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2011 Spring
Contemporary Art Auctions in New York
By Brian
Appel
How high can the art market go? The strength of
the contemporary art market is stoked by the
growth in the wealth of the world’s richest
people. Forbes magazine reported 214 new
billionaires just this year.
Many of the newly
minted are collecting art for the same reasons
seasoned collectors do: prestige, pleasure,
profit, proximity to fame and genius, and to be
seen as arbiters of taste.
Despite the less-than-sparkling economy here at
home and around the world, more and more of
these high net worth (HNWI) individuals—many
from Russia, Brazil, India, Asia-Pacific and the
Mid-East—are funneling their resources into the
acquisition of these treasured cultural
artifacts.
This spring the contemporary art market in New
York saw $718 million traded at Sotheby’s,
Christie’s and Phillips de Pury & Co. as
compared to $571 million from the spring of
2010.
Christie’s, the New York auction leader this
season, surged from $282 million last spring to
a robust $367 million this spring. Phillips de
Pury & Co., which opened a new, posh, uptown
flagship gallery and salesroom at 450 Park
Avenue, more than doubled their sales from $45.7
million last spring to $108 million this spring.
Still, at the height of the New York
contemporary art auction bubble—which peaked in
the spring of 2008 with a $955 million tally—the
market is rallying and slowly but steadily
climbing to levels from three years ago.
Sotheby’s
ANDY WARHOL
(American, 1928-1987)
Sixteen Jackies
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas in sixteen
panels
Each: 20 by 16 inches; Overall: 80 by 64 inches
Executed in 1964
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $20,242,500
SOTHEBY'S, N.Y.: "Contemporary Art Evening
Auction"
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #21
Illustration courtesy SOTHEBY'S IMAGES INC.,
2011
Prices for Andy Warhol’s works are a good
barometer for the art market in general and
Warhol’s tour de force “Sixteen Jackies” from
1964 took the top spot at the house’s evening
auction.
The sixteen panel artwork employed seven
different source photographs from the press
coverage that followed the First Lady from her
smiling arrival at Dallas’ Love Field to her
grieving at John F. Kennedy’s funeral in
Washington, D.C.
Over the span of four days, the public watched
transfixed as television provided live coverage
of the aftermath of the assassination, the
capture and shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and
the stately ceremony surrounding the President’s
funeral. Today, the 24-hour coverage of cable
news outlets is the norm, but the extent of the
coverage of the Kennedy assassination and
funeral was unprecedented in the 1960s,
saturating the airwaves, the newspapers and the
magazines.
The enormity of Jackie’s tragedy informed Warhol
of America’s sense of loss, and her inner trauma
was now allowed to become evident in her public
persona, creating a more complicated image than
the glamorous, symbolic face of a young and
vibrant post-war America. The tragic events of
1963 transformed her into a symbol of national
mourning, and the young widow became a subject
in which Warhol’s fascination with death and
disaster is intermingled with his fascination
for celebrity more profoundly than anywhere else
in Warhol’s oeuvre.
Assembled by newspaper magnate and long-time
Warhol collector Peter Brant, the sixteen panel
work—each panel was 20 by 16 inches—came with an
aggressive $20 million-$30 million pre-sale
estimate. The polyphonic, four by four painting
which dramatically emphasizes the photographic
sources and the cinematic quality of Warhol’s
work is said to “unspool before us, as if frames
from a documentary film.”
Two bidders fought over the 6 ½ foot by 5 ½ foot
Pop masterpiece pushing the hammer fee up to $18
million, $2 million below the pre-sale minimum
estimate but enough to satisfy the consigner’s
secret minimum. With buyer’s premium, the work
was traded at $20.2 million.
JEFF KOONS
Pink Panther
Porcelain
41 by 20 1/2 by 19 inches
Executed in 1988
This work is the artist's proof from an edition
of three plus one artist's proof
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $16,882,500
SOTHEBY'S, N.Y.: "Contemporary Art Evening
Auction"
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #10
Illustration courtesy SOTHEBY'S IMAGES, INC.,
2011
Jeff Koons’s “Pink Panther” of 1988 marks a
serious point of departure for the artist, both
in terms of his use of materials and his move
from “readymade” material to high “craft”.
Part of the
artist’s breakout “Banality” series, with its
roots in Pop, Conceptual and Minimalist art, the
work is deemed as more creative and complex than
his earlier pieces and have become highly prized
luxury consumer products for collectors with
deep pockets and a hunger to acquire
“global-brand” trophies.
The elite edition of three plus one artist proof
is immensely illustrious. Koons and his dealers
have limited supply by placing these works with
important private and public collections. One
version is housed in the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, another resides in the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, and a third is with
none other than Peter Brant who paid $1.8
million in 1999 for the hapless-looking cartoon
cat being hugged by a buxom blonde. It was a
huge amount at the time and catapulted Koons’s
record at auction which up to that point had
topped out at $288,500.
The last remaining porcelain sculpture from the
edition was consigned by the uber-rich art
collector Benedikt Taschen. Known as a prescient
taste-maker who has collected and sold Koons’s
sculptures before, the high profile German art
publisher traded “Blue Diamond”, a giant blue
diamond ring for $11.8 million in 2007 and two
years later sold Koons’s “Large Vase of
Flowers”, also at Christie’s, for $5.7 million.
Both sales helped skyrocket the value of the
artist’s sculpture which elevated “slapstick
comedy” to the highest level of sophistication
and challenges the avant-garde’s claim to
originality and creativity, two of the prime
characteristics of postmodern artwork.
