AO Onsite Auction Results – New York: Contemporary Art Evening Sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s Bring in Over $550M, Several Artist Records Set
November 10th, 2011
Clyfford Still, 1949-A-No. 1, 1949 (est. $25-35 million, realized $61.6 million), via Sothebys.com
The evening sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week left little doubt about the appetite for, and willingness to spend on, Contemporary art, regardless of how the financial markets may be performing. Tuesday’s sale at Christie’s brought in $248 million for 82 of 91 lots sold, and Sotheby’s auction the following evening realized $316 million against a high estimate of $270 million. Several artists records were set over the two nights, including those for the painters of each sale’s top lot – Clyfford Still and Roy Lichtenstein.
Paul McCarthy, Tomato Head, 1994 (est. $1-1.5 million, realized $4.5 million), via Christies.com
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook), 1985 (est. $250,000-350,000, realized $902,500), via Christies.com
Christie’s had reason to be anxious after their Impressionist and Modern art sale last week, which failed to reach its low estimate by a whopping $70 million. The first 26 lots of the auction house’s marathon sale came from the collection of Peter Norton, who amassed a fortune from selling the software that bears his name. Norton is a highly esteemed collector of Contemporary art and, since 1988, has commissioned one artist a year to create a (limited edition) gift that the entrepreneur gives to a few thousand of his closest friends each year. The provenance helped boost the Norton offerings, which sold 100% by lot and brought in $26.8 million against a high estimate of $16 million. Records for nine artists were set during that portion of the sale alone, including Paul McCarthy, whose Tomato Head led the group and brought in $4.5 million against estimates of $1-1.5 million. Records were also set for Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Mona Hatoum, Sophie Calle, Charles Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Christian Marclay, and Fred Tomaselli.
Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole Room!…and There’s Nobody in it!, 1961 (est. $35-45 million, realized $43.2 million), via Christies.com
The Contemporary art evening auction immediately followed the Norton sale and was headlined by a 1961 Roy Lichtenstein that eclipsed the artist’s record set at the equivalent sale at Christie’s last year, when Ohhh…Alright… sold for $42.6 million. I Can See the Whole Room!…and There’s Nobody in it! carried estimates of $35-45 million and fetched $43.2 million.
Louis Bourgeois, Spider, 1996 (est. $4-6 million, realized $10.7 million), via Christies.com
The Christie’s sale saw strong prices for works by female artists. Louis Bourgeois‘ monumental Spider leapt past its $6 million estimate when it sold for $10.7 million and set the artist’s auction record. The price is amongst the highest ever paid for a work by a woman artist at auction.
Andreas Gursky, Rhein II, 1999 (est. $2.5-3.5 million, realized $4.3 million), via Christies.com
The auction record was also set for Andreas Gursky with his placid Rhein II. The $4.3 million paid for the picture also represents the highest sum ever paid for a photograph at auction. Cindy Sherman held the record since last May, when a self portrait sold at Christie’s for $3.9 million.
Clyfford Still, 1947-Y-No. 2, 1947 (est. $15-20 million, realized $31.4 million), via Sothebys.com
Clyfford Still PH-1033 1976 (est. $10-15 million, realized $19.9 million), via Sothebys.com
The Contemporary sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening was boosted by four Clyfford Still paintings. The works were left to the City of Denver by the artist’s widow, who died in 2005. A rare sight on the art market, the paintings were being sold by the city to further the endowment of the new Clyfford Still Museum, which opens in Denver next week. The group contributed $114 million to the sale’s $316 million total and were led by a red and black canvas that sold for $61.6 million – almost twice its high estimate. A later Still, titled PH-1033, sold for $19.9 million reportedly to the same buyer of the $61.6 million work.
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1997 (est. $9-12 million, realized $20.8 million), via Sothebys.com
Gerhard Richter, Gudrun, 1987 (est. $5.5-7.5 million, realized $18 million), via Sothebys.com
Buyers could not get enough of abstract works by Gerhard Richter, whose retrospective is currently on view at Tate Modern in London. A rose colored canvas set the record for the artist when it sold for $20.8 million, or $8 million above its high estimate. Similarly, Gudrun , of 1987 sold for $18 million against a high estimate of $7.5 million.
Cady Noland, Oozewald, 1989 (est. $2-3 million, realized $6.6 million), via Sothebys.com
In addition to the records set for Still and Richter, the Sotheby’s sale also saw new records for Cady Noland, Joan Mitchell, Dan Flavin, Albert Oehlen, and David Hammons.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, c. 1960 (est. $4-6 million, realized $9.3 million), via Sothebys.com
For those scrambling to find a safe place for their fortunes amid global economic turmoil, this week’s auctions seem to offer a sound bit of advice: Buy art.
-J. Mizrachi
Related Links:
Christie’s Norton sale results [Christie's]
Christie’s evening sale resluts [Christie's]
Sotheby’s evening sale results [Sotheby's]
As Stocks Fall, Art Surges At a $315.8 Million Sale [NYT]
Day in the Sun for Postwar and Contemporary Art [NYT]
Sotheby’s Sells Group of Clyfford Still Paintings for $114 Million [WSJ]
Irascibility Pays Off as Clyfford Still Leads Sotheby’s to a White-Hot $316 Million Postwar Art Sale [Artinfo]
Leonardo DiCaprio Watched as Christie’s Stellar $248 Million Contemporary Art Sale Set Record After Record [Artinfo]
November 12th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
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 12:43 am
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