I have some big news today: Puck has acquired Artelligence where it will become a twice weekly newsletter called Wall Power. (Yes, that’s meant to be funny.) The content will still try to explain what’s really happening in the art world—using data where we can—with an unsentimental eye toward what it really takes to keep the art world spinning. You can read more about the move in Axios.
I have been a subscriber to Puck almost since they launched in 2021. I was attracted by writers like William D. Cohan, Dylan Byers, and Julia Ioffe, whose work I had read for a long time. I was also impressed by Puck’s unique approach to covering Hollywood, Wall Street, media, fashion, and sports as essentially intersecting worlds—especially since so many art collectors hail from those industries. At Puck, you can subscribe to as many (or as few) authors and newsletters as you like. But at the end of the day, it’s all one universe driven by money, power, and ego.
I decided to join Puck for two very different reasons. The first is that I think it will be much better for my subscribers. Puck is cheaper than a subscription to Artelligence. It also provides subscribers with so much more content than I can deliver at that lower price. So, for you, Puck is a great deal. You can keep receiving just my newsletter, now called Wall Power, or you can add as many of my new colleagues’ newsletters as you like.
So what does all of this mean for you? Since you’re already a free subscriber, we’ve created a Puck account for you with access to my new bi-weekly newsletter, Wall Power—it will begin appearing in your inbox every Tuesday and Sunday, starting April 16. It will continue to be free for another four weeks.
To set up your account, simply enter your email here to create a new password. At Puck, I’ll be offering both a premium version—which will have the same comprehensive coverage you’ve been receiving and access to all of Puck’s other authors and subscription content—and a free, limited “preview” version of Wall Power.
For the first four weeks, you’ll get the full, premium version. But then we are going to ask you to subscribe. I hope after reading the free version of Artelligence and seeing the added value of getting Puck’s other writers for a subscription price lower than I was charging at Artelligence, the decision will be easy. If you’re still on the fence, how about an early bird special? You can save 25% off the first year of an annual subscription with discount code WALLPOWER at checkout (click here to join today) as a thank you for subscribing at launch.
Of course, if you only want to receive the preview version, you don’t have to do anything—you’ll continue to receive the limited version twice a week for free after the first four weeks. But good journalism is worth paying for.
Remember, when you become a member of Puck, you’ll also join the inside conversation at the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, media, fashion, sports, and now arts—the deals, the players, the gossip, and the true stories behind it all. If you’re ready now, you can click here to join today and get access to all of my soon-to-be colleagues, too.
Also, be sure to add my new email address, marion@puck.news to your contacts so you don’t miss a beat from me.
This is an exciting moment for me, as well as for the world I cover. Which brings me to the second reason I joined Puck. Too often, the most important art news suffers from either being buried in the trade press—or isolated newsletters like Artelligence—or sensationalized by mainstream media that fundamentally misunderstands what’s at stake. You and I both know the art world is filled with fascinating stories and personalities. At Puck, I will be able to cover those power players and inside stories as well as the auctions, art fairs, museum shows, and private collections in greater depth, while still reaching a new audience. We’ll have the resources to offer more direct coverage in a way that you cannot get anywhere else.
Also on a personal level, joining Puck gives me a chance to raise the level of my coverage. My new colleagues have pioneered a way to speak simultaneously to the most sophisticated practitioners in the industries that they cover while still writing in an accessible, entertaining, and engaging style. That’s not as easy as they make it seem, and I’m looking forward to learning from them every day.
One last note, Puck offers group subscriptions. If you're interested in moving your Artelligence group subscription over to Puck (or in starting a new group subscription for your organization), reach out to fritz@puck.news. You can start a group subscription with as few as five users.
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 TheNew 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
Takako Yamaguchi, The Fire Next Time (2004), HKD 2.032 million
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
Lucio Fontana in his studio (the Rachofsky’s Fine di Dio is seen on the right in the background behind other works.)
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
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Sliced Melon (1760) estimate €8m
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,andZao 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.