Unveiled at Koons’s seminal show “Banality”, the
“Pink Panther” cartoon character was originally
created for the eponymous 1963 Peter Seller’s
comedy film vehicle featuring the bungling
French police inspector Jacques Clouseau.
Clouseau, an idiot savant who is brilliant and
incredibly naïve at the same time, is the
perfect vehicle for the loveable cartoon
character. The Jayne Mansfield-like bombshell—a
high-culture version of a low-culture
archetype—can be said to define sexual fantasy
in the classic Pop cast while the panther
injects what the catalog notes describe as “a
synthesis of bewildering surprise and forlorn
disappointment, injecting the supposedly
inanimate toy with real emotional character,
making the artificial seem hyper-real.”
Koons’s casting of a cheap mass-produced stuffed
toy as a “tragicomic antihero” is a perfect
stand-in for a supremely postmodern narrative
which is “Pink Panther.” The flawless execution
of the contrasting textures of the porcelain
surfaces in combination with the dazzling vivid
colors “that reinforce the objects
artificiality” no doubt played a role in pushing
the value of the work to $15 million at the
hammer. The take-home price after buyer’s
premium reached just under $17 million.
LUCIO FONTANA
(Italian, 1899-1968)
Concetto Spaziale
Waterpaint on canvas
38 1/4 by 51 3/4 inches
Executed in 1965
Pre-sale est.: $6,000,000-$8,000,000
Price realized: $6,242,500
SOTHEBY'S, N.Y.: "Contemporary Art Evening
Auction"
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #39
Illustration courtesy SOTHEBY'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
Spearheading the “Spatialist” movement that rose
in New York City along with the Abstract
Expressionist movement, Lucio Fontana called for
the liberation of painting and sculpture from
“ossified convention” demanding that art explore
concepts of time and space. On a more literal
level Fontana’s calligraphic entrances transport
the viewer beyond the flat plane of the canvas
and into the sculptural realm where space is as
inherent a component as time.
Fontana’s method involves painting the canvas a
single hue, almost soaking it in shop-bought
emulsion paint and after a few hours, and still
slightly damp, he places the canvas on the easel
and makes his cuts (“deflowering”) with graceful
swoops of his Stanley knife. As a final step
after the canvas dries, he gently pries the cuts
with his fingers and “tapes” them in place from
the back with a piece of strong black gauze. The
result was a nonchalant audacious beauty that
destroyed one kind of special illusion while
creating another while nicely ignoring the
distinctions between decorative and fine art and
between plan and accident.
The twelve lyrically slender slashes of
Fontana’s blade in the image above depended on
the moment of chance in the performance. The
pattern of slashes is a bravura exhibition of
the unrepeatable moment, repeated; the immediacy
of the artist’s gesture is suspended forever.
With works such as “Concetto spaziale”, the cut
became Lucio Fontana’s emblematic contribution
to the evolution of Post-War art. Instead of
allowing the artist’s gesture to remain on the
surface he makes it penetrate through the
canvas.
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ANDY WARHOL
(American, 1928-1987)
Shadow (Red)
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
76 by 52 inches
Executed in 1978
Pre-sale est.: $700,000-$800,000
Price realized: $4,842,500
SOTHEBY'S, N.Y.: "Contemporary Art Evening
Auction"
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #20
Illustration courtesy SOTHEBY'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
When we think of Andy Warhol we immediately
think of images appropriated from the tabloid
front pages, celebrity headshots, American
consumer culture or pictures of death and
disaster. But Andy also explored images that
offered a refuge from the difficulties of
politics, sex, love and death. He was
simultaneously preoccupied in a career-long
quest to come up with an abstract art that would
make the “anti-pop mandarins of the New York art
world” look at his work in a more favorable
light. Andy made the Shadows paintings for those
who thought that representational art was a
reactionary glitch in the march of the 20th
century avant-garde toward pure abstraction.
Starting in 1978 with the “Shadows” and the
“Oxidation (Piss)” paintings, and moving through
to the 1980s with the Rorschachs” (1984) and in
the year prior to his premature death at 58 with
the “Camouflage” painting of 1986, the act of
deception, the fun of fooling people was not
only a strategy—it was a compulsion.
Warhol’s closest confidents were unnerved when
he ventured into abstraction, beseeching him,
“But you’re Andy Warhol. You have to paint
things.” The people closest to Warhol
acknowledged that he clearly aspired to be an
abstract artist, but according to Ronnie Cutrone
(Andy’s assistant at the time), “It had to be
some kind of sense of reality or humor.”
Warhol’s response was to paint something
ephemeral and “Shadows” was the answer.
Whether Warhol or Cutrone conceived this idea is
not certain, but Warhol employed the same
process that he used for portrait paintings:
Cutrone took some Polaroids of stage-lit mat
boards, then Warhol selected the images and had
acetates made and traced the screens. As he had
done for the Mao series, Warhol whipped up a
painterly surface with a large squeegee mop to
create the ground on which the Shadow tracings
were screened. The thick impasto of the surfaces
gave these works the imprimatur of “high art,”
and the dark shadows lent them the brooding
melancholy of profound meaning providing a stark
contrast to the bright colors that project
through the shadows.
Heiner Friedrick a German gallerist recently
transplanted to Soho in Manhattan proposed an
exhibition of Warhol’s “Shadows” at his West
Broadway gallery in January of 1979. For this
installation Warhol conceived of 102 canvases
abutting one another in a continuous sequence
around the gallery in a manner reminiscent of
his 1963 Elvis installation at the Ferus Gallery
in Los Angeles.
