae, or, in the case of Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019, the sitter’s own hair. Such concealment and (dis)identification speaks to the wider art history of female portraiture, and the ways in which beauty and conventions can hide our true selves.The present work takes its name from Ernst Thelott’s portrait of Elise Dorothea Friederike, a Swabian baroness who died in 1831, aged just 21. As in Thelott’s portrait, Juszkiewicz’s interpretation places the young Elise in a decadent satiny gown, with puff sleeves and a ruched neckline.

Ernst Thelott, Elise Dorothea Friederike, Freifrau von Schaezler, geb. Freifrau von Süsskind, c. 1829-1831.

The background behind Elise is as fantastic as her dress, depicting a sunset over distant mountains, with a small branch or bush at lower left, all dwarfed by Elise’s enormous sleeves. Juszkiewicz meticulously reproduces these details from Thelott’s portrait, expertly capturing the transparent values of Elise’s sleeves; the painted surface of Untitled (after Ernst Thelott) is as smooth and shiny as any court portrait from history. Juszkiewicz critical difference, of course, is the exchange of Elise’s frilly curls and calm, rosy-cheeked complexion for a braided up-do in reverse. One can imagine that Juszkiewicz was inspired by Elise’s topknot, but freshened up the look for the 21^st century—the loosely braided hair in Untitled (after Ernst Thelott) is wonderfully contemporary, recalling the braided hairstyles of Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games that wove into 2010s fashion. More recent art historical referents, too, come to mind, like René Magritte’s work, Le viol, 1945, as the displacement of the sitter’s face immediately raises questions of identity, the uncanny, and individuality under the male gaze.

Maria Berrio

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
USD 635,000

María Berrío – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 24 May 2023 | Phillips

No One Can Hear You, Only the Wind, 2012, is a richly detailed example of María Berrío’s signature collage and watercolor technique. The composition of a graceful ballerina leaping across a deep night sky and a kaleidoscopic field of flowers, comes together through an assemblage of decorative papers primarily produced in the Global South—in addition to Berrío’s cherished, handmade Japanese paper—as well as botanical drawings of birds and flowers, a sheaf of dried leaves, and a reproduction of a calendar page from the Limbourg Brothers’ 15^th century illuminated manuscript, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. The seamless integration of such disparate materials speaks to the constant interplay of the global and local, the mythical and deeply, politically relevant, in each of Berrío’s works.

Dried leaves stand alongside collaged ones, fusing the real and unreal in a surreal, even magical world of collage and watercolor. This infusion recalls the deep artistic and literary roots of Surrealism and magical realism in Latin America, from the work of Surrealists such as Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Tanning in Mexico, to some of Berrío’s favorite authors, including Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, and the oral folklore traditions of indigenous peoples. Like these artists and storytellers, Berrío creates a dream world in No One Can Hear You, Only the Wind, and as a native of Colombia who has spent her professional career in New York, she is deeply attuned to the artistic richness of hybrid experience and cultural exchange.

Anna Weyant

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 609,600

Anna Weyant – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 22 May 2023 | Phillips

Fadojutimi is, at her core, a colorist, as the astute juxtaposition of pale neons and rich plum in The Menstrual Marshland reveals. But beyond her strong color sensibility, the idea of color permeates every aspect of her life. As she shares, her practice and way of life are one, and painting in such vibrant colors as with The Menstrual Marshland is, for Fadojutimi, a way of working through her identity and lived experiences. The movement of The Menstrual Marshland, the underlying sense of action and play, aligns with one of the artist’s oldest inspirations: anime. One can see Fadojutimi’s engagement with the bright, line-driven style of these Japanese cartoons, especially the anime-style of depicting movement, as in fight scene. Even the neon yellow paired with blue is reminiscent of Sailor Moon, one of the artist’s favorite anime characters.

Caroline Walker

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 350,000
USD 469,900

Caroline Walker – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 2 May 2023 | Phillips

In Caroline Walker’s 2010 painting, Conservation, a woman in her underwear stretches to place an Ancient Greek vase on a floating glass shelf. She stands in a minimal, yet luxurious, interior, with an orchid, cowhide rug, and four mirror-paneled closet doors, which reflect the scene back in on itself. The present work dates to a key point in Walker’s career as an artist, when she shifted from painting scenes of Victorian-style interiors to spaces with more modern architecture. Having grown up in a Victorian home herself, the change in scenery ignited Walker’s curiosity as an artist, and she continued to push themes of perspective, reflection, and interiority.

The abundance of reflective surfaces in the dream home of Conservation—from the closet doors to the glass shelves and table—encourages a sense of prolonged contemplation. Walker utilizes these surfaces to keep the eye moving between objects, their reflections, and fragments of those reflections. The woman acts, and acts in reflection; the viewer views, and views again. The visual device recalls Édouard Manet’s Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1882, Courtauld Gallery, London, which shows a female bartender at work, and the scene behind her reflected in a bar-length mirror. But where Manet’s work traffics in how the female bartender is seen by her male patrons, Walker inverts the gender of the painter’s gaze. How, she wonders, is it different when it’s a woman looking at women?

