Last week, ARTINFO.com ran the first installment of Art+Auction's November auction preview coverage, with the November Impressionist & Modern Art sales at Christie's and Sotheby's. The second installment, covering this week's Contemporary Art sales at Phillips, Christie's, and Sotheby's, is below. To read the earlier article, click here.
November 11, Phillips, Contemporary Art
Phillips winds down the week with Jeff Koons’s stellar 66-inch-tall polychromed carved-wood sculpture Buster Keaton, 1988, featuring the silent-movie star astride a horse (est. $4–6 million). The American collector consigning the piece acquired it 1989. Another one of the edition of three sold from the Gagosian stand at Art Basel Miami Beach last December for more than $5 million. “Top-level collectors are participating on both ends, buying and selling,” says Zach Miner, Phillips’s New York evening sales head, “so we’re looking forward to an extremely strong November.”
November 12, Christie’s, Postwar & Contemporary Art
Jeff Koons’s large-scale Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994–2000 (est. $35–55 million), leads a number of high-value works in this sale. While the estimate may seem astronomical, it reflects the fact that a less famous chromatic Koons, Tulips, from 1995– 2004, sold for a record $33.6 million at Christie’s New York in November 2012. The high-chromium stainless-steel sculpture with transparent color coating is one of just five in different metallic monochromes; the other four are owned by Dakis Joannou, François Pinault, Eli Broad, and Steven A. Cohen. The work, which Christie’s is pitching hard as a holy grail for collectors, authentically stands as one of the best works from Koons’s “Celebration” series. Other heavy-hitting lots include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled, 1982 (est. $25–35 million), a six-foot-tall self-portrait in acrylic and oil stick on wood, in which the artist simultaneously depicted himself as a crowned king, skeleton, and boxer. Another Basquiat, Untitled (Head of Madman), also from 1982, a work on paper laid down on panel, depicts a large head in red and blue with wild-looking eyes; it measures 40 by 30 inches and carries an estimate of $7 million to $9 million. Also geared for success on the auction block is Andy Warhol’s late mammoth silkscreen and acrylic on canvas, Mercedes-Benz W 196 Grand Prix Car (Streamlined Version), 1954, from 1986 (est. $12–16 million), commissioned by Daimler to celebrate the auto company’s 1986 centenary. Christie’s is additionally offering a rare cadmium-red early Donald Judd sculpture, Untitled (DSS 42), 1963, a stunning wall-mounted work, part fabricated and part hand-painted in galvanized iron, wood, and aluminum (est. $10–15 million). “We’ve been able to get some really fantastic things, and with really high values,” says Robert Manley, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. Referring to last May’s record-breaking $495 million contemporary evening sale, Manley adds, “We have a chance to give that $500 million mark a run for its money.”
November 13, Sotheby’s, Contemporary Art
This evening sale offers a controversial consignment of paintings and sculpture from the Dia Art Foundation that are being sold to establish an acquisition fund for the storied organization, which specializes in in-depth, single-artist presentations. In that spirit, Cy Twombly’s bravado suite of 24 drawings, Poems to the Sea, 1959 (est. $6–8 million), created during and after a two-month idyll in a tiny, whitewashed Saracen fishing village south of Rome, is a bona fide market standout. Also from Dia, key and early works by John Chamberlain head to the auction block, including Shortstop, 1958, the first of his sculptures to feature crushed automobile parts, this one sourced from a junked and rusted 1929 Ford paddy wagon (est. $1.5–2 million), and Candy Andy, 1963, a rambunctious and wildly colored welded-steel work (est. $2–3 million). Dia has tacked on Barnett Newman’s early, landscape motif– influenced, Ab-Ex–era painting Genesis— The Break, 1946, an oil on canvas measuring 24 by 27 inches (est. $3.5–4.5 million). “It’s a very meaty and solid sale of things that will not be hard to sell,” says Tobias Meyer, who also notes, ”It’s very hard today to really place a value on works. It just depends on one or two players who are either there or not there. We know the market is incredibly strong.” Sotheby’s is also offering a trio of Andy Warhol works, led by Liz #I (Early Colored Liz), 1963, a stunning variant of the 40-by-40-inch series with its striking yellow background. Estimated at $20 million to $30 million, it has been on long-term loan at the Baltimore Art Museum, a good resting place before heading to market. On the disaster-painting front is Warhol’s 5 Deaths on Turquoise, 1963 (est. $7–9 million), one of 11 versions of the upside-down car crash in the single-format style, formerly in the Sonnabend collection. Rounding out the three is Warhol’s less jarring Five-Foot Flowers, 1964 (est. $10–15 million). The house will also auction an evocative political work, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Yellow Tar and Feathers), 1982 (est. $15– 20 million), being sold by longtime owners Ivan and Zoya Gerhath.
This article appears in the "On the Block" feature of Art+Auction's November 2013 issue.
Watch ARTINFO video preview of Sotheby's Contemporary Sale HERE.
To see images, click on the slideshow.