Notes: What’s wrong with Tamara de Lempicka?; Sotheby’s Hong Kong pre-sale stats; a note on the evolution of Artelligence
Lot Watch: A professor’s Basquiats & the Nelson-Atkins’ Monet
Notes
The Comeback Kid: It’s great that the Broadway musical of Tamara de Lempicka’s life is opening soon. And yet the Times has marked the occasion, in semi-characteristic fashion, by mischaracterizing the painter’s reputation as a woefully overlooked underachiever—“a queer woman and an ambitious painter, who has often been undervalued, in the art market and beyond,” as the appraisal put it. Or, to quote from a curator at an upcoming retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, she was “diminished to a phenomenon pertaining to the Art Deco period, a phenomenon of decoration, of fashion, rather than a great painter and a fantastic draftsperson.
And yet Tamara de Lempicka’s work has been highly valued by celebrity and fashion designer collectors for decades—and, more recently, as a new generation of buyers have entered the picture. (Indeed, the Times notes that Barbra and Madonna are fans…) In fact, the funny thing about the artist is that she’s one of those painters beloved by the market who simply never received critical attention—which is why the retrospective is such a big deal—probably because she painted in a number of derivative styles but none as unique as her Art Deco portraits. It’s also a strange complaint because most artists are defined by a singular style. Mark Rothko, call your office!
The Dragon Tames Hong Kong: Sotheby’s Spring Hong Kong sales cycle has already begun. Friday evening Hong Kong time, The Now sales opens the Modern and Contemporary art sales. This season, there are 188 lots with a pre-sale value of $99 million. That’s half of the lots and 75% of the value of last year’s comparable sales. The top lots by estimate in this season’s sales are a Yoshitomo Nara, a 60s Picasso, a Monet and works by Yayoi Kusama, Zao Wou-ki, Nicolas Party, among others.
The Change Will Do Us Good: If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed a change in tone for the newsletter. Today, we’re doing more work on the formatting. Next week we’ll have some further news on the evolution of Artelligence.
A Basquiat Renaissance
Phillips to Offer Three Early Works with $58.5m in Estimates
Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat dining at Francesco Pellizzi’s east side home in 1984
Today, Phillips announced that it would sell three Basquiats: the large untitled (ELMAR), estimated at $40 million during New York’s May sales; and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles Amorites on Safari, with a $12 million estate two weeks later in its Hong Kong sales. A third work from 1981, Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), will also be sold on May 14th with a $6.5 million estimate.
Phillips has been punching above its weight in the Basquiatrealm for some time now, specializing in works that come from either the artist’s estate or early collectors with deep personal ties to him. In 2019, the house sold a self portrait from 1983 painted on two doors that was owned by Matt Dike, who would later collaborate with the Beastie Boys by contributing many of the samples to their seminal album, Paul’s Boutique. Before that, Dike had been Basquiat’s minder when the painter was living in Los Angeles and creating work for Larry Gagosian’s gallery. Works from that brief moment are now the subject of a landmark show at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills exhibition space. The self portrait sold for $9.5 million.
The year before that, Phillips sold from the Basquiat estate Flexible from 1984, one of the artist’s distinctive works on a slatted armature like a shipping pallet, to David Geffen for $45 million. Phillips continued their partnership with the estate by sponsoring the family’s remarkably popular for-profit King Pleasure exhibition that has been mounted in New York and Los Angeles.
As time passes, finding works with provenance close to Basquiat himself is becoming more and more difficult. In 1984, Francesco Pellizzi, an anthropology professor and journal editor who was married to Dia co-founder Philippa de Menil in the early 1970s and died last year, began to collect Basquiat’s work. In the de Menil tradition, Pellizzi had been buying minimalism, but the ferment of the East Village art scene clearly attracted his interest. He entertained artists like Warhol, Francesco Clemente, and Basquiat at his east side townhouse. And he ended up buying works by many of the East Village art stars, including two 1982 Basquiat works—a large, dramatic painting and heavily text-based work on an unconventional stretcher—from Anina Nosei, the dealer who did so much early on to establish Basquiat, including providing him his first studio space where he converted his street-art style into more conventional painting.