Typically, Warhol was self-deprecating and
offhand in describing the “Shadows” paintings
and, in particular, he described their
installation at the Heiner Friedrich gallery as
“disco décor.” He even used the installation as
a backdrop to a fashion shoot in his magazine
“Interview.”
His “Shadow (Red)” at once revisits, critiques,
pokes fun at, and takes in surprising new
directions the works of some of the major
abstract painters from the 1940s and 1950s,
especially Franz Kline. Sharply delineated vivid
black forms on the left turn ragged and seem
vaporous and drift across the blood red surface
like a dark mist. There is something vaguely
menacing about Warhol’s “Shadows”. His shadowy
forms are enticing and luscious but also
suggest, however obliquely and implicitly,
encroaching blackness which might contain
shuddering intimations of mortality and
eternity.
All 102 panels were purchased as a single entity
by the Lone Star Foundation (now the Dia Center
for the Arts) for $20,000 apiece or just over $2
million. “Shadow (Red)” sold for $4.8 million
making Dia’s installation worth just under $500
million at today’s prices.
JEAN-MICHEL
BASQUIAT (American, 1960-1988)
Eroica 1
Acrylic and oilstick on paper mounted on canvas
90 7/8 by 88 3/4 inches
Executed in 1988
Pre-sale est.: $3,500,000-$4,500,000
Price realized: $5,906,500
SOTHEBY'S, N.Y.: "Contemporary Art Evening
Auction"
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #49
Illustration courtesy SOTHEBY'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
In the last two years of his life Basquiat’s
reality was descending into turmoil. His
greatest works, as in the case of the above
painting, are firmly anchored in his own history
and result in compositions where a deeply
personal, sometimes disturbing
stream-of-consciousness floods across the
canvas.
He had broken with his long-term dealer Bruno
Bischofberger to be represented by Tony Shafrazi
and in addition to his profound upset over the
death of his friend Andy Warhol in 1987,
Basquiat was plagued with thwarted romances and
drug abuse.
Tony Shafrazi’s cousin Vrej Baghoomian, held the
important and last show of Basquiat’s work
during his lifetime at his Prince and Broadway
gallery in April 1988 in which “Eroica 1” was a
feature. It is impossible not to read the
painting as a premonition of his death,
particularly given that the artist staged a
photograph of himself in front of the piece with
the ominous text “Man Dies” over his shoulder
and his drug-related pallor taking center stage
for the viewer.
By the late 1980s his works were imbued with
words and lists that were both labels for and
representations of the world; repetitions,
misspellings, crossed out letters, circled and
underlined words were deliberate and meant to
invite closer scrutiny by the viewer. The
incorporation of words in Basquiat’s work stems
from both the artist’s earlier life as a
graffiti artist, and from his love of books and
music.
Basquiat often used symbols in his paintings and
the catalog notes for this lot identify his
favorite book as being “Symbol Sourcebook” by
Henry Dreyfus. In “Eroica 1”, he incorporates
the talon symbol, a cryptic symbol used by hobos
that meant ‘man dies’ and was used to warn each
other of potential dangers. This painting, like
“Riding with Death” and others from the last
year of Basquiat’s life encapsulates the
complexities of the artist’s unraveling life and
his intensified obsession with death.
Beethoven’s “Sympathy No. 3 in E flat Major” is
also known as “Eroica” which Basquiat is
undoubtedly referencing in this late work. The
catalog notes that the second movement of the
symphony, the funeral march for the fallen hero,
“… resonates with Basquiat’s ‘Eroica’ which was
played at Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral.
It is perhaps coincidental, although a
fascinating connection back to the present work,
in which Basquiat writes ‘FDR blues’ in the
lower right quadrant.”
FDR Blues is itself a musical reference to the
blues musician Champion Jack Dupree’s record of
the same title. Dupree, the African-American
blues pianist who moved around America until he
settled in Detroit where he met the boxer Joe
Louis—another hero Basquiat references—painted
him in other works. Dupree, and other
African-Americans supported FDR and his “New
Deal” which produced jobs and promoted equality
for minorities.
The complex nature of this work—executed at the
end of his all too brief but highly productive
nine year career—culminates everything Basquiat
stood for.
A Basquiat collector himself, Johnny Depp aptly
observed as early as 2003, “However crude the
image may be or how fast it appears to have been
executed—every line, mark, scratch, drip, foot
and fingerprint, word, letter, rip and
imperfection is there because he allowed it to
be there.” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Fondation Dina
Vierny, Musee Maillot, “Jean-Michel Basquiat,”
2003, p. 19.)
Christie’s
ANDY WARHOL
(American 1928-1987)
Self-Portrait (blue)
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, in four
parts
Overall: 40 by 32 inches
Executed: 1963-1964
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $38,442,500
CHRISTIE'S, N.Y.: "Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale"
#2440
May 11, 20011
Lot #22
Ilustration courtesy CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
It was legendary dealer Ivan Karp of the Leo
Castelli Gallery who was the first to suggest to
Warhol to paint his first self-portrait. “You
know people want to see you. Your looks are
responsible for a certain part of your fame,
they feed the imagination.” (I. Karp as sited in
C. Ratcliff, “Andy Warhol”, New York, 1983,
p.52). And it was Karp who was responsible for
taking Florence Barron, a Detroit-based patron
of the arts, to Andy Warhol’s studio in 1963 to
discuss a portrait commission.
Warhol had just completed the multi-panel
portrait of Ethel Scull and suggested a
six-panel portrait of Florence. She famously
responded: “Nobody knows me. I am a nothing.
