A $59M Basquiat Bounty & a Monet Match
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A $59M Basquiat Bounty & a Monet MatchSotheby's Hong Kong sales cycle opens on Friday down 50% by lots & 25% by pre-sale value + Phillips big Basquiat haul & Christie's Monet Doppleganger
Welcome to ArtelligenceIf you have questions, feel free to contact me using the button below. In This Issue
Notes
A Basquiat RenaissancePhillips to Offer Three Early Works with $58.5m in Estimates
Today, Phillips announced that it would sell three Basquiats: the large untitled (ELMAR), estimated at $40 million during New York’s May sales; and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles Amorites on Safari, with a $12 million estate two weeks later in its Hong Kong sales. A third work from 1981, Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), will also be sold on May 14th with a $6.5 million estimate. Phillips has been punching above its weight in the Basquiat realm for some time now, specializing in works that come from either the artist’s estate or early collectors with deep personal ties to him. In 2019, the house sold a self portrait from 1983 painted on two doors that was owned by Matt Dike, who would later collaborate with the Beastie Boys by contributing many of the samples to their seminal album, Paul’s Boutique. Before that, Dike had been Basquiat’s minder when the painter was living in Los Angeles and creating work for Larry Gagosian’s gallery. Works from that brief moment are now the subject of a landmark show at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills exhibition space. The self portrait sold for $9.5 million. The year before that, Phillips sold from the Basquiat estate Flexible from 1984, one of the artist’s distinctive works on a slatted armature like a shipping pallet, to David Geffen for $45 million. Phillips continued their partnership with the estate by sponsoring the family’s remarkably popular for-profit King Pleasure exhibition that has been mounted in New York and Los Angeles. As time passes, finding works with provenance close to Basquiat himself is becoming more and more difficult. In 1984, Francesco Pellizzi, an anthropology professor and journal editor who was married to Dia co-founder Philippa de Menil in the early 1970s and died last year, began to collect Basquiat’s work. In the de Menil tradition, Pellizzi had been buying minimalism, but the ferment of the East Village art scene clearly attracted his interest. He entertained artists like Warhol, Francesco Clemente, and Basquiat at his east side townhouse. And he ended up buying works by many of the East Village art stars, including two 1982 Basquiat works—a large, dramatic painting and heavily text-based work on an unconventional stretcher—from Anina Nosei, the dealer who did so much early on to establish Basquiat, including providing him his first studio space where he converted his street-art style into more conventional painting. The consignment comes at a time when Basquiat’s auction volume has been high. According to LiveArt’s data, sales in 2021 peaked at $439 million. The previous high water year had been 2017, when $345 million of Basquiat’s work sold, including the $110 million untitled head. In the past, peak years were followed by significant drops in sales. In 2022, the auction volume did drop to $221 million only to rise again in 2023 to $235 million setting up the potential for continuing demand this year.
Mo’ Monet, Mo’ Problems
The auction world is filled with coincidences that seem like cause and effect. Random events often coincide to create what appears to be a narrative. Take the Monet painting of The Mill at Limetz that Christie’s announced earlier this week that it will offer in May with an $18 million low estimate. A similar work was offered last season at Sotheby’s with a $12 million estimate. It sold for a surprisingly strong $25 million with fees. There were multiple bidders still chasing the work even after the auctioneer cried out $20 million. From the outside, it looks like Christie’s noticed the interest in Monet and went looking for another version now that Monet’s multiple takes on a single view have become so prized by collectors. (So prized that the auction houses are now playing up the fact that Monet often painted different works from the same vantage point long before he settled into the late series works.) Cool story. The reality is a lot more interesting, though. In the background, there’s been a huge run-up in the value of Monet’s paintings. It’s not like they were cheap to begin with; however, during the pandemic, the price of Monets rose dramatically. Paintings that had sold for around $25 to $30 million in the late twenty teens were selling in 2021 for $50 million. Two very similar views of a corner of Monet’s water lily garden painted in 1918 were sold on either side of the pandemic divide. The first sold in May 2019 for $21.8 million; by November of 2021, the second, arguably better, work sold for $50.8 million. Was that painting almost 150 percent better? Probably not. Were the wealthy so flush with ZIRP-era pandemic liquidity that the price rise didn’t matter? Would it all be sustainable after the art market came back to earth? The value of Monets at auction had already moved up as early as 2012 when the art market began to reach escape velocity from the global financial crisis. The top price paid for a work by Monet at auction came in 2019 when Hasso Plattner, the billionaire founder of SAP, bought an 1890 grainstack for $110 million. In the biggest years for Monet’s auction volume, according to LiveArt’s data, annual sales surpassed $300 million, peaking at $337 million in 2015 and $357 million in 2018. In 2022, as the world reopened, that figure reached an astonishing $540 million. What makes it even more startling was that the bulk of the sales for 2022 took place in the first half of the year. ______ Market Volatility What caused the Monet market to shut off in mid-2022? It doesn’t appear that the demand went away, even if rising interest rates have restrained the art