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In This Issue
But first: Marlborough’s last drag; The Teflon Whitney; Pinault palace intrigue; Are Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac Heads one of the world’s most viewed contemporary artworks? Big Halsey Biennale energy:
Takako Yamaguchi’s Whitney Lift Loses Altitude: The artist’s market struggled in Hong Kong
Howard Rachofsky’s $20m Fontana Space Egg to Sell at Sotheby’s: The Dallas collector will sell his record-setting Fontana in May
Chardin Leave: France Says They’ll Let This One Go: The Rothschilds will sell one of the last Charding still lifes in private hands
Results: Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern & Contemporary Art = $108m
But first …
Marlborough’s last drag: Marlborough Fine Art, which was founded by Austrian émigré Frank Lloyd and became the gallery of Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, and many American abstract expressionists, is closing. The real estate will be sold and the gallery inventory disposed of. Of course, Marlborough’s reputation was damaged during the ’70s after a court case brought by Rothko’s children revealed self-dealing by the gallery and executors of the artist’s estate. Lloyd, himself, would eventually go to prison for tampering with documents presented in the case. Four years ago, the gallery went through turmoil again when Pierre and Max Levai, Lloyd’s relatives, were sued by the gallery’s board. The most interesting question following the decision is what remains in the gallery’s inventory and whether there is any demand for the work.
The Teflon Whitney: In an era when few cultural institutions escape scrutiny for their personnel practices, the Whitney museum has thoroughly changed its leadership—promoting internal candidates to every position from the museum’s director to its chief curator and C.O.O.—without a peep from the mainstream press, the art press, or various vocal interest groups. Scott Rothkopf was named director without a search committee or any indication that another candidate was considered by the board.
The Whitney has cannily played to previous critics by having Kim Conaty, the new chief curator filling Rothkopf’s shoes, emphasize that she “plans to focus on Latino and Indigenous artists, who remain underrepresented in the Whitney’s collection,” according to The New York Times. But Rothkopf’s previous achievements—especially the 2014 Jeff Koons retrospective that closed the Whitney’s residency in the Breuer building, a monumental Jasper Johns retrospective that mirrored a companion show in Philadelphia (while unintentionally exposing the museum’s weakness in pandering to its patrons), and the upcoming 2026 Roy Lichtenstein retrospective—would normally draw vitriol from the same critics who forced Warren Kanders to resign from the Whitney’s board because his company produced tear gas. At the very least, it would appear that Rothkopf has pulled off a quiet publicity coup.
Pinault palace intrigue: It’s hard to tell if Bloomberg is having fun with us or just got a little too excited when its reporters discovered that 26-year-old François Louis Nicolas Pinault had replaced his grandfather—the formal and fearsome Monsieur Pinault who first took Christie’s private in 1998 as a white knight after a failed takeover bid by SBC Warburg Dillon Read—on Christie’s board. Bloomberg’s headline declared that the appointment “reveals succession path at Christie’s,” as if the younger Pinault would be moving toward an executive role at the auction house. Aside from the fact that no one learns to run a business from a board seat, the news was especially interesting to the art trade, which has warily watched Patrick Drahi place his 29-year-old son, Nathan, on a path to run Sotheby’s by giving him the reins in Asia. The results have been mixed.
Are Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac Heads one of the world’s most viewed contemporary artworks?: In 2009, a pair of the 12 famous zodiac head sculptures looted from the Beijing Summer Palace were at the center of an international incident when the Chinese government objected to their sale from Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s art collection. Christie’s eventually donated the two heads to the Chinese government as a goodwill gesture, but not before Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei created his riff on the 12 statutes, which originally formed a clock in the gardens of the palace. Because the two works were cast in a larger bronze version (in an edition of eight) and a smaller gold version (in an edition of 12), the work has proliferated to an astonishing 53 different venues, and still counting, around the globe. One set was donated to LACMA, where it will be on permanent display in the museum’s garden. Others were on temporary display at both remote venues—like the Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine, or Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire—and prestigious museums like Cleveland’s encyclopedic museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Big Halsey Biennale energy: On the eve of her inclusion in the Venice Biennale’s main event exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, Lauren Halsey gets a profile in GQ. Jasmine Sanders, the writer, tries to explain the puzzle of Halsey’s hyper-specific art and how it also functions as a counternarrative to misrepresentations of both South Central Los Angeles and the Black urban experience. “Her focus on granular family experiences, is what she calls a ‘B-side’ to the pervading narratives about her hometown. For Halsey, her family is not just the subject of her art, her family is the art.”