They want to see you.” So they made a deal. He
would paint her portrait, but only after he
created his portrait for her. And that is how it
came about that Warhol painted his first major
self-portrait.
In an interview with the collector’s son Guy
Barron, Brett Gorvy, the International Co-Head
of Post-War and Contemporary Art and Warhol
scholar discovered that Mrs. Barron had paid
only sixteen hundred dollars for the four-panel
acrylic and silkscreen ink icon on canvas.
Gorvy states of the work: “It was the first time
that he presents for posterity his
self-transformation into the high priest of Pop
and the arbiter of 1960s cool—the silver hair,
the Wayfarer sunglasses, the dispassionate
stare: the artist as enigmatic Superstar.”
Brett’s essay “The Birth of Cool,” in a special
catalog devoted only to this lot, compares
Warhol’s self-portrait alongside Egon Schiele’s,
Pablo Picasso’s and Francis Bacon’s, three of
whom have sold works privately or at auction for
over $100 million.
“Andy Warhol’s four-paneled self-portrait from
1963-1964, is acclaimed in every Warhol
monograph and exhibition catalog as his first
seminal self-portrait. It ranks not only as one
of the most iconic and enigmatic portrayals of
an artist’s own image, but its multi-panel
format and use of mechanically-produced
photographic imagery—the automated 25-cent
“photomat” strip—are also acknowledged as the
most radical advancements in portraiture since
Cubism.”
The Warhol work—in four varying shares of
blue—went on to sell in a riveting and
unprecedented 16-minute competition between
tenacious clients on the phones with private
dealer Philippe Segalot, and Christie’s honcho
Brett Gorvy. The painting was offered for $14
million to start and rose in $1 million
increments until it reached $24 million where
Segalot and Gorvy battled it out sometimes in
unconventional increments of $100,000 (it’s
usually at $250,000-$500,000 when bidding
reaches $10 million) with the packed Sotheby’s
salesroom hissing and booing and clapping and
laughing—until Brett’s client successfully
hammered at $34.2 million ($38.4 with buyer’s
premium). Warhol’s first major artwork
chronicling his earliest experiments with
trademarking his own image, turned out to be the
number one lot of the spring season.
MARK ROTHKO
(American, 1903-1970)
Untitled No. 17
Oil on canvas
93 by 76 inches
Executed in 1961
Pre-sale est.: $18,000,000-$22,000,000
Price realized: $33,682,500
CHRISTIE'S, N.Y.: "Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale"
#2440
May 11, 2011, Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y.
Lot #8
Illustration courtesy CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
Mark Rothko is a complicated artist to talk
about because he is working completely
non-figuratively, completely eliminating all
elements of Surrealism or mythic imagery,
providing us with a nonobjective composition of
amorphous forms for which the artist is so
championed.
No doubt Rothko had amassed a tremendous backlog
of information about the artists who preceded
him and have taken bits and pieces from them all
but his mature work is instantly recognizable as
a “Rothko” painting… as unique as a Bacon, or a
Warhol.
From the early 1950s until his death by suicide
in 1970, Rothko made a series of works in which
any suggestion of figuration was abandoned in
favor of superimposed rectangular shapes of
color, with cloudy edges, that possessed an
evanescence and incandescence unique to his art.
Bathed in a painterly mist, these indeterminate
forms project their hues out of the pictorial
space, inviting the viewer to contemplate the
space he had created.
The seductive power of Rothko’s canvases, built
upon the elimination of line in favor of a
blurred demarcation of color forms, is
powerfully felt in “Untitled #17.” Here veils of
a rich red and an opalescent pink are layered on
top of a yolk yellow ground stretched to the
perimeter of the canvas, allowing the ground to
frame the dazzling interaction of color within.
Such color juxtapositions achieve an alchemy of
optical mystery, with the evanescent vapors of
red, yellow and pink evoking a myriad of
contradictory responses.
Oil paint seems to have been soaked into the
present work, achieving a finish akin to the
effects of watercolor bleeding into paper.
Rothko fleshes out his color bands with
feathery, liquid brushstrokes that further
define these passages as densely painted areas.
Such brushwork serves to establish the
amorphous, evanescent forms that appear to float
on top of each other. Rothko’s rectangular
shapes hover on the subtly diffused canvas,
lending each shape a halo-like effect that
serves to simultaneously radiate out and recede
into the picture plane. The artist has
calibrated these color fields in relation to the
proportions of the internal forms and the
overall scale of the canvas.
As others have said about Rothko’s prime works,
the viewer is not presented with an empty
pattern merely to satiate the eye, but rather
invents a portal into another dimension into
which each individual can project their own
feelings and emotions.
This apparently unknown canvas by Rothko—it is
not listed in the artist’s catalogue raisonne,
nor has it appeared in any books or in any
exhibitions—was vetted by Christie’s experts who
verified its authenticity with a London art
historian and is being considered for inclusion
in an addendum to the 1998 catalog raisonne.
Acquired directly from the artist by the present
owner, the shaky provenance of the work did
little to cool bidding on the almost eight foot
tall canvas. It hammered at thirty million
dollars well over its high estimate of
twenty-two million. Take home price with buyer’s
premium pushed the work to $33.7 million making
it the second highest lot at the house behind
the early Warhol self-portrait and second
overall for the season. Still, the Rothko could
not touch what is referred to as the Rockefeller
Rothko that established the world record for the
artist near the peak of the market in May of
2007. That painting—which was purchased by David
Rockefeller in the 1960s for $11,000—brought
$72.8 million, and is the yardstick for all
future Rothko’s to come on the market.