market’s animal spirits in the last year and a half. With values for Monet’s best works continuing to rise even as the art market entered its sober era, there was little incentive to sell. Monet’s Mill at Limetz is one of a pair of works that Monet made in 1888 with the same title. Both works peer across a small body of water at a stone mill and bridge obscured in the background by trees hanging over the near bank. In one work, the mill is brilliantly illuminated behind the blue-lavender shadows of the trees. In the other, the sun dapples the foregrounded trees and lights up the water that lies in between the mill and the bank with vibrant greens. Each work showcases a different aspect of Monet’s skill depicting light and shadow. Each work spent the bulk of the 20th Century in the hands of rich Midwestern American families. One was owned for more than a hundred years by the Palmers of Chicago. Potter Palmer built the department store that would become Marshall Field before developing real estate in the center of the city and reclaiming the land that would become Lake Shore Drive. He bought his Mill at Limetz in 1892, four years after it was painted. A hundred and thirty years later, the painting was still in the Palmer family but had grown so valuable that it was offered at Sotheby’s with a very conservative $12 million estimate. The $25 million selling price was a windfall that validated the decision. We now know that the buyer was also Plattner. The painting is now listed among the 113 Plattner works housed at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany. More than a third of those holdings, 39 paintings including the $110 million grainstack and another grainstack in winter, are by Monet. In many ways, Plattner has been the market for Monet. Of those 39 works in Potsdam, at least 21 were on the auction block in the last 22 years. Nearly half were auctioned in the last eight years. The total bill at auction for these works was more than $414 million. That’s a huge investment in one artist by just one collector. _____ The Folgers Element You can see how this looks. The Palmer’s mill makes $25 million at auction and the owner of the other version sits up and takes notice. Or, Christie’s, ever-aware of what their rival is doing, makes a few calls to the owner of the other Mill at Limetz who eventually gives in because the family doesn’t want to get left out of the action. The other mill, of course, has its own back story. It had been bought by Folger’s coffee executive Joseph Atha in the 1940s. In 1986, Atha bequeathed his version of The Mill at Limetz to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Or, to be more precise, he bequeathed two-thirds of the painting to the museum with the condition that the institution would either buy the remaining third from his heirs, once the last of his three children were gone, or sell the painting. Atha’s son, Donald, died in 2018 in Arizona; his daughter, Elaine, died in Palm Beach in 2022; last year, the eldest of the Atha children, Ethelyn, died in Manhattan at the age of 99. Lyn was the last of the Athas—she was also Chevy Chase’s step-mother—and her demise triggered a decision for the Nelson-Atkins museum buy the remaining third of the work at today’s prices which would have been fairly easy to calculate at around $8 million or sell the work and use the the approximately $15 million the museum would hope to receive to endow an acquisitions fund. For the Nelson-Atkins’s director Julián Zugazagoitia, the decision wasn’t easy or obvious. When asked if he was offering the Mill at Limetz because of the success of last year’s Palmer painting, he demurred that the sale was baked into the Atha’s bequest nearly forty years ago. Nevertheless, the new, higher valuations for Monet’s works, especially a direct comparable, surely played an important role in whether he could raise funds to complete the acquisition or sell the work to fund future purchases. The Palmer painting would have set his bar at $8 million to acquire the Atha heirs’ remaining third. These days it is hard to get donors to pony up for Impressionists when so many museums are in need of works that are more representative of the broader population. Zugazagoitia says he tried to raise the money. In the years since the Atha bequest, the Nelson-Atkins was also able to greatly increase its holdings of Monet through the donation less than a decade ago of a large gift of Impressionist art from Henry and Doris Block. Zugazagoitia’s curators have also helped out recently by persuading a local collector to loan another 1880s Monet to the museum. With five Monets at the Nelson-Atkins, the Mill at Limetz was no longer a work Zugazagoitia had to save. And then there is the approximately $12 million (assuming the work sold only at the low estimate instead of the price the Palmers got) that Zugazagoitia will receive from the sale to endow future acquisitions. The C.E.O. won’t say if the museum has a wish list for those funds. Cagily, he hinted to me that he would like his curators, “honor the Athas by finding works as adventurous or avant garde as it was to buy a Monet in the 1940s when they bought the painting.” Also, let’s not assume that another $25 million sale is immediately in the cards. Yes, it’s a brighter work. But one of the bidders is now out of the competition. (Though we’ve seen that Plattner isn’t shy about acquiring multiple works on similar themes, so there’s always the chance that he could bid again.) There’s also the probability that other Monet collectors saw the sale of the Palmer mill and were intrigued. That may bring more bidders in. The one thing the Monet market has above all other artists is a truly global collector base, says Christie’s head of sale Imogen Kerr. These buyers are often not constrained by a specific period or subject matter in the artist’s body of work. Artelligence is moving to a new platform soon. Add your name to our list so you can come along. 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© 2024 Marion Maneker
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