Édouard Manet, Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1882. The Courtauld Gallery, London. Image: © The Courtauld / Bridgeman Images

In Conservation, Walker places the viewer behind a white armchair, a slightly covert position, which allows them to see the woman, and her reflection, perhaps without being seen in return. While Walker jokes that her voyeuristic impulse stems from “being nosy,” there’s also a calm sense of intimacy to the placement of the gaze in Conservation. It is as if we are sitting in the room together with the woman, watching her in a delicate moment of trust; in sheer underwear, her sweater lifting up her midriff, she extends on tiptoe to place the fragile vase.

Louise Bonnet

Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 406,400

Louise Bonnet – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 6 May 2023 | Phillips

The cropped, central figure in The Red Pants, 2016, is emblematic of the unique visual language of Louise Bonnet’s surreal, distended universe. Featured in the artist’s first solo show at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles in 2016, the intentionally claustrophobic composition centers on the pelvis of a figure whose long, drooping nose swings into view like a fleshy necktie. Sausage-like fingers hold buttercups, pulled together loosely with twined white string, one of the artist’s long-standing motifs. The Red Pants brings together the artist’s signature combination of bodily distortion and a sense of unease. Bonnet’s treatment of the body—particularly her bulbous noses—caused sensation in Los Angeles, where she lived, worked, and exhibited, in the mid-2010s. The artist addresses the phallic likeness of her noses head-on:

“The figures make some people uncomfortable maybe because the noses look like penises, but I don’t start out thinking I’m going to paint penises. I just like when things go in and out of something.”

Indeed, The Red Pants, and her oeuvre at large, traverses a wide range of graphic references, from Surrealists like René Magritte, to the late work of Philip Guston; the underground cartoons of R. Crumb, and even medieval European devotional art.

Detail, book of hours, c. 1500, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Morgan Library, MS G5 fol. 18v. Image: The Morgan Library & Museum / Art Resource, NY

The hands holding buttercups function as a fig-leaf to the exposed nose above, recalling medieval Christian floral symbolism. The picked flowers and color palette of The Red Pants are reminiscent of the aesthetics of medieval books of hours, particularly those from the Flemish and Netherlandish schools, c. 1500, which featured illustrations of flowers as life-like as those found in contemporary herbals. More widely, in medieval European art, Christian saints are painted holding attributes, such as flowers, that symbolize the plot of a story from the saint’s life. St. Elizabeth of Hungary’s cloak full of roses, for example, reminds the viewer of when the saint miraculously turned bread into roses. Bonnet likes this aspect of medieval European art, explaining how painting from this time is “really in the service of an idea, and it’s trying to tell a story,” just like her own work. In The Red Pants, for instance, the viewer is keenly aware that the content on the canvas is only part of the scene. The drooping nose belongs to some invisible face; the buttercups were picked elsewhere.

 

2. 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

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Morning Session

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16 May 2023

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Mornin… New York May 2023 (phillips.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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Total: USD 21,233,765
# Lots: 159
# Lots sold: 131 Lots
# Lots withdrawn: 3 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 84%

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Top Lot: USD 1,016,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 1 Lot

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Sold over Estimates: 52 Lots (33%)
Sold within Estimates: 44 Lots (28%)
Sold below Estimates: 35 Lot (22%)
Unsold: 25 Lots (16%)

2. Top 5 Lots

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#1. Roy Lichtenstein

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 1,016,000

Roy Lichtenstein – 20th Century & Conte… Lot 117 May 2023 | Phillips

#2. Keith Haring

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 600,000 – 800,000
USD 952,500

Keith Haring – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 116 May 2023 | Phillips

#3. Josef Albers

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 844,550

Josef Albers – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 157 May 2023 | Phillips

#4. Joan Mitchell

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 825,000

Joan Mitchell – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 106 May 2023 | Phillips

#5. Donald Judd

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 698,500

Donald Judd – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 123 May 2023 | Phillips

Donald Judd’s untitled (Menziken #91-175), 1991, exemplifies the artist’s preoccupation with positive and negative space through his unique privileging of industrial materials. Beginning his career as an abstract painter and shifting into the producer of the Minimalist three-dimensional forms for which he is known today, the present work celebrates the interplays of space and color which are central to the artist’s oeuvre. A pioneer of the Conceptual art movement, Judd and his contemporaries believed that ideas themselves could exist as art, separate from any material conventions. Created just three years before his death in 1994, the present work belongs to the Menziken series, each composed of Swiss-manufactured aluminum and monochrome Plexiglas sheets—here in rich black, a departure from vibrant colors such as Cadmium red and Ultramarine blue. Similar examples of Judd’s later works are housed in private collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art and The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

3. Other Highlights

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Andy Warhol

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 482,600

Andy Warhol – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 115 May 2023 | Phillips

Andy Warhol’s O.J. Simpson, 1977, brings together two of the most recognizable names of the 20th century. Part of the artist’s famed Athlete Series, consisting of over 200 portraits made between late March and early November of 1977, the present work reflects the artist’s interest in celebrity and more broadly, his reinvention of traditional portraiture. First debuted in his 1977 exhibition at Coe Kerr Gallery, New York in December of that year, and one of the few portraits signed by both the athlete and artist, O.J. Simpson captures the influence of a notorious figure in pop culture. The present work was previously in the collection of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and other portraits of the sitter are housed in esteemed university collections such as the University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, and the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The present work installed at Athletes by Andy Warhol, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1978. Artwork: © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