ANDY WARHOL
(American, 1928-1987)
Self-Portrait (red)
Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas
108 1/4 by 106 1/2 inches
Executed: 1986
Pre-sale est.: $30,000,000-$40,000,000
Price realized: $27,522,500
CHRISTIE'S, N.Y.: "Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale"
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #16
Illustration courtesy CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
“It was years since he had done a great
self-portrait, and believe it or not, at the end
of his life, nobody had a good word to say for
him. Whether they were august museum directors,
or collectors, or the general public he was
considered a has-been. It was considered that he
had done nothing good or important since Mao… in
1972. So I felt that it was behoven on me… if I
was going to work with him, to make a great
proposal to him for a really important work, to
propose to him the self-portraits and that to be
a colossal success. And you know they went all
over the world to great collections and museums.
There’s one hanging in the Metropolitan, there’s
one hanging in the Guggenheim…” –Anthony D’Offay,
Tate Shots, Video, Tate Modern, London 2002; Lot
#16 cat. notes, p.80.
Warhol made two versions of this momentous
image, the last self-portraits before his
untimely death just months later in February of
1987. The version here, with Andy’s hair
splaying out to the left was chosen and
commissioned by D’Offay. But Andy ultimately
chose another image where the gaze was slightly
more severe, the artist’s eyes appearing more
deeply sunken below his spiked hair which stood
straight up—at once both flamboyant and
shocking.
When Warhol took the finished paintings to
D’Offay—thinking the dealer would not remember
which image he had selected from the Polaroids
months earlier—the dealer immediately saw the
difference and implored Andy to re-do the series
for the exhibition using his original choice
with fuller features and a less severe overall
effect. That is why there are two sets of the
1986 self-portraits—referred to as the
“fright-wig” portraits.
By portraying himself through different decades
of his life, Warhol became the most important
subject matter of his many portraits.
The artist’s first mature self-portrait was the
quartet, made from a strip of four images from
1963—the house’s top seller this season (see
above)—in which his appearance is masked by dark
glasses and the graininess of the then new
screen process. This was followed immediately by
a subsequent small series in 1964, similarly
based on a photo-booth photograph but with only
one image removed from a photo-booth strip (lot
#34 of this sale which rang up $6.8 million).
By 1966, the year of the third great series of
self-images, he was a star in his own right
whose constructed public persona was almost as
famous as his artistic production. Propelled
into the public limelight, Warhol captured on
canvas his role as the most alluring and elusive
star in this most fertile site of artistic
self-discovery.
The introspective hand to mouth pose fading into
the shadows is at once revealing and mysterious.
Warhol is showing only a particular side of
himself while still concealing something from
the viewer.
It was not until 20 years later—in the series to
which the above lot belongs—that Warhol would
find an equivalently powerful self-image. An
image that could be argued to be the most
disconnected from reality because of its
enormous size, the hypnotic intensity of the
gaze and the fact that the artist’s neck is
invisible and the head, with its oddly lit
nimbus of hair that seems posed forever over his
head seems to convey an awareness of his own
impending death.
Last May, a 108 inch by 108 inch purple on black
“fright-wig” self-portrait (with the hair
straight up) sold at Sotheby’s for $32.6
million. This year’s 106 ¾ inch by 106 ½ inch
red on black “fright-wig” self-portrait (with
the hair shooting out to the left) sold for
$27.5 million.
The $5 million difference in price more than
likely reflected the provenance of the work and
the stronger connection to the existential
nature of the portrait. Last year’s
self-portrait was de-accessed by the designer
and mega-Warhol collector Tom Ford from Gucci
fame. But it might also be for the preference of
the more severe Warhol version and the choice of
purple as more regal than the crimson, blood red
of this year’s model.
What is unclear is whether dealers Larry
Gagosian or Jose Mugrabi—who were sitting side
by side in the auction salesroom—won the work.
Both are bullish on Warhol. Jose Mugrabi is
reported to own 800 Warhols and Gagosian has
been buying Warhol at both auction and private
sale. During the bidding for this portrait, they
were leaning toward each other in conversation
just before the gavel came down. Both men are
notorious for using very subtle head and/or hand
gestures rather than hoisting a paddle to
indicate a bid. Either way, the Warhol portrait
masterwork—from a series that was undervalued
until last year’s success at Sotheby’s—will no
doubt reappear again on the auction block as
prices for the Pop Prince’s works continue to
spiral upwards
FRANCIS BACON
(British, b. Ireland, 1909-1992)
Three Studies for Self-Portrait
Triptych--Oil on canvas
Each: 14 by 12 inches
Executed: 1974
Pre-sale est.: $16,000,000-$20,000,000
Price realized: $25,282,500
CHRISTIE'S, N.Y.: "Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale"
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #36
Illustration courtesy CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
Executed at the zenith of Bacon’s career when
his creative ambition was freed from the
obstacle of commercial success, “Three Studies
for Self-Portrait” is one of the most
psychologically compelling and physically
engaging works of Bacon’s near fifty year
career.
Drawn perhaps from Eadweard Muybridge’s
sequences of analytical photographs on the
motion of animals and human beings, the shifting
profiles and features of Bacon’s portrait heads
appealed to the artist because, as he once
explained, “I see every image all the time in a
shifting way and almost in shifting sequences.
So that one can take it from more or less what
is called ordinary figuration to a very, very
far point.” (as told to David Sylvester in
1975).
