What We Learned this Week (2412)
South Asian art is on fire + Sotheby's $30m Francis Bacon + Agnes Pelton at MoMA
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In This Issue
Lot Watch: Francis Bacon’s market is having a resurgence with $30m Portrait of George Dyer Crouching coming to Sotheby’s in May
Results: New York’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art = $39.5m
Notes: Class action lawsuit against Hermès selling handbags like art; The story behind a complete set of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji; Frieze is looking for a new director for the Armory Show; Pace announces Kyoko Hattori for its new Tokyo gallery that will open with a Calder Foundation show; Agnes Pelton’s record-setting The Fountains was bought by MoMA.
Lot Watch
Sotheby’s Reveals $30m Francis Bacon Portrait of George Dyer for May
Acquired directly from Marlborough gallery in 1970, Portrait of George Dyer Crouching from 1966 has remained in one family for more than 50 years. Sotheby’s will bring the work to market in May with a $30 million estimate. The sale comes after recent revival of activity in the Bacon market. According to LiveArt’s data, Bacon’s market peaked in 2015 at $233 million in total sales value followed by a brief secondary high-point in spending of $127 million in 2018. Sales volume declined from 2018 to 2021 when the total sales value was a grim $42 million. The next year, Bacon’s sales revived with 37 works making a new total high-water mark of $258 million. That included six works sold at prices above $29 million. Last year, Bacon’s sales pulled back to the $100 million mark but comprised one work sold for $52 million and another for $34 million which clearly demonstrated demand at the top of the Bacon market. So far in 2024, two significant works have sold for $25 million and $8.6 million which should explain how Sotheby’s resident Bacon expert, Gregoire Billault was able to persuade the family that owns this Portrait of George Dyer Crouching to sell now.
Results
The Contemporary art market may be entering a period of torpor but that does not mean buyers are fleeing art. The Spring sales of Asian art in New York contain the South Asian Modern and Contemporary sales which have waxed and waned over the last decade. Indian Contemporary saw a brief moment of global appeal in the years before the financial crisis but the Modern and Contemporary artists have had lasting staying power. Now that India’s economy is booming and the country’s richest families have returned to supporting art institutions both in India and abroad, the South Asian Modern and Contemporary art market has suddenly sprung back to life beginning last year.
These New York sales were greatly anticipated to see if the buying trend would continue. The sales paid off mightily achieving a red-hot 2.45 hammer ratio and a 97% sell-through rate on nearly 200 works offered. The total sale was $39,519,495 at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Top lots were works by S.H. Raza and Francis Newton Souza. There were also stunning prices for Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nasreen Mohamedi and Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar. Nearly half the value of the sales was spent on Souza’s art, including the record $4.89 million spent on The Lovers from 1960 that was sold by the family of Robin Howard, an early supporter of Souza’s work. The painting had only been previously seen in black-and-white photographs. Raza’s work attracted 24% of the value spent in these sales. M.F. Husain, previously the dominant artist in the category, pulled in 7% of the spending. Bhupen Khakhar reached 6% of the sales and Gulammohammed Sheikh’s single lot that sold for more than seven times the estimate garnered 3.5% of sales.
Estimates will surely rise as these prices attract more works to market. But the cycle is likely to still be in the beginning stages with the amount of wealth in India and among Non-Resident Indians abroad who, because of the peculiarities of foreign exchange restrictions and the success of NRIs around the world, have been a mainstay of this market.
Notes
Two Californians sue Hermès, claiming Birkin handbags are offered only to repeat customers (Los Angeles Times): Earlier this year, I spoke to Guillaume Cerutti about the parallels between the way art is sold and, increasingly, the way luxury items are sold. Namely, if you go to a Rolex store or an Hermès shop you will not be able to easily buy a watch or a Birkin bag unless the company identifies you as a customer with a “purchase profile.” That usually means you’ve bought other items from the company and are considered a good client. This is almost exactly what many of the primary market art galleries do where the work of the most desirable artists is sold to clients who must first “support the program” by acquiring work of other artists on the gallery’s roster or potentially buy one work along with a second work to donate to a museum. Now two California residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against Hermès for similar tactics. Will the suit get traction in the courts? Even if it does, how far will it go? Answers to those questions are a long way off but in the meantime, let’s all appreciate the LA Times’s Caroline Petrow-Cohen and her description of the price of Birkin bags: “The bags sell for thousands of dollars, ranging from the price of a small motorcycle to the price of a small cabin.”
