David Nahmad gives a rare interview this week with the New York Times, insisting that the disputed Modigliani work in his collection is not Nazi war loot. “Looted art, hidden art — they made me look like a crook instead of doing real battle in the court,” he said. (more…)
Sotheby’s has added a $40 million Amedeo Modigliani to its upcoming Impressionist and Modern sale this month in London. The work is a portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, the artist’s lover during his last years, who committed suicide after his death. (more…)
The leaked documents of Mossack Fonseca may help in identifying the buyer of a $17 million Modigliani, a work seized by Nazis during WWII and under request for return by a Paris art dealer’s estate. The company holding the work has been shown to be owned by the Nahmad family. “The main thing is what are the issues in the case, and can the plaintiff prove them?” says lawyer Richard Golub, who represents David Nahmad. (more…)
The New York Times interviews collector and billionaire Liu Yiqian, the buyer of the Amedeo Modigliani that smashed records this past month to become one of the most expensive works sold at auction for $170 million. “I was on the phone with a girl from Christie’s Hong Kong who was bidding on my behalf, and she kept dropping the phone because she was so nervous,” Mr. Liu he says. “I told her, ‘Why are you so nervous? I’m the one paying, and I’m not even nervous. Just buy it.’  ” (more…)
Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché sells at Christie’s, via Rae Wang for Art Observed
Dashing through a 34-lot auction in style, Christie’s has entered the November auction week in impressive style, bringing a flurry of sales during its curated “The Artist’s Muse” auction tonight that saw several world records fall, and achieved an impressive tally of over $491 million for the evening, especially considering the 10 lots that failed to sell.
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (1917-18), via Christie’s (more…)
Christie’s has announced an ambitious follow-up to its successes earlier this year with another full week of auction sales this November in New York. At the top of the sales will be an Amedeo Modigliani painting estimated at around $100 million, a price that would easily top the artist’s $70 million record. “This is quite simply one of the most important paintings I have handled in my long career at Christie’s,” states Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s Global President and Chief Auctioneer. “There are a very small number of masterpieces that we dream of handling: this magnificent Modigliani has always been one of them.” (more…)
An Amedeo Modigliani portrait of the artist’s common-law wife may command up to $35.5 million at auction next month in London. The 1919 painting of the artist’s common-law wife, titled Jeanne Hebuterne (au Chapeau), is part of a 78-lot auction of Impressionist and Surrealist works by Christie’s International, and also includes works by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró. The total sale is valued at $237 million, and will take place on February 6th.
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Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror, 1941 (est. $4-6 million, realized $16.3 million), via Christies.com
Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art on Tuesday night brought in $140 million against presale estimates of $210-300 million. Four of the top 5 most valuable lots failed to sell, including the auction’s cover lot – a Degas ballerina sculpture with a presale estimate of $25-35 million. The Degas had been shopped around privately with no luck and carried what many believed to be a very aggressive estimate. The auction house cited those two facts to explain that lot’s failure, as well as the overall performance of the sale. In general, fresh to market material faired best, and hefty presale estimates deterred bidding on the priciest works. What turned out to be the evening’s top lot – Max Ernest‘s The Stolen Mirror – was both fresh to market and carried an estimate in line with the artist’s records and with heightened interest in Surrealist material over the past few auction cycles. The canvas set the record for the artist at auction when it sold for $16.3 million against a high estimate of $6 million. The previous record was set this past June at Christie’s London with a 1923 work that brought $4.4 million.
Suspect may have panicked and trashed 5 stolen masterworks following “one of the biggest art heists ever” in Paris last May. The works stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne were Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso, Pastoral by Henri Matisse, Olive Tree near l’Estaque by Georges Braque, Still Life with Candlestick by Fernand Leger and Woman with Fan by Amedeo Modigliani. [AO Newslink]
Marc Chagall, “To My Betrothed” (1913), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. All pictures by Art Observed.
Art Observed was at PMA’s newest show, a celebration of Marc Chagall and his Paris contemporaries. The show encompasses 70 works in various media, including paint, sculpture, and paper, by the emigré artists of Paris. Here are masterpieces by Modigliani, Kisling, Lipchitz, and Soutine, all set against and borne of La Ruche, a jumble of art studios in this early 20th-century community. As he did with the museum’s gorgeous Picasso show last year, PMA curator Michael Taylor recreates an artists’ colony, a whiff of nostalgia threaded throughout its galleries.
Detail, Marc Chagall’s “Paris through the Window” (1913) at Philadelphia Museum of Art.
