A work by Belgian painter René Magritte, another by American Ed Ruscha and a volatile banana by Italian Maurizio Cattelan may set records at New York art auctions starting this week, in a market that hopes to recover down on last year.
The two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, compete starting Monday with a rich offer that includes names such as Picasso, Magritte, Matisse, Miró, Kandinsky, Ruscha, Basquiat, Rothko, Lichtenstein or Botero.
Shown to the public free of charge in their headquarters, which became short-term museums for a few days, many of the works for sale never left their owners’ walls.
Like “L’empire des lumières” by René Magritte (1898-1967), which belongs to a series in which the master of surrealism plays with lights and shadows, confusing night and day. Christie’s has estimated its price at $95 million, a record for the Belgian painter.
The work is part of the collection of the designer and supporter of Romanian origin Mica Ertegun, who died at the age of 97 last December, which also includes pieces by Joan Miró, David Hockney and Ed Ruscha.
The French luxury brand house François Pinault is also mounting another iconic work by Ed Ruscha, “Standard Station,” which the American reference in pop and conceptual art was painted in 1966 when he was 29 years old. his age.
Now 86, Ruscha’s photographs of the gas stations that lined the famous Highway 66 connecting Chicago and Los Angeles defined the modern American landscape and contributed to the bold visual language of the 1960s.
The paintings by Magritte and Ruscha “have never come to auction and are truly the best of their kind,” said Christie’s vice president Max Carter.
For its part, Sotheby’s will sell on Monday the collection of Sydell Miller, known as the “queen of the beauty industry” for her empire of false eyelashes and hairdressing products, who died last February at the age of 86. It is said that his house in Palm Beach (Florida) looked like a museum and it took an hour to tour his rooms.
The sale includes a work from the “Water Lilies” series by French artist Claude Monet, valued at 60 million, and ‘Picasso’ valued at 30 million.
Sotheby’s, owned by French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, is also putting up for online sale starting Thursday a collection of 31 street art pioneer Keith Haring’s chalk drawings of billboards the New York subway in the 1980s.
– Is it banana art? –
The most controversial work is “Comedian”, a banana held on the wall with adhesive tape by the Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan, which already caused a sensation when it showed for the first time at the Fair Art Basel in Miami in 2019.
Appreciate it or criticize it, the banana, which has been eaten twice, comes with a roll of adhesive tape and an instruction manual for changing it at the right time of ripening. Sotheby’s has valued it at between $1 million and $1.5 million.
The market hopes to recover from high interests, inflation and political instability that made it in 2023 register 3,000 million less than the 68,000 million in 2022 (-4%).
Christie’s expects to close the week with sales between 583 and 796 million and Sotheby’s 478 and 659 million.
“Our market is defined more by supply than demand” and this season “we feel very optimistic,” Carter told AFP.
Buoyed by a “surreal” sale in Paris, “well above estimates,” Sotheby’s head of Impressionism and Modern Art, Julian Dawes, insists the market is “strong” and “that there is demand.”
“Buyers are active. I think there have been a lot of positive signs in the macroeconomy in the last few months,” he says.
2024-11-17 15:59:00
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