The consignment comes at a time when Basquiat’s auction volume has been high. According to LiveArt’s data, sales in 2021 peaked at $439 million. The previous high water year had been 2017, when $345 million of Basquiat’s work sold, including the $110 million untitled head. In the past, peak years were followed by significant drops in sales. In 2022, the auction volume did drop to $221 million only to rise again in 2023 to $235 million setting up the potential for continuing demand this year.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, untitled (ELMAR) (1982) estimated at $40 million
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles Amorites on Safari (1982), estimated at $12 million
Mo’ Monet, Mo’ Problems
Claude Monet, The Mill at Limetz (1888) estimated at $18 million
The auction world is filled with coincidences that seem like cause and effect. Random events often coincide to create what appears to be a narrative. Take the Monet painting of The Mill at Limetz that Christie’s announced earlier this week that it will offer in May with an $18 million low estimate. A similar work was offered last season at Sotheby’s with a $12 million estimate. It sold for a surprisingly strong $25 million with fees. There were multiple bidders still chasing the work even after the auctioneer cried out $20 million.
From the outside, it looks like Christie’s noticed the interest in Monet and went looking for another version now that Monet’s multiple takes on a single view have become so prized by collectors. (So prized that the auction houses are now playing up the fact that Monet often painted different works from the same vantage point long before he settled into the late series works.) Cool story. The reality is a lot more interesting, though.
In the background, there’s been a huge run-up in the value of Monet’s paintings. It’s not like they were cheap to begin with; however, during the pandemic, the price of Monets rose dramatically. Paintings that had sold for around $25 to $30 million in the late twenty teens were selling in 2021 for $50 million. Two very similar views of a corner of Monet’s water lily garden painted in 1918 were sold on either side of the pandemic divide. The first sold in May 2019 for $21.8 million; by November of 2021, the second, arguably better, work sold for $50.8 million.
Was that painting almost 150 percent better? Probably not. Were the wealthy so flush with ZIRP-era pandemic liquidity that the price rise didn’t matter? Would it all be sustainable after the art market came back to earth? The value of Monets at auction had already moved up as early as 2012 when the art market began to reach escape velocity from the global financial crisis. The top price paid for a work by Monet at auction came in 2019 when Hasso Plattner, the billionaire founder of SAP, bought an 1890 grainstack for $110 million.
In the biggest years for Monet’s auction volume, according to LiveArt’s data, annual sales surpassed $300 million, peaking at $337 million in 2015 and $357 million in 2018. In 2022, as the world reopened, that figure reached an astonishing $540 million. What makes it even more startling was that the bulk of the sales for 2022 took place in the first half of the year.
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Market Volatility
What caused the Monet market to shut off in mid-2022? It doesn’t appear that the demand went away, even if rising interest rates have restrained the art market’s animal spirits in the last year and a half. With values for Monet’s best works continuing to rise even as the art market entered its sober era, there was little incentive to sell.
Monet’s Mill at Limetz is one of a pair of works that Monet made in 1888 with the same title. Both works peer across a small body of water at a stone mill and bridge obscured in the background by trees hanging over the near bank. In one work, the mill is brilliantly illuminated behind the blue-lavender shadows of the trees. In the other, the sun dapples the foregrounded trees and lights up the water that lies in between the mill and the bank with vibrant greens. Each work showcases a different aspect of Monet’s skill depicting light and shadow.
Each work spent the bulk of the 20th Century in the hands of rich Midwestern American families. One was owned for more than a hundred years by the Palmers of Chicago. Potter Palmer built the department store that would become Marshall Field before developing real estate in the center of the city and reclaiming the land that would become Lake Shore Drive. He bought his Mill at Limetz in 1892, four years after it was painted. A hundred and thirty years later, the painting was still in the Palmer family but had grown so valuable that it was offered at Sotheby’s with a very conservative $12 million estimate. The $25 million selling price was a windfall that validated the decision.
We now know that the buyer was also Plattner. The painting is now listed among the 113 Plattner works housed at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany. More than a third of those holdings, 39 paintings including the $110 million grainstack and another grainstack in winter, are by Monet. In many ways, Plattner has been the market for Monet. Of those 39 works in Potsdam, at least 21 were on the auction block in the last 22 years. Nearly half were auctioned in the last eight years. The total bill at auction for these works was more than $414 million. That’s a huge investment in one artist by just one collector.