More images, story, and relevant links after the jump…
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Assis Sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine), 1917 (est. $40 million, realized $68.9 million), via Sothebys.com
The fall auction season in New York kicked off on Tuesday evening with Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern sale. The 61-lot auction carried a presale estimate of $195-266 million and realized $227,561,000. Just four lots accounted for more than half of the evening’s earnings, while 15 lots were bought in. Amedeo Modigliani‘s Nu Assis Sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine) was the top lot, bringing in a staggering $68.9 million and setting the record for a work by the artist at auction.
Aristide Maillol, Torse de L’Action Enchainée, 1861-1944, at auction (est. $500-$700 thousand, realized 2.9 million), via Art Observed
More results and images after the jump…
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Assis Sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine), 1917 (est. $40 million), via Sothebys.com
Sotheby’s and Christie’s will both hold Impressionist and Modern sales in New York during the first week of November. Sotheby’s will offer 61 lots during the Evening Sale on November 2nd, with Christie’s Evening Sale following on the 3rd. The latter is comprised of 85 lots, and is expected to bring at least $200 million.
More text and images after the jump…
La femme a l’eventail (Lady with fan), Amedeo Modigliani
During the early hours of the morning on Thursday, May 20, five paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger were stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art (MAM – Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris). CCTV caught a single masked intruder entering the museum by a window, removing the works from their frames and then leaving with the loot, all in under fifteen minutes. The stolen works are Henri Matisse’s La Pastorale, Georges Braque’s L’olivier pres de l’Estaque, Amedeo Modigliani’s Woman with a Fan; Fernand Leger’s Still Life with Chandeliers; and Pablo Picasso’s Le pigeon aux petits-pois (The Pigeon with the Peas) – an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting that is estimated to be worth €23 million alone. Various reports have valued the missing works at anywhere from €100 million to €500 million ($126–635 million) – dealers and officials are currently debating the price of the works that had long been held in the public trust. This morning, embarrassed officials at the City Hall in Paris outlined a number of significant security blunders that made pulling off “one of the biggest thefts in art history” as simple as removing a reinforced window. The City Hall officials, who were officially in charge of the permanent collection, admitted that a partial malfunction of its alarm system had been reported on March 30, at which point it was shutdown without repair. Furthermore, Paris prosecutors confirmed that the entire theft was captured on film, but security guards have told police that they ‘saw nothing’, prompting investigators to believe they had been asleep. Ordering an ‘internal administrative inquiry’, the city’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, told the UK’s Daily Mail that ‘all have questions to answer.’
Police officers search for clues on the frames of the stolen paintings outside the Paris Museum of Modern Art yesterday. Image via WSJ
More images and a full round-up of links after the jump….
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Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
The spring auctions in New York, which form the bellwether of the art market, get under way tonight with the Impressionist and modern art sale at Christie’s. Over the next two weeks, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury & Co are offering up to $1.2 billion of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art – twice as much as they sold last May. During the Impressionist and modern evening sales in May 2009 only three works carried price tags of $10 million or more – this month 10 works by Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and others are priced as high. Another six works are expected to fetch at least $5 million, up from four a year ago. Judging by these optimistic pre-sale estimates, the auction houses clearly hope that things will play out as they did three months ago in London when Sotheby’s set the record for any work of art ever sold at auction with the $104 million sale of Alberto Giacometti’s L’Homme qui marche I to Lily Safra, wife of the late Lebanese banker Edmond Safra. Now a Pablo Picasso nude bears the largest pre-sale estimate in history ($70m to $90m) and an anonymous third-guarantor who has agreed to bid at least $70 million (that’s more than the auction house got last fall for its entire evening sale of Impressionist and modern art). Christie’s are set to dominate the fortnight because of two art-stocked estates. Tonight, paintings and sculptures owned by the late Los Angeles collector Frances Brody are expected to fetch as much as $194 million. 98 lots from the estate of the bestselling author and filmmaker, Michael Crichton, are estimated to sell for as much as $75 million and form the backbone of their Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Tuesday, May 11.
More images, text and related links after the jump…. (more…)
Currently on view at Sotheby’s New York for the first time and for a short time only is a selection of works from the collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen. The exhibition consists of twenty pieces by masters of the modern period, such as Picasso, de Kooning and Warhol, and leading contemporary artists, dealing with women as subject matter. Other artists represented in Women are: Edvard Munch, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani. Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Lucian Freud, Richard Prince, Marlene Dumas and Lisa Yuskavage.
