Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole Room!…and There’s Nobody in it!, 1961 (est. $35-45 million), via Christies.com
The November sales continue this week as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips de Pury offer over half a billion dollars worth of Contemporary art over the next few days. After uneven results during last week’s Impressionist and Modern sales, the performance of these auctions may be a truer indication of the state of the art market. Phillips inaugurates the week on Monday with their 45-lot evening sale, which is immediately preceded by a 22-lot benefit auction for the Guggenheim Foundation. Christie’s will also host two back-to-back sales on Tuesday evening. First are 26 lots from the Peter Norton Collection, which will be followed by the 65-lot evening sale. Sotheby’s wraps up on Wednesday with a 74-lot sale.
Andy Warhol, Nine Gold Marilyns (Reversal Series), 1980 (est. $7-10 million), via Phillipsdepury.com
The headlining lot at the Phillips sale is a suite of Warhol‘s Marilyns from the artists Reversal Series. The work is being sold by a Japanese collector and is estimated to fetch as much as $10 million.
Alexander Calder, Trepied, 1972 (est. $7-10 million), via Phillipsdepury.com
Richard Prince, Runaway Nurse, 2006 (est. $5-7 million), via Phillipsdepury.com
A freestanding Calder sculpture is among the top lots at Phillips. The late work was last sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $1.5 million. This time around it is estimated to bring $7-10 million. A Richard Prince nurse painting is estimated to bring $5-7 million.
Maurizio Cattelan, Others, 2011 (est. $300,000-400,000), via Phillipsdepury.com
All the lots in the Guggenheim benefit auction were donated directly by the artists to be included in the sale. The group is led by a flock of taxidermied pigeons by Maurizio Cattelan, whose retrospective is currently on view at the museum. The sale also includes work by George Condo, Anselm Kiefer, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, and Richard Serra.
Mark Rothko, White Cloud, 1956 (est. $18-25 million), via Christies.com
Christie’s Tuesday auction is headlined by a playful Roy Lichtenstein canvas that is also the most expensive lot to be offered during the week’s sales. I Can See the Whole Room!…and There’s Nobody in it! carries a hefty estimate of $35-45 million. The work is reportedly being sold by the widow of former Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, who picked it up in 1988 at Christie’s for $2 million. A mostly orange Mark Rothko painting is the evening’s second most expensive lot and is expected to bring as much as $25 million.
Louis Bourgeois, Spider, 1996 (est. $4-6 million), via Christies.com
Christie’s will also offer a monumental Louis Bourgeois spider that carries a $4-6 million estimate. Last week the auction house placed the piece outside its Rockefeller Center location in order to stage a PR stunt that involved actor Craig Henningsen, who plays Spider Man in the Broadway production, in full costume posing on and around the sculpture.
Takashi Murakami, B in the Strange Forest (Blue DOB), 1999 (est.$2.5-3.5 million), via Christies.com
The 26-lot auction of work from the collection of entrepreneur and art collection Peter Norton is lead by a group of Takashi Murakami sculptures titled B in the Strange Forest (Blue DOB) that could fetch as much as $3.5 million. On Wednesday the artist will be hosting a charity auction at Christie’s, with all proceeds donated to the relief effort in Japan.
Clyfford Still, 1949-A-No. 1 1949, (est. $25-35 million), via Sothebys.com
Clyfford Still, 1947-Y-No. 2 1947, (est. $15-20 million), via Sothebys.com
The Sotheby’s sale on Wednesday evening features four Clyfford Still paintings from the collection of Patricia Still, the late artist’s widow. The group is led by 1949-A-No. 1, which carries an estimate of $25-35 million. The paintings are being sold to support the endowment of the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which will open on November 18, 2011.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Self Portrait, 1967 (est. $15-20 million), via Sothebys.com
Amongst the top lots at Sotheby’s is a fresh to market Francis Bacon triptych. Three Studies for a Self Portrait was exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London in shortly after it was painted 1967 and was acquired by the selling party later that year. It is estimated to bring $15-20 million.
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), 1964 (est. $8-12 million), via Sothebys.com
Follow Art Observed on Twitter for live tweeting of notable sales, and check back for results.