Takako Yamaguchi’s Whitney Lift Loses Altitude
Sotheby’s Hong Kong evening sale of Modern & Contemporary art gave us a chance to check in on the market progress of Takako Yamaguchi, the Los Angeles artist whose work is featured in the current Whitney biennial. It’s not uncommon for that exhibition to boost an artist’s market, but Sotheby’s didn’t wait around for that to happen. In March, Sotheby’s featured Yamaguchi’s 1994 work Catherine and Midnight as the first lot in its London evening sale. Estimated at £400,000 and backed by an “irrevocable bid,” the work sold at almost twice that, eventually making for £889,000 with fees, or $1.1 million.
That’s extraordinary considering the artist has had a long career without previously appearing on the auction market. In fact, Sotheby’s had a false start a week before the successful sale, when another Yamaguchi work from 2003 was withdrawn from Sotheby’s New York Contemporary Curated sale. Yamaguchi is represented by Ortuzar Projects, and Roberta Smith compared her work to elements of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Pelton in a brief review of the artist’s show there last year. But one successful sale, even a surprise million-dollar sale, does not make an artist’s market. There’s no telling who was bidding on the work or what their motives might have been; however, Friday’s auction in Hong Kong was a chance for Sotheby’s to establish a confirmation price—i.e., a sale after a new record that helps establish a new price structure for the artist.
The confirmation price is rarely at the same level as the record, but even a sale at half a new record price for a work of a different date, size, or image, can confirm that depth of demand for the artist. This is the way the market verifies a price. But in Hong Kong, 2003’s The Fire Next Time, which was estimated at the same level as the work withdrawn in New York, sold for HKD 2 million which works out to about $264,000. If you’re watching this market carefully, either as a holder of Yamaguchi’s work or looking to get in on the market momentum, these numbers suggest that Yamaguchi might become the next Salvo.
Howard Rachofsky’s $20m Fontana Space Egg to Sell at Sotheby’s
Dallas art collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky are selling their Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio, from 1964, which the couple bought at auction in 2003. Fontana has a broad market fueled by a large number of his immediately recognizable slash paintings, but the ovoid Fine di Dio works sit at the apex. “They looked for a long time to find the best one,” Sotheby’s David Galperin said of the Rachofsky’s search for a major work by Fontana in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “That pursuit is visible in the quality.” The Rachofskys paid a then-record $2.3 million for Fine di Dio. Sotheby’s announced late last week that the painting will be back on offer in May. The bright yellow work (one of only four yellow ones among the 38 Fontana made) will be sold with a $20 million estimate. That’s at least a 20-fold rise in value, a worthy gain for Rachofsky, who used to manage a hedge fund. Says Galperin, “There are Fine di Dios, and then there’s this one.”
This weekend, the Dallas Art Fair is in full swing, which might explain the timing of the announcement. It’s the 15th year that the fair has been held. Dallas is a not-so-stealth art center with a boisterous and sometimes competitive collecting community. This gestalt is on display at the Rachofskys’ Richard Meier-designed home, where they hold an annual amfAR fundraiser featuring an auction of work by emerging artists. The Rachofsky’s also collaborated to found The Warehouse to display the overflow of work that no longer fits in their home.
The couple support the Dallas Museum of Art, where they’ve pledged their collection with one proviso. They get to continue acquiring and selling works from their collection during their lifetimes. The Rachofskys sell art at auction more often than many realize, but it is usually done without their provenance broadcast in the sale. In recent years, they’ve sold works by Christina Quarles and Justin Caguiat. Their sales usually time the market exceptionally well.
Best known for his solid-colored canvases—often red or white but occasionally other colors—slashed vertically with anywhere from a single cut to a dozen or more, Fontana’s work is abstract, gnostic, and broadly appealing across cultures. He also produced a substantial body of work, which makes his art appealing in market terms. Between 2005 and Fontana’s market peak in 2015, more than a billion dollars was spent at auction on the Italian master’s art. Inspired by the first human attempts to conquer space travel, Fontana’s egg-shaped Fine di Dio works are viewed as the zenith of his vast body of work. The top five prices paid for Fontanas—all above $20 million—were for Fine di Dio works.