Endowing the complete work with a powerful sense
of motion, the work explores the alternating
moods and expressions and an atmosphere of
uncomfortable and shifting psychological unease.
Creating a fragility and life that is seldom
achieved in Bacon’s single panel portraits, the
triptych forces the viewer to engage in the
struggle of identity along with the artist.
In “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait” the
catalog notes state that the material and the
non-material meet “… in what appears to be three
fleeting flash-bulb moments that hauntingly
capture in paint the very essence and vitality
of Bacon’s psychological and physical presence.”
Although each portrait clearly differs from the
others, the radiating lines, smudges and blurred
distortions of all three seem to communicate
with one another between the paintings so that
something of Bacon’s living presence, his
‘emanation’ perhaps, seems to majestically
infuse the work.
Like the other post-war 20th Century icon of
self-portraiture Andy Warhol, Bacon worked
mainly from photographs. His self-portraits were
also often drawn from photo-booth portraits that
he made of himself, but Bacon “… would also
spend hours studying his own features in the
mirror.”
“According to John Richardson, he would even
deliberately let his stubble grow for three or
four days and then using Max Factor pancake
make-up rehearse the brush strokes and
distortions he intended to make in the painting
on his face in front of the mirror. Presenting
three seemingly sequential images of Bacon’s
face isolated against a rich purple background,
this cosmetic aspect seems especially prominent
in this work, for here, Bacon has heightened the
paintings’ already rich variety of color by
applying a sequence of striations in orange,
turquoise and magenta in places by printing
paint marks made by soaking either his sweater
or a piece of corduroy with orange paint and
impressing it onto the surface of these
otherwise completed portraits. In this way, the
final act of creation in “Three Studies for a
Self-Portrait” echoes in some respects the
prolonged and intensive process of putting on
make-up and of self-examination and
self-exploration that went into Bacon’s
preparation for making such an image.”
The triptych’s three works in oil on canvas
hammered at $22.5 million, $25.3 million with
buyer’s premium, an impressive amount by any
standard but miles off the artist’s majestic
“Triptych” from 1976 which sold at Sotheby’s to
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich for $86
million in the spring of 2008.
CY TWOMBLY
(American, 1928-2011)
Untitled
Oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas
48 by 55 inches
Executed: 1967
Pre-sale est.: $10,000,000-$15,000,000
Price realized: $15,202,500
CHRISTIE'S, N.Y.: "Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #25
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
Illustration courtesy CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD.,
2011
At a time when many of his generation were
turning to contemporary popular culture for
inspiration, Cy Twombly followed his forefathers
in interrogating the traditional sources of
Western art, looking back to Greek and Roman
Antiquity and to the grandeur and decadence of
the High Renaissance courtly love cycles for
inspiration. But following a brief period of
creative drought in the mid-1960s, 1966 saw
Twombly abandon the emotive use of color to
embark upon a cycle of matte grey canvases in
search of a leaner, altogether more expressive
clarity. Extraneous literary and historical
concerns were cast aside as the artist sought to
channel the vitality of his wrist towards
exploring the expressive possibilities of
autonomous rhythmic repetitions.
These Minimalist-looking paintings—now known as
the “blackboard” paintings—significantly
departed from the schismatic and spontaneous
lyricism of Twombly’s earlier Roman paintings,
and are distinguishable for their strict
graphic, regularity, severe formal restraint and
often-apparent emptiness.
Executed between 1966 and 1971, these new works
were dubbed “blackboard” paintings because
classroom blackboards or a child’s
primer—temporal and highly graphic conveyers of
information—inspired them. Twombly also painted
them predominately on dark grey backgrounds that
resembled blackboard slate.
Painted in 1967, “Untitled” was exhibited in the
autumn of the same year at Leo Castelli’s
gallery in New York where, after the recent
debacle of Twombly’s flamboyantly
expressionistic “Nine Discources on Commodus”
exhibition, critics saw these grey-ground
paintings as a necessary purging from his
previous Baroque elaboration. They were
immediately hailed as a much-needed return to
form.
The catalog notes elaborate: “This process
closely echoes the Palmer method of handwriting
often taught to American children when they are
first learning to write. This extremely strict,
near mechanical technique required pupils to
practice handwriting drills on a daily basis,
moving neither fingers nor wrists but only their
arms. "
Indeed, the Palmer method was the technique that
Twombly himself had learned. Now Twombly worked
in the opposite direction of the children who
learned to impose a rigid order and a rational
discipline on their hand. He adopted the
technique of perpetually repeating a looped line
to increase the fluid and graphic energy of his
line while still maintaining continuum
throughout. In this work especially, the artist
controls equilibrium, layering the line
sequentially, maintaining a regular height and
scale of the loops running throughout its
horizontal progression. Twombly’s strong,
innovative and powerful line builds and pulsates
like steady oncoming waves.
Phillips de Pury & Company
ANDY WARHOL
(American, 1928-1987)
Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz)
Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen
40 by 40 inches
Executed in 1963
Pre-sale est.: $25,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $26,962,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: "Part 1
Contemporary Art"
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #8
Illustration courtesy PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.
IMAGES LTD., 2011
Once again Andy took the top slot in the spring
New York auctions this time at Phillips de Pury
& Company where “Liz #5”—one of 13 he made of
Elizabeth Taylor in various colors—rose quickly
to $24 million at the hammer, $26.9 million with
the house’s buyer’s premium.
“Liz #5” realized $3.4 million more than actor
Hugh Grant received for his Warhol “Liz” at
Christie’s in November of 2007 when the market
was almost at it’s peak. It’s been reported that
Grant paid $3.6 million for his “Liz” at
Sotheby’s in November of 2001.