Commissioned by Warhol’s friend and collector Richard Weisman, the Athletes Series includes over 200 portraits—more than Warhol painted of Mao five years earlier—of famed sports stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali and Dorothy Hamil. Occupying the role of both movie star and athlete, Simpson was an ideal candidate for the project. A star running back for the Buffalo Bills and an aspiring actor, he was only 30 years old at the time of his meeting with Warhol. Showing up to their meeting in a Buffalo motel room on October 19, 1977, Simpson forgot both signifiers of his profession – his jersey and a football. Eventually sourcing a ball, Warhol snapped 46 Polaroids of the athlete dressed in a plaid shirt under a blazer, selecting two to use as source images for eleven subsequent portraits. The impermanence of these Polaroids—a medium Warhol used as early as the 1960s when he embarked upon his first commissioned portraits—reinforce the ephemeral nature of fame which Warhol was interrogating in his work. In O.J. Simpson, Warhol composes the portrait so that the ball almost takes up as much space as O.J.’s face. He also takes a more painterly approach to his traditional silkscreen, especially when compared to his 1980s portraits rendered in the same 40 by 40-inch format, using swathes of red and orange pigment to brush gently across the surface of the canvas. When viewing this 1977 depiction, immediately the viewer is reminded of another, less glamorous portrait of Simpson – his mugshot. Unaware of his picture’s impact years later, Warhol acknowledges and highlights the footballer’s budding celebrity.

Alex Katz

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 444,500

Alex Katz – 20th Century & Contemporary… Lot 112 May 2023 | Phillips

 

Afternoon Session

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16 May 2023

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Aftern… New York May 2023 (phillips.com)

1. Auction Statistics

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Total: USD 17,444,500
# Lots: 192
# Lots withdrawn: 8 Lots
# Lots sold: 150 Lots
Sell-Through Rate: 81.5%

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Top Lot: USD 1,633,000
# Lots sold over USD 1 million: 1 Lot

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Sold over Estimates: 52 Lots (28%)
Sold within Estimates: 49 Lots (27%)
Sold below Estimates: 49 Lot (27%)
Unsold: 34 Lots (18%)

#2. Anish Kapoor

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 977,900

Anish Kapoor – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 352 May 2023 | Phillips

Recessed into the wall, Untitled expands upon Kapoor’s investigation of voids and negative space, which the artist has approached through color, form and material. Consistently exploring the phenomenological relationship between viewers and artworks, the present example can be compared to projects across Kapoor’s oeuvre such as his works using Vantablack. The trademarked material, a military-grade, synthetic coating that absorbs 99.96% of visible light, was utilized in his works at the 2021 Venice Biennale. These black hole-like sculptures provided a similarly elusive experience to that of Untitled. Drawing viewers in, the lacuna at the center of the present example invites ongoing contemplation of presence and absence. The concave structure of Untitled is not immediately registered since the edge of the work sits flush with the wall, prompting viewers to further investigate its true physical character.

#3. Sarah Lucas

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 736,600

Sarah Lucas – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 346 May 2023 | Phillips

#4. Shara Hughes

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 400,000
USD 698,500

Shara Hughes – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 324 May 2023 | Phillips

#5. Anish Kapoor

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 250,000 – 350,000
USD 660,400

Anish Kapoor – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 353 May 2023 | Phillips

Held in the personal collection of Hollywood actor Jim Carrey, Non-Object (Spire), 2007, is an iconic example of Anish Kapoor’s Spire sculptures that have been prominently shown across the globe in exhibitions such as Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down at Kensington Gardens, London, organized by the Serpentine Gallery in 2010, and Anish Kapoor at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai in 2011. With its delicate, tapered pinnacle, precisely round base and polished steel surface, the outdoor sculpture almost otherworldly in its geometric perfection. Stretching up towards the sky, the work at once reflects and pierces its surroundings. Anish Kapoor utilizes the phrase “non-object” to describe works that morph with their surroundings to highlight the beauty of other objects. A “non-object” does not refer to the lack of an object, but rather the malleable relationship between the object and its space. Kapoor’s “non-objects” upend traditional expectations of shape and form: they are solidly present but constantly in flux as they interact with their shifting settings. The title of Non-Object (Spire) hints at the elusive, seductive qualities of the sculpture. It is a substantive structure, but its presence is chameleon-like.  This exceptional work is amongst the first of Kapoor’s Non-Object sculptures and epitomizes this series, which includes other examples such as Non-Object (Pole), 2008 and Non-Object (Plane), 2010.

3. Other Highlights

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Matthew Wong

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 120,000 – 180,000
USD 609,600

Matthew Wong – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 301 May 2023 | Phillips

Scott Kahn

Phillips New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 100,000 – 150,000
USD 241,300

Scott Kahn – 20th Century & Contemporar… Lot 373 May 2023 | Phillips