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The Folgers Element
You can see how this looks. The Palmer’s mill makes $25 million at auction and the owner of the other version sits up and takes notice. Or, Christie’s, ever-aware of what their rival is doing, makes a few calls to the owner of the other Mill at Limetz who eventually gives in because the family doesn’t want to get left out of the action.
The other mill, of course, has its own back story. It had been bought by Folger’s coffee executive Joseph Atha in the 1940s. In 1986, Atha bequeathed his version of The Mill at Limetz to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Or, to be more precise, he bequeathed two-thirds of the painting to the museum with the condition that the institution would either buy the remaining third from his heirs, once the last of his three children were gone, or sell the painting.
Atha’s son, Donald, died in 2018 in Arizona; his daughter, Elaine, died in Palm Beach in 2022; last year, the eldest of the Atha children, Ethelyn, died in Manhattan at the age of 99. Lyn was the last of the Athas—she was also Chevy Chase’s step-mother—and her demise triggered a decision for the Nelson-Atkins museum buy the remaining third of the work at today’s prices which would have been fairly easy to calculate at around $8 million or sell the work and use the the approximately $15 million the museum would hope to receive to endow an acquisitions fund.
For the Nelson-Atkins’s director Julián Zugazagoitia, the decision wasn’t easy or obvious. When asked if he was offering the Mill at Limetz because of the success of last year’s Palmer painting, he demurred that the sale was baked into the Atha’s bequest nearly forty years ago. Nevertheless, the new, higher valuations for Monet’s works, especially a direct comparable, surely played an important role in whether he could raise funds to complete the acquisition or sell the work to fund future purchases.
The Palmer painting would have set his bar at $8 million to acquire the Atha heirs’ remaining third. These days it is hard to get donors to pony up for Impressionists when so many museums are in need of works that are more representative of the broader population. Zugazagoitia says he tried to raise the money.
In the years since the Atha bequest, the Nelson-Atkins was also able to greatly increase its holdings of Monet through the donation less than a decade ago of a large gift of Impressionist art from Henry and Doris Block. Zugazagoitia’s curators have also helped out recently by persuading a local collector to loan another 1880s Monet to the museum. With five Monets at the Nelson-Atkins, the Mill at Limetz was no longer a work Zugazagoitia had to save.
And then there is the approximately $12 million (assuming the work sold only at the low estimate instead of the price the Palmers got) that Zugazagoitia will receive from the sale to endow future acquisitions. The C.E.O. won’t say if the museum has a wish list for those funds. Cagily, he hinted to me that he would like his curators, “honor the Athas by finding works as adventurous or avant garde as it was to buy a Monet in the 1940s when they bought the painting.”
Also, let’s not assume that another $25 million sale is immediately in the cards. Yes, it’s a brighter work. But one of the bidders is now out of the competition. (Though we’ve seen that Plattner isn’t shy about acquiring multiple works on similar themes, so there’s always the chance that he could bid again.)
There’s also the probability that other Monet collectors saw the sale of the Palmer mill and were intrigued. That may bring more bidders in. The one thing the Monet market has above all other artists is a truly global collector base, says Christie’s head of sale Imogen Kerr. These buyers are often not constrained by a specific period or subject matter in the artist’s body of work. Artelligence is moving to a new platform soon. Add your name to our list so you can come along.
Inigo Philbrick's Offensive Charm + $18m Warhol/Basquiat collab at Sotheby's + Is the sky falling in the ultra-contemporary market? + Swann's African American sale
Lot Watch: Sotheby’s $18 million Warhol-Basquiat collaboration; Swann’s African American sale
Art Basel Hong Kong sales: Gladstone sold three Salvos and White Cube made deals for 15 works
Look Out, World: Here comes Inigo again
Is the Sky is Falling? And why are so few contemporary collectors concerned about it?