Both 40 by 40 inch works embody the electric
artificiality that made Warhol’s brand of Pop
art so extraordinary. Some might say that the
brilliant turquoise-hued phthalo green “Liz”
that Phillips was offering, had a more perfectly
registered screen, rendering Taylor’s halo of
coal black hair slightly more volumizing, and
hence richer than the “Liz” Hugh Grant
de-accessed.
Beyond Warhol’s mastery of technique with “Liz
#5”, the painting came equipped with an
impeccable provenance. The 1963 Pop masterwork
was snapped up by powerhouse art dealer Ileana
Sonnabend soon after its execution and had been
part of her personal collection for over four
decades up until her death in 2007.
“Liz #5” also has had a storied exhibition
history. The silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen
painting has been in museum shows in Basel,
Berlin, Barcelona, Hamburg, Sydney, Melbourne,
Venice, Turin as well as a handful of cities in
the U.S.A. including New York’s Stable Gallery,
Sidney Janis Gallery and the Leo Castelli
Gallery. More recently it was shown at the
uptown Gagosian Gallery in an exhibition called
“Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection.”
Warhol’s “Liz #5”, among other masterpieces from
the 1960s and 1970s, were sold in 2008
reportedly to Larry Gagosian a year after
Ileana’s death. The Sonnabend heirs reportedly
yielded $600 million from this sale. “Liz #5”
was among this group of paintings. Hedge-fund
billionaire and SAC Capital head honcho Steven
A. Cohen—presently being investigated by Federal
prosecutors in an insider trading
inquiry—reportedly purchased the Liz Taylor
Warhol from Gagosian and was the consignor of
the work at the Phillips sale.
To Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor epitomized
everything that fascinated him. She was
shockingly beautiful and devastatingly alluring,
yet her life was full of both tragedy and
scandal. In one image, many of the central
themes of his oeuvre: celebrity, wealth,
privilege, sex, death, Hollywood, icons of
American life are all there in spades.
Closely related to the candy-colored Marilyn
paintings that he executed in the previous year,
“Liz #5” asserts a radiant and disarming
presence. The picture’s “neo-folk” energy has
affinities with the sacred icons Warhol knew
during his early years of worship at the St.
John Chrysoston Byzantine Catholic Church in the
impoverished Pittsburgh neighborhood where he
grew up.
“For Andy,” observed art historian Jane
Dillenberger, “[his] earliest experience of art
was of religious art—and it may not have been
very good art, but unlike for many Protestants
or those outside the churches, whose experience
of religious art may have been limited to
museums, for Andy, art and religion were linked
from a very early age.”
Like the paintings of Marilyn and Jackie, “Liz
#5” portrays a vulnerable woman who
spectacularly combines fame and tragedy, love
and sorrow. Indeed, as in Warhol’s paintings of
Jackie Kennedy smiling, the picture is all the
more powerful because of the viewer’s ironic
knowledge of the doom that will soon grip the
seemingly happy and enviable person in the
photograph.
ANDY WARHOL
(American, 1928-1987)
Flowers
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
48 by 48 inches
Executed in 1964
Pre-sale est.: $8,000,000-$12,000,000
Price realized: $8,146,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: "Part 1
Contemporary Art"
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #21
Illustration courtesy PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.
IMAGES LTD., 2011
One of the indelible images of twentieth-century
art, “Flowers” was made between June and
September 1964 at Warhol’s East 47th Street
silver studio—which became a production line for
“Flower” paintings of different sizes.
Throughout this phase of his artistic
development, Warhol pioneered and refined the
screenprinting process that he had made his own.
The first artist to make extensive use of this
revolutionary process, Warhol was attracted by
its affinity with the mass-produced image-making
machines of consumer culture and by its
anonymous, luxuriously slick facture which
effaced the individual hand of the artist.
Each canvas was made up of three distinct
phases: firstly, the forms of the flowers are
stenciled, masked and the colored paints applied
by hand onto the primed canvas; once dry, the
flowers are masked and the green acrylic of the
surrounded ground is applied with a wide brush
in broad swatches, leaving barely discernable
traces of the artist’s brush; finally the
screen-print image is applied over the dried
image.
The idea to make flowers the subject of a major
series was apparently suggested to Warhol by
Henry Geldzahler, then curator of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. By choosing to
depict the disarmingly innocuous motif of
flowers, Warhol was consciously and willfully
engaging with an established canon of still-life
painting stretching back to bygone centuries.
“With the flower paintings, Andy was just trying
a different subject matter. In a funny way, he
was kind of repeating the history of art. It was
like, now we’re doing my Flower period! Like
Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s flowers, the
genre.” (Gerand Malanga as cited in “A Year in
the Life of Andy Warhol,” New York, 2003, p.74).
The source of the Warhol image appropriated for
this series first appeared in the June 1964
issue of “Modern Photography”, intended to
illustrate the varying visual effect of
different exposure times and filter settings. No
doubt the seriality of the images held immediate
appeal for Warhol, however, it was through a
sequence of interventions and
manipulations—cropping the image and rotating
one of the flowers 180 degrees—that Warhol
derived his final composition.
The canvas is meticulously executed, using the
same composition of the four hibiscus flowers
against a green and black background. Each
painting is uniquely colored—their petals in
jewel-like vibrant hues of phthalo green, rich
aubergine and opalescent white.
After the “Death and Disaster” series of
1962-1963—which depicted sensational images of
electric chairs, suicides and horrendous car
crashes—the motif of four blossoming hibiscus
flowers appears almost anodyne, an antidote to
the horror and violence of previous imagery.