One Collector’s High Mountain Road to Hokusai (NYTimes): Geraldine Fabrikant profiles the Wharton professor who spent a decade, and $3 million, assembling a complete set of Hokusai’s most famous woodblock prints 36 Views of Mount Fuji. There has been rising demand and sales activity over the last several years for the most famous of the images, the Great Wave Off Kanagawa. One example sold last year for $2.7 million and another, later in the year, for nearly a million. The Ukiyo-e industry, the name for these images of the “floating world,” was a mass market phenomenon. So many of these prints exist but of variable quality. As the woodblocks wore down, inking and images changed leaving some prints with different colored details and others missing the pink clouds in the sky. According to Fabrikant, there are as fewer than 10 complete sets of the 46 images (the series was so successful in the middle of the 19th Century, Hokusai added another 10.) Professor Singh never displayed his 46 prints. After completing the set in January of 2023, he decided to sell. Christie’s offered the set during its Japanese and Korean art sale with a $3 million estimate. The series sold for $3.5 million with fees, a record for Hokusai. In the same sale, an example of the “Great Wave” made $693,000 and another of the “Black Fuji” made $214,000.
Frieze Makes a Move: Nicole Berry’s departure from the Armory Show fair, announced across the art press this week, was filled with cryptic references to wishing her “all the best,” claiming to already be searching for a new fair director. The quote was attributed to Frieze’s Kristell Chadé and Christine Messineo, respectively the executive director of fairs and director of Americas for Frieze. It raises more questions than it answers about the future of Frieze’s wobbly North American fairs. Although Frieze LA was better organized and more functional than the previous year when it debuted at the Santa Monica airport, Frieze New York remains in the inadequate facilities at The Shed. The Armory Show has a far better footprint at New York’s Javits Center with a vast open floor plan instead of The Shed’s cramped stack of floors. The Armory Show also has a prime spot in the calendar opening the second semester of the art market in the beginning of September. That’s not as good as coinciding with the May sales in New York but it may be far better to exchange the real estate for the timing. Will Frieze try to maintain two New York fairs or consolidate in one? Strategy has never been Frieze’s strong suit. Since Endeavor acquired the Frieze fair in London, only that fair has remained consistently vibrant and important in the global art market calendar. With competition from Art Basel, who now run Paris Plus the week after Frieze London, Frieze London and Frieze Masters are now potentially under competitive threat.
Pace announces Kyoko Hattori to lead its new gallery in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills: In May, Pace will christen its Azabudai Hills gallery location with a show of 100 works from the Calder foundation. Although Calder never visited Japan himself, the artist had an affinity for Japanese artists and poets, according to the Calder Foundation, and there are more than two dozen works by Calder in 18 different Japanese museum collections. Pace also announced that former Phillips Japan regional director, Kyoko Hattori, will join the gallery as a Vice President to run the outpost and “develop a Japanese collector base for the gallery […] cultivating new relationships with local artists and institutions.”
MoMA Gets Agnes Pelton’s The Fountains: A 2020 show at the Whitney and Phoenix Art Museums, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, was hampered by the pandemic but did succeed in bringing attention to an artist who had been overlooked since her move to California in 1932. In May of 2023, Christie’s brought one of the standout works from that exhibition to auction with a $1.5 million estimate. Demand for work by female abstract artists, interest in transcendentalist painters and the new prominence of Pelton from the show caused the work to be sold for $3.438 million dollars. The buyer was anonymous. Now it would appear the works was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art using funds from the sale of works gifted by Joan Tisch who died in 2017.