Lot Watch
Warhol-Basquiat collaboration work at Sotheby’s for $18m in May
Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol, untitled (1984), estimate $8 million
Prices for the late body of works that were a collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat began bubbling up on the auction market in 2016. They eventually reached their peak when Taxi, 45th/Broadway from 1984, once owned by Gianni Versace was sold for $9.4 million in 2018. The collaboration works were featured in the second show of Basquiat’s work shared between collector Peter Brant and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. That show last year would seem to have had a significant effect on demand for these works as one of the untitled paintings from 1984 featured in the exhibition is now coming to Sotheby’s to anchor their May sale with an $18 million estimate.
Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Hughie Lee Smith and Jacob Lawrence featured at Swann’s African American art auction
Howardena Pindell, Skowhegan Series: Lake Lillies for Karen (1980-81), estimate $75,000
It’s been more than a decade since art made by African American artists has been sought after in the market. Black artists who work in diverse styles and genres like Ernie Barnes, Rashid Johnson, Mark Bradford and Amy Sherald regularly sell for high prices and are featured lots at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. Before that demand filtered up to those global houses, Swann auctions in midtown Manhattan has been building markets for African American artists and educating collectors. Led by the OG Nigel Freeman, Swann’s sales continue to thrive now that the other houses have discovered the artists and their markets.
Rather than compete, Freeman stays ahead of the trend selling works by artists that museums still desperately need and collectors are still learning about. The preview for Swann’s April 4th sale opens tomorrow with important works by Kermit Oliver, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Jacob Lawrence and Hugie Lee Smith.
The 80-year-old Howardena Pindell has been quietly built into a million-dollar artist by Garth Greenan gallery, Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the last several years. That didn’t come easily for an artist who got her MFA at Yale in the mid-sixties before working at MoMA for a dozen years then teaching at Stonybrook after 1979. It has only been since 2022 that her public auction prices have reached the seven-figure mark for the large subtle works that she created in the 1970s fusing painting, textiles and a tonal approach to color. To give you a sense of how quickly the market for her work has turned, Freeman had a large work from that period on offer in 2009 with an estimate at $75,000. It passed. Today, that work would be reasonably estimated above $500,000. Freeman can’t go back and get that work but he has two stunning small assemblages that perfectly capture the themes of Pindell’s career. Estimated at $75,000 and $30,000, the two works are decorated with colored paper punch outs evoking minimalism and memory.
Pindell’s postcard-based works have a hint of Surrealism around them. That’s also a specter haunting Hugie Lee Smith’s work whose estate is now represented by trend-setting gallery Karma. The Ball Player from 1970 is estimated at $150,000. Smith came of age in the shadow of the Harlem Renaissance but his work transforms landscapes into pageantry with a raking light and empty spaces that bring Giorgio de Chirico to mind. There’s also his much smaller beachscape Bather from 1954 with a $75,000 estimate.
Jacob Lawrence is another African American artist whose career was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. His 1977 set of 22 prints, The Legend of John Brown, has 60 impressions. Swann has a complete set that is still in the original box having never been mounted or displayed. It’s estimated at $100,000.
Kermit Oliver, Hay Rolls (1983) estimate $100,000
Kermit Oliver is an artist who worked as a postal service employee for most of his career to leave himself time for painting. The son of Texas cowboy, Oliver was asked to design Southwest-themed scarves for Hermès in the 1980s upon the recommendation of Neiman Marcus’s Lawrence Marcus. Swann has a self portrait in a Hill Country landscape from 1983. Hay Rolls is estimated at $100,000.
Sam Gilliam’s big break as an artist came in 1967 when he had his frist museum show at the Phillips Collection in his native Washington, DC. At the time, Gilliam was making “slice” paintings and experimenting with beveling the edges of his canvases. In the case of the untitled 1967 work in Swann’s sale, the bevel goes behind the picture to make the work appear to float off the wall. Gilliam included seven of his slice paintings in the Phillips show. This one, estimated at $80,000, has a palette of metallic silver and muted orange, olive green and faded blues. Works from the same era with similar hues have made as much as $250,000.
More Art Basel HK Sales
White Cube sold a total of 15 works by the end of the second day with “indicative sale prices” including:
Gladstone gallery also sold three works by Salvo priced at $375,000, $225,000, and $175,000
Who Choked Off the Ultra Contemporary Art Market
Last weekend, my phone blew up (okay, I got a couple of texts) from active market participants—the kinds of collectors who often get called flippers or speculators—pointing to an Artnet post declaring a crash in Contemporary art prices. You would expect these guys—and they are mostly guys—holding a lot of pictures by mostly young artists to be a bit panicked or, at least, a little queasy when they read a headline quoting Jeffrey Deitch stating flatly that “it’s not a soft landing.”