Sotheby’s New York
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Women: A Loan Exhibition from the Collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen
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1334 York Ave, New York,
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10th floor
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April 2 – April 14, 2009
RELATED LINKS
Exhibition Page and Press Release [Sotheby’s]
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NY Times Carol Vogel Previews the Exhibition [New York Times]
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Steven Cohen’s Rise as a Collector [The Independent]
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MAO Critiquing Cohen’s Motives [MAO]
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NY Mag Examines Cohen’s Motives [New York Magazine]
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The Exhibition in the Light of the Art Market [Wealth Bulletin]
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Speculations on the Exhibition [ArtForum]
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Speculations on the Exhibition II [ArtInfo]
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Speculations on Cohen’s Motives [Bloomberg]
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Exploring Cohen’s Motives [Luxist]
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Preview of the Exhibition [Bloomberg]
Dans la prairie (1876) by Claude Monet; Sold for £11,241,250 ($16,104,942), against estimates of around £15 million. Image via Artnet.
“It was a great sale and brought back a lot of confidence to the market.” Leon Benrimon, in remarks to ArtInfo.
Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, held February 4th, has been hailed by some as a confidence-building event which demonstrated that there is some vitality left in the art market, while others give credit for the auctions ostensible success to high quality pieces (often being auctioned for the first time in decades), along with low estimates and low expectations. The auction realized a total of £63.4 million or $91.2 million, well within its range of £58.8 million to £86 million. In the course of the evening, 39 of 47 lots were sold, with 4 lots sold for over £5 million, 16 for over £1 million, and 25 for over $1 million. According to Christie’s, 54% of the works were bought by European bidders, 26% from the U.S., 18% from the U.K. and 2 percent from Asia.
Dans la prairie, by Claude Monet, was the highest priced lot of the night despite falling below its expected range. The painting, which was exhibited for the first time at 1877’s seminal Impressionist Exhibition, sold for £11.2 million, or $16.1 million–while the range for the painting was unpublished, it is thought to be somewhere in the £15 million range. Dans la prairie‘s subject is Monet’s wife, Camille, reading in a meadow in Argenteuil, a few kilometers north of Paris. It was bought in a single telephone bid made by Anika Guntrum, a Paris-based Christie’s specialist, on behalf of an anonymous buyer.
Monet oil tests art market [GuardianUK]
Monet Painting of Wife Sells for 11.2 Million Pounds [Bloomberg]
Monet painting sells for £11.2 million, £4 million below estimate [Telegraph UK]
Monet, Modigliani, Low Estimates Boost Christie’s London Sale [Bloomberg]
Impressionist and Modern sale nets £63.42 million at Christie’s [IHT]
Christie’s “Brings Back Confidence” [ArtInfo]
Claude Monet’s Dans la Prairie Sells for $16,164,918 at Christie’s Auction of Impressionist and Modern Art [ArtDaily]
On Wednesday November 5th, Christie’s conducted its sale of the estates of two separate widows (the Alice Lawrence and Hillman family collections) bearing similar works of mostly late 19th and early to mid-20th century pieces, in an auction thus titled “The Modern Age.” These auctions included works by headliners such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Mark Rothko, Fernand Léger, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio De Chirico and René Magritte. The event followed the latest Sotheby’s auction for Impressionist and Modern art on Monday (as covered by AO here) which disappointedly totaled $223.8 million against the $338 million low estimate. Additionally, the Modern Age sale corresponded to a particularly steep post-presidential race drop in the public equity markets in which the Dow plunged 486 points.
The auction results were no surprise considering the current tepid environment in the art market: The two collections listed 58 lots, of which 17 did not sell, for a total sale of $47 million, which was less than half of its $104 million low estimate. Christie’s said 51% of buyers were American and 29% European. Though Surrealist lots by Magritte (see image above) and De Chirico (see below) did well, of the lots that were brought in were the most expensive of the sale, notably, Manet’s “Fillette sur un banc/Girl on a Bench,” a 1880 portrait of a girl with a wide-brim hat estimated at $12-18 million (see image below), and Rothko’s “No. 43 (Mauve),” estimated at $20-30 million. Other works by Cézanne, Renoir, and de Kooning also failed to sell.
Bleak Night at Christie’s, in Both Sales and Prices [NY Times]
Art-Market Rout Persists: Rothko Snubbed at Auction [Bloomberg]
Buyers Cool to Private-Collection Art at Christies [Reuters]
Market Forces Bring Fire-Sale Prices for Christie’s “Modern Age” [Art Info]
The Modern Age: Property from the Hillman Family Collection [Art Daily]
Christie’s Wan and Woeful Night [CultureGrrl]
Christie’s Website
more auction results, quotes and images after the jump…
Kazimir Malevich’s 1916 painting Suprematist Composition sold for $60 million via International Herald Tribune.