So much of his art has sold in recent years that market supply has faded. “The Fontana market has changed a lot in the last decade,” Galperin told me. In the last year or two, buyers have been actively searching for, and bidding up, a wider range of works than the more common slash paintings. Auction totals for Fontana have been way down since the last high-volume year of 2018, but last year they rose to a five-year high of $85 million. This is mostly due to the lack of high-value works on the market. The Fine di Dio works reached a peak price of $29 million nine years ago for one of the three other yellow paintings.
One of the axioms of the auction trade is that previous record-setting works often set new record prices when they return to the market, especially if the work in question has been in a noted collection for a significant period of time. This Fine di Dio ticks all of those boxes. Even though the market for high-value works has faded in the last 18 months, Sotheby’s seems to have found a work that could easily attract the very top collectors, who still have plenty of money to spend.
Chardin Leave: France Says They’ll Let This One Go
Two years ago, Kimbell Art Museum paid dearly for The Basket of Wild Strawberries, a still life by cult Old Master Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The painter’s otherworldly work is desperately sought after by museums like the Kimbell, but even though the Fort Worth museum was willing to bid the work to a final selling price twice the €12 million estimate—they still could not bring the object of their intense affection home.
As everyone in the art game knows, money only gets you so far. In this case, the Louvre used its right of preemption to raise the money to acquire Strawberries and add it to their hoard of 41 other Chardins. French citizens were so passionate about hanging on to the Chardin that 10,000 individuals helped raise €1.6 million to get to the magic number. The bulk of the funds came from LVMH, with another large chunk coming from the Société des Amis du Louvre.
Last week, Christie’s announced that another Chardin, one of the last works remaining in private hands, will be auctioned in Paris this June. Le melon entamé, painted in 1760, will carry an €8 million estimate. The rare oval work is another still life of fruit, but this one has been cleared for export—or, as Christie’s insists on putting it, “The painting is in free circulation, making it available to collectors worldwide.”
No one would blame the Kimbell if it viewed that statement with some skepticism. The wild strawberries came from the collection of Eudoxe Marcille, who died in 1890. The painting remained with his descendants until it was sold at Artcurial in 2022. Marcille’s father had been a pioneering collector of 18th century art who led the rediscovery of Chardin in the early 19th century. Le melon entamé was also in Marcille’s collection, but it had been bequeathed to Eudoxe’s brother Camille, who died 15 years before Eudoxe. At that point, in 1875, a branch of the Rothschild family bought the still life. Their descendants are selling. Three years ago, the Dutch Rijksmuseum bought Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer from another branch of the Rothschilds for €175 million.
Results
Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern & Contemporary Art = $108m
The Contemporary art market continues to fall like a knife. Most buyers are choosing to step aside instead of trying to catch it. Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern & Contemporary art sales were heavily managed to $108 million in total sales. The house aggressively removed 11 lots before the sale with a presale estimate of HKD 82.5 million, or more than $10 million. That’s a bit above 10 percent of the presale estimated value removed to protect the lots for future sale and project confidence to clients. The hammer ratio (the aggregate hammer price of all lots before fees, divided by the aggregate presale estimates minus withdrawn lots) was a weak but almost respectable .96. Add the withdrawn lots back in and the hammer ratio fell to .86, which is a number that tells us the estimates for the sale were still way above where the market sees value. The sell-through rate after withdrawals was an industry average 82 percent. Add the withdrawals back and you would have a weak 77 percent. Only 23 percent of the lots saw aggressive bidding. Three of those 33 works were by Wu Guanzhong, a painter who fused traditional Chinese painting with the bright colors of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, three by Andy Warhol, and two by Zao Wou-ki. The remaining 25 works were by 25 different artists, which is a good sign for the breadth of the market.
Only one of the top lots by price, an 1881 painting by Renoir, saw aggressive bidding above the estimate range. Works by Yoshitomo Nara, Picasso, Monet, Yayoi Kusama, and Zao Wou-ki were also among the most expensive lots but sold at or below their estimates. Sotheby’s had already reduced the overall number of Hong Kong lots in the Modern and Contemporary category by half. That brought down the total estimated value of the sale by a quarter in the process. Yet it was still not enough to entice bidders. These results are a reminder that buyers and sellers remain out of sync with each other.