The soft landing referred to the idea that the art market could make a transition from the cyclical focus on (mostly) painters with short market track records to something else without seeing those markets dry up entirely. The art market, like all markets, cycles over several years between historical artists and new artists. No two cycles are ever the same. Some artists are evergreen, even as their markets wax and wane with intensity; others come and go. Stepping back, though, we can see the broad, slow rhythm of change not unlike the stock market’s oscillation between value stocks and growth companies.
Artnet’s Chicken Little article didn't faze these collectors. It didn’t say anything they didn’t already know. They’re active buyers and sellers. They have a better sense of pricing—in a market where this is no central or public display of prices—than anybody else. For one reason, Chicken Little’s evidence was a few random examples that often confused fundamental elements of the art market to make its point. A random Frank Stella auction price was compared to the asking prices of new works ignoring the what everybody knows in the art market—in good times and bad— that you price by body of work, size, medium, and example, to name just a few factors. That didn’t stop Chicken Little from comparing the price of works at auction by Dan Colen, Oscar Murillo, and Pat Stier to asking prices from dealers for different bodies of work. In the Pat Stier example, strong sales in Los Angeles seemed to directly contradict the hand waving thesis of the article.
What the collectors who called me were more amused by was how close the article seemed to come to grasping what they felt is actually taking place here, that primary dealers had choked off many emerging artists’ markets by raising prices.
From the experience of the collectors I spoke to over the weekend, real experience buying artists they are happy to continue to own (and good luck to them,) the market for artists with emerging markets—not the entire art market—has been choked off by their primary galleries. The usual model has been for the primary galleries to keep prices below the secondary market to maintain control over who gets which works.
In recent years, buoyed by pandemic demand, primary prices have been moved up to secondary market levels. That’s fine as long holds. And you can’t really blame a gallery for wanting the artist and gallery to benefit from the full market value of the artist’s work. The problem with gallery pricing, though, is that it is far from dynamic. Galleries can clear inventory by offering discounts but that tactic has its own limitations. Backing down an artist’s broader price structure is far more difficult to do than hiking prices.
Nearly a year and a half into the downward price trajectory precipitated by the rise in interest rates—remember that in a higher interest rate environment active-trading collectors have to look at pictures on their walls every day that are not making them the 5% interest they would get from cash in the bank—these collectors are chasing the demand that remains for these emerging artists by underpricing the galleries. So now the secondary market is trading at a discount to primary prices. Early buyers can still make money in that environment and many probably are.
The funny thing is that the collectors who got in touch with me last weekend weren’t pulling out of the market. They’re just not buying from art fairs or directly from galleries. They’re picking up work they like at prices they think make sense. We can see this in some of Chicken Little’s examples. Take the Emmanuel Taku, Sisters in Pink that was auctioned in 2021 for $189,000 and sold again at auction this year for $8,000. Yes, that’s an eye-catching drop. But if the work was back at auction in early 2024, it must have been offered privately all through 2023 and possibly before. Two years of shopping a work privately—presumably at prices above $200,000—will thoroughly burn a painting. There may even have been offers in the six figures that got turned down. No buyer likes to reward a seller they believe spurned a reasonable offer which is how you get to a painting selling for $8,000 instead of seeing it withdrawn from the sale. And, of course, someone did buy it.
None of this is new. Chicken Little offers a list of “cautionary tales” including Anselm Reyle, the German artist known for his use of foil, and the Zombie Formalists. Each represents a period when Contemporary art was hot on the market. For Reyle it was 2007-2008; the Zombies were around 2014. Reyle’s market collapsed so badly that he closed his studio for a number of years. Recent work hasn’t quite had the punch of his earlier work. But a foil painting just sold in London for $106,000. That price is 17% of what his best foil painting did at auction 16 years ago. Nevertheless, it sold. And Reyles have been selling slowly and steadily for years now with a blip in 2023 that suggests we’ll see more works at auction in the future.