The results of the Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and Modern Art auction Monday night were overall dissapointing, despite some noteworthy lot results of works by Malevich, Degas and Munch. Fears of an art-market meltdown have been fueled by recent lukewarm results at London’s Frieze art fair and the abrupt pulling from the auction of the 1909 Picasso that was expected to sell for over $30 million. While the Sotheby’s evening total on Monday stood at 45 works sold for $223.8 million, it was well below its initial estimates of $337 million to $476 million, which were set over the summer before the financial crisis. The sale was the lowest for an Impressionist evening sale at Sotheby’s since May 2001. David Norman, an executive vice-president at Sotheby’s was quoted by the Guardian as saying “Anyone would expect people to be more circumspect in this environment. We’re selling in a very uncertain world.”
Auction Season Opens With Little Enthusiasm [NY Times]
Art Market `Corrects’ as Lots Go Unsold at Sotheby’s [Bloomberg]
Three Big Lots Pace Respectable Showing at Sotheby’s [ArtInfo]
New York sales hit record highs amid signs that the art market is dropping [Guardian UK]
Work by Kazimir Malevich sold for record $60 million [International Herald Tribune]
Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition Sets Record at Sotheby’s Sale [Art Daily]
Opening of Fall Art-Auction Season Marked by Crappy Sales, Great Deals [NYMag]
Flat result at NY season’s first art auction [Reuters]
Munch artwork fetches record $38m [BBC]
more results and pictures after the jump…
Danseuse au Repos, the 1879 painting by Edgar Degas is a highlight of this evening’s Sotheby’s auction though it remains to be seen if it will sell for its estimated $40 million, via NY Times
After extremely high sales in May which tallied $1.56 billion, and then more recently lackluster sales in London which missed low estimates by up to $40 million, as covered by Art Observed here, the art world is up for a major test in the next two weeks as Sotheby’s and Christie’s begin tonight selling contemporary, impressionist, and modern works that add up to high estimates of $1.76 billion, including a work by the Russian Kazimir Malevich (“Suprematist Composition” 1916, a $60 million geometric work) and a $40 million self-portrait by Francis Bacon and other works from high profile financiers Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. co-founder Henry Kravis and Lehman Brothers Chief Executive Officer Fuld.
Despite Pablo Picasso’s 1909 painting ‘Arlequin’ (which was estimated at $30 million) being pulled before the Sotheby’s auction recently, this evening’s Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art sale is slated to tally about $320 million and includes 71 lots including “Danseuse au repos” by French Impressionist Edgard Degas which is expected to go for $40 million (pictured above).
This auction will be followed by Christie’s $153 million high estimate November 5th sale which includes works from the estates of the widows, Rita Hillman and Alice Lawrence, and then a November 6th sale, comprised of art from various owners, estimated to total up to $344 million. Sotheby’s November 11th sale of contemporary art could total up to $281.6 million and features works by John Currin, Richard Prince, and Yves Klein. Following that is Christie’s November 12th sale with a high estimate of $321.7 million, featuring Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich’s Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of a boxer at an estimate of $12 million.
On Auctions Overall:
Big Prices, Big Risks at Fall Art Auctions [NY Times]
NY art auctions under microscope amid financial crisis [AFP]
Art world dreading declines at upcoming key NY sales [Reuters]
Kravis, Fuld Brace for N.Y. Auctions as Collectors Lower Prices [Bloomberg]
Falling under the hammer [Financial Times]
It’s not a pretty picture Christie’s, Sotheby’s may be on the hook [New York Post]
Art sales face acid test in midst of credit crunch [Financial Times]
Exceptional Work by Francis Bacon Leads Christie’s New York Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale [ArtDaily]
Things Are Cold, Clammy at City Auction Houses [NYObserver]
From ArtObserved:
Metallica’s drummer to sell Basquiat painting at Christie’s New York, November 12th auction; ‘Boxer’ to be displayed during Frieze Art Fair in London [ArtObserved]
Sotheby’s hopes to smash Russian art at auction record with $60 million sale of Malevich painting in New York on November 3rd [ArtObserved]
On withdrawn Picasso:
Picasso work withdrawn from Sotheby’s sale [Reuters]
Picasso painting pulled from sale [BBC News]
Picasso Work Is Withdrawn From Sotheby’s Sale [NY Times]
Sotheby’s Withdraws Picasso’s Arlequin From Impressionist and Modern Art Sale [Art Daily]
Picasso Withdrawn From Sotheby’s Imp-Mod Sale [Artinfo]
Picasso painting withdrawn from Sotheby’s auction [Associated Press]
Auction Information:
Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale – Sotheby’s November 3 [Sotheby’s]
Christie’s Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale November 5th [Christie’s]
more pictures from the Sotheby’s Sale and other auctions after the jump…