-J. Mizrachi
Related Links:
Phillips evening sale e-catalog [Phillips de Pury]
Phillips benefit auction e-catalog [Phillips de Pury]
Christie’s evening sale e-catalog [Christie's]
Works from the Peter Norton Collection sale at Christie’s e-catalog [Christie's]
Sotheby’s evening sale e-catalog [Sotheby's]
November 10th, 2011 at 5:38 am
I CAN SEE THE WHOLE ROOM… AND THERE’S NOBODY IN IT !
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deconstructing-roy-lichtenstein/6259392311/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deconstructing-roy-lichtenstein/46915622/in/photostream
~ Artist William Overgard’s Original Art ~
COPIED BY ROY LICHTENSTEIN IN 1961
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein
David Barsalou MFA
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deconstructing-roy-lichtenstein/
November 27th, 2011 at 12:54 am
ARTINFO
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Published: November 17, 2011
Connecting the Dots Between the Record $43 Million Lichtenstein and the $431 Comic Strip It Was Copied From
By Judd Tully
It is widely known that the late, great Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein sourced much of his imagery from comic books and newspaper comic sections of yore, tweaking the scale to create the boldly painted compositions that made him world famous. But rarely do the collectors who pay millions for his paintings spare a thought for the Ben-Day artists who inspired his work.
This was likely the case last week at Christie’s when Lichtenstein’s classic bubble-captioned painting “I Can See The Whole Room!… And There’s Nobody In It!” sold for an artist-record $43,202,500 to New York private dealer Guy Bennett. The cover lot last sold at auction at the same house, also as the cover lot, in November 1988 for a then-dazzling $2,090,000 (est. $800,000-1.2 million), part of the fabled Tremaine Collection. The Connecticut-based Burton and Emily Tremaine, for their part, had acquired the work from the Leo Castelli Gallery in November 1961 — the year it was painted — for a discounted price of $450, according to gallery records provided by Barbara Castelli, the late dealer’s widow who continues to run the gallery.
Christie’s academically styled catalogue entry included a reproduction of the source image for the painting, culled from an August 6, 1961, panel of Saunders & Overgard’s syndicated comic “Steve Roper.” Apart from the word “Trooper!”, which began the bubble caption in the original, the text and image are virtually identical. Of course, the newspaper strip was black and white, and Lichtenstein added a yellow background to further dramatize the blown-up, sharply chiseled male visage staring through the peephole.
But there’s more to the story than a polite footnote about the Steve Roper source material.
In 1963 the painting was exhibited in the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition “Six Painters and the Object.” Lichtenstein, then 39, had just been featured in a splashy Time magazine piece about the new Pop art craze, which included a comment about his use of real comic strips as models: “there is enough change so that he can claim to impose his own order on them.” A published letter to the editor by William Overgard, the then-36-year-old cartoonist and creator of the original drawing, followed.
“Sir: As a cartoonist, I was interested in Roy Lichtenstein’s comments on comic strips in your article on pop art,” went the letter. “Though he may not, as he says, copy them exactly, Lichtenstein in his painting currently being shown at the Guggenheim comes pretty close to the last panel of my Steve Roper Sunday page of August 6, 1961. Very flattering… I think?”
Overgard, the son of a silent movie star and a published author and screenwriter in the science fiction and horror film realm, died in 1990 at his 17-acre farm in Stony Point, New York. You might say Overgard had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame, but there’s also more to his legacy than that.
The cartoon artist was tracked and rediscovered in part by David Barsalou, the creator of the Web site Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, a three-decade endeavor to track down the original cartoons that the Pop art icon supped on.
“A lot of these major collectors, they want a Lichteinstein, which is fine,” Barsalou said in a phone interview, “but the whole premise of Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein over the years is just to bring recognition to the original comic art that Lichtenstein copied.”
“If these collectors understood the intrinsic value of original comic art they’d be grabbing all of that stuff because its at bargain prices right now,” continued Barsalou, who studied Pop art as a student in the late ‘70s at the Hartford Art School. “Sooner or later the art world is going to catch up to it.”
Barsalou has his own auction story to tell, in fact, tying the frayed thread between Overgard and Lichtenstein. Last August, the cartoon aficionado found the original Overgard panel on eBay and outdueled four other remote bidders to snag the prize for $431. Overgard had donated his 3,000-plus cartoon archive to the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University, but that panel is not part of that protected trove.
“To me,” said Barsalou, “it was the steal of the century.”
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/750696/connecting-the-dots-between-the-record-43-million-lichtenstein-and-the-431-comic-strip-it-was-copied-from