As for the Zombies, Jacob Kassay, who made a splash on the auction market from 2011-13 with his silver-dipped process paintings, also disappeared from the art market for a decade. Yet right now he has a show at 303 Gallery that shows up approvingly and often on Instagram feeds. Who knows if they sold? But that’s as good an indicator as much of what were given in Artnet.
No one said it was easy to become—and stay—a successful artist. Reputations rise and fall when artists are alive and long after they are gone. Markets do too. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is not having prices go down but having no price at all. Those Reyle’s selling at a deep discount to his best prices aren’t necessarily being sold at a loss though it is surely not much of a gain after so long. But the lower prices brings in new buyers who now become advocates for the artist.
When collectors and dealers don’t compromise on prices, that makes the market for an artist freeze up. And when that happens, we’ve truly reached the end.
Inigo Philbrick’s Charm Offensive
When word first started filtering out that double-dealer Inigo Philbrick was switching from federal prison to home confinement in January, a few questions came to mind: Had the arrogant sociopath been changed at all by the experience of being brought to justice? Had prison taught him anything? And, would he start fresh with a new life not seeking attention, not trying to project a life of glamor that he cannot afford, and not dealing art?
Inigo wants you to know that he’s back, that he can explain away his behavior, shift blame to others, and that he’s going to somehow dazzle the art world with his brilliance again. The Vanity Fair story seems to be an attempt at a charm offensive but the story is spectacularly tone deaf, the product of a self-deluded conman collaborating with an extremely gullible journalist. Judge for yourself. Here are a few of Philbrick’s claims or comments:
Philbrick was shocked to realize how few of the folks he met in prison had any “conception of what an art dealer does”
“‘I would never have had an offshore company nor an art-backed loan had I not met Robert Newland,’ Philbrick says.”
“‘By no means am I blameless, but the people I was partnered with were all seeking an edge,’ he says.”
“Among the documents he left behind were spreadsheets showing the dizzying positions each investor owned in the various percentages of the oversold art, along with a handwritten note that read, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum, ‘How to fuck them?’ Philbrick says the note was in Newland’s handwriting, but Newland’s attorney Burlingame calls this claim ‘false (and ridiculous) […]’”
“‘I was traveling on my US passport, hardly a fugitive,’ insists Philbrick. The Justice Department, which considered him one in April 2020, disagrees.”
“‘I’m 36, still a young man, and a second act is going to require my having been up front and sincere, but also not a martyr,’ he says.'“
“‘Of course, I did things the wrong way,’ says Philbrick. ‘But creatively and with the best of intentions. I’ll have to tick the box for the felony. But I believe the art world is sophisticated enough to understand that I wasn’t Bernie Madoff (who never made an actual investment).’”
The comparison to Madoff, a sociopath who reveled in the deception, is particularly telling. Like Madoff, Philbrick believed his victims deserved to be exploited and that their trust was evidence of his own superiority. Nothing in this Vanity Fair piece contradicts that.
As much as Philbrick wants to insist he was sincerely trying to recoup losses or that there will be revelations that can change how his actions are viewed, that’s all delusional thinking. Philbrick didn’t defraud his partners because of unexpected losses. Like Jho Low, he was a compulsive spender and needed to defraud others to pay for the ridiculous excesses. Like Michel Cohen a generation before him, the financial pressures came from his own reckless behavior.
There’s another problem with this coordinated attempt to play up Philbrick’s notoriety. His girlfriend, Victoria Baker-Harber, posted pictures from the Vanity Fair story on her Instagram profile. The comments from her 193,000 followers are obsequious. But like those Philbrick met in prison, they have no conception of what an art dealer does. Back in the claustrophobic world of art dealing, his criminality is the least of his limitations. Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel no longer have markets active enough for Philbrick to stage a comeback. He’s got $86 million to pay in restitution but no viable leads on art he might sell or flip even if he can convince someone to deal with him. Then there’s the current state of the market which is not favorable to a quick score. Finally, Philbrick’s been out of the game too long. He no longer has a fulcrum, an edge, on any part of the market.
