Ahead of the week of auctions, which started with fireworks, the fair, two years after its previous physical edition, saw great transactions.
In a plummeting financial environment, where Wall Street analysts are selling stocks – marking the longest decline in more than a decade – the art world in New York continues to reach new heights. Monday evening, during the Ammann sale at Christie’s, Larry Gagosian seized the iconic Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) by Andy Warhol for 195 million dollars (see QDA of yesterday). It is interesting to note that it was the gallery owner who sold the portrait of the cursed actress to Thomas Ammann in his gallery in Chelsea in 1986. Earlier in the evening, Gagosian had also seized the work on paper by Cy Twombly, Venus Above Gaeta (1988), for the tidy sum of $16.9 million. A plaster vase by Alberto Giacometti, known as Eagle, which could have been relegated in a design sale, exceeded its estimate by $500-700,000 to reach 1.7 million. Tuesday, May 10, Christie’s sold a monumental work by Gerhard Richter, Abstrakes Bild (1994), at $33 million. A painting by Reggie Burrows Hodges, Intersection of Color : Experience (2019) jumped beyond its $200-300,000 estimate to $560,000. The cheeky black and white image of Helmut Newton, Big Nude III (Variation), Pariswhich, although taken in 1980, was printed in the 1990s, was expected between $800 and $1.2 million but reached $1.9 million.
Leading French Galleries
A similar wave of sales was seen throughout the five-day TEFAF New York, which took place at the Park Avenue Armory, an 1880 building, and closed on May 10. Clearly the pandemic, which has forced the fair into a long two-year absence, has created rampant demand. Less than an hour after the opening…
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