Upcoming Art Auctions: From a Millennial Bible to a Rare Rousseau

One of the “once in decades” oddities is the work “The Flamingos” (1910) by self-taught French painter Henri Rousseau who was in the Payne Whitney Middleton family for decades.

It is a scene of naive or primitive art, totally invented by “The customs officer”, as Rousseau was known, with an estimated price of 20 to 30 million dollars. It shows a forest of palm trees in the background, a river, two people with spears on a spit of sand, huge flowers and four flamingos in the foreground.

There are “no recent references” on the market for the works of the French painter, who by day was in charge of collecting taxes and in his spare time was a painter, says Max Carter, vice president of Christie’s and head of the department of contemporary art of the centuries. XX and XXI.

It’s one of the two or three “rarest” paintings I’ve seen at Christie’s, Carter adds, recalling that the auction record for one of the few remaining Rousseaus on the market was $4.4 million for a much larger painting. small in 1983.

The star of competing Sotheby’s is also a waterscape but by Gustav Klimt, “An Island in the Attersee” (1902), which has an estimated price tag of $45 million and is also up for auction for the first time.

Another highlight of the Sotheby’s auction is “Spider” (1996), one of the iconic giant spiders by French-American sculptress Louise Bourgeois, estimated at $30-40 million and also auctioning for the first time.

In addition to the inevitable such as Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, Magrit, Chagal, Gauguin, Giacometti, Warhol, Kooning, Richter or Nara, another of the stars of these auctions is the American Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose works are increasingly sought after .

Christie’s puts up for sale “The Great Show (The Nile)”, also known as “History of blacks”, a monumental triptych from 1983 estimated at 45 million, while Sotheby’s auctions another work by the greatest exponent of street art and neo-expressionist movement, “Now’s the Time”, of 30 million dollars.

the millennial bible

Sotheby’s also finishes off the oldest and most complete “Codex Sassoon” Bible in Hebrew that is preserved, despite the fact that in its millenary journey it has lost some pages.

The auction house hopes to fetch $50 million for this “civilization-founding” text, as defined by Richard Austin, the auction house’s head of ancient books and manuscripts.

The work comprises 24 books of the Hebrew Bible from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls or Scrolls dating from the 3rd century BC.

Art as an investment alternative

In a market in full swing, as demonstrated last year with the sale of the collection of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, which reached 1,620 million dollars in two days of auction in November, the specialists of the two auction houses are optimistic. .

Above all, because many of the works, belonging to private collections, are going on the market for the first time.

What has been seen in the last 30 years “is that contemporary art in particular, but art in general, has been a very safe investment and in continuous appreciation, especially in front-line works such as Nara, Warhol, Bourgeois or Klimt “, Sotheby’s Lucius Elliott told AFP.

In times of uncertainty, “art seems like a viable investment alternative for many of our clients and collectors,” he says.