Despite its apparent decorative quality,
however, which doubtless appealed to Warhol in
his program to make a truly popular art form,
the motif is laced with the tragedy and
morbidity that permeates Warhol’s oeuvre.
Forever trying to capture the intangible
transience of fame, the motif of the flourishing
hibiscus serves as a metaphor for the brevity
and unsustainability of celebrity—the flash of
beauty that suddenly becomes tragic under the
viewer’s gaze. Exuberant now, but soon to
perish, the flower can also be seen on a more
generic level as a symbol of the fragility of
life, a haunting contemplation of death that is
never far removed from Warhol’s work.
ANDY WARHOL &
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (American, 1928-1987) &
(American, 1960-1988)
Third Eye
Acrylic on canvas
80 ¾ by 128 ¾ inches
Executed: 1985
Pre-sale est.: $2,000,000-$3,000,000
Price realized: $7,200,000
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.: “Part 1 Contemporary
Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #20
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST DUO
Illustration
courtesy PHILLIPS de PURY & CO. IMAGES LTD.,
2011
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol were from
different generations and different sociological
backgrounds. They had radically different
painting styles and equally different
aesthetics. They were at different stages of
their lives and different levels of their own
development. They began their friendship just as
Warhol’s career was beginning to calm down from
the frenzy of the 1960s and ‘70s and Basquiat’s
career was beginning to explode. Somewhere
though, they found a common ground and
established a healthy relationship.
Andy was amazed by the ease with which Jean
composed and constructed his paintings, and was
constantly surprised by the never-ending flow of
new ideas. Jean respected Andy’s philosophy and
was in awe of his accomplishments and mastery of
color and images.
Most of their collaborations were large scaled
works measuring approximately 80 inches by 130
inches (or larger) with Warhol’s contribution
featuring heraldically hand-painted enlargements
of advertising images, headlines, and company
logos, but partly in painterly brushstrokes,
similar to that seen in some of his works of
1961 and early 1962. Basquiat was usually the
second painter to work on the canvases and had
fused his spontaneous, expressive, and effusive
iconography with that of Warhol.
It was the brilliant dealer Bruno Bischofberger
who had the idea for the two artists to combine
both of their distinctive brands of art making
in a series called “Collaborations” begun in
1984.
By 1983, Andy had given up drawing and
hand-painting and it was Basquiat who got him to
return to that. Basquiat said to Bischofberger
“Andy is such a fantastic painter! His hand
painting is as good as it was in the early
years. I am going to try to convince him to
start painting by hand again” (B. Bischofberger,
“Collaborations and Reflections on/and
Experiences with Basquiat, Clemente and Warhol.”
“The Andy Warhol Show,” Milan, 2004, p.43).
Phillips de Pury & Company’s catalog places
their relationship in context: “In the
“Collaborations” each artist contributed both
the materials and styles for which they were
best known. Though each of the artist’s styles
were worlds apart, when combined they created
bold, powerful works. Both artists looked to
popular culture for inspiration—Warhol to
advertising and celebrities, Basquiat to street
life, jazz musicians and professional athletes.
Though teaming up with the legendary Warhol was
the stuff of dreams for Basquiat, the
collaboration was mutually beneficial, if not
more so for Warhol than Basquiat whose career
had been sidelined recently. As Ronnie Cutrone
said: “Jean-Michel thought he needed Warhol’s
fame, and Andy thought he needed Jean-Michel’s
new blood. Jean-Michel gave Andy a rebellious
image again.” (V. Bockris, “Warhol: The
Biography, Cambridge, 2003 p.461-2).
In the “Collaborations” Warhol would start most
of the paintings… he would put something very
concrete or recognizable like a newspaper
heading or a product logo and then Basquiat
would sort of deface it and then do more work on
it. They used to paint over each other’s work
all the time. Warhol’s bold color blocking and
Basquiat’s frenzied mark-making created a moving
tension between the two styles and across the
canvas.
“A third eye represents a deeply mystical and
spiritual belief in enlightenment and intuition
and is typically associated with imagination and
creativity. The present painting, so aptly
titled, is a striking homage to the styles that
made both artists so famous. There is a
distinctly visceral and carnal feel to this
painting with an undeniable focus on actual
consumption. Warhol’s painted advertisements of
prime cuts of meat form a visual tension with
Basquiat’s anatomical depiction of a fractured
skeleton and its organs. Basquiat’s carefully
chosen words, “Chewing”, “Meat” and
“Sausage”—some clearly visible, some crossed
out, heighten the dynamism of the canvas. He
once said “‘I cross out words so you will see
them more: the fact that they are obscured makes
you want to read them.”’ This constant adding
and changing technique not only epitomized
Basquiat’s own personal technique but also the
central theme of the shared “Collaborations”.
The giant twisted pretzel in the background is
also no less evocative, perhaps a nod to New
York City street life.” (Phillips catalog notes
for the “Third Eye”, lot #20).
Doubling the
pre-sale high estimate the painting easily
became the new record for their collaborative
paintings, and generated the most excitement of
the evening.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN
(American, 1923-1997)
Still Life with Mirror
Oil and Magna on canvas
96 1/2 by 54 inches
Executed in 1972
Pre-sale est.: $6,000,000-$8,000,000
Price realized: $6,578,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: "Part 1
Contemporary Art"
#NY01011
May 12, 2011
Lot #23
Illustration courtesy PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.
IMAGES LTD., 2011
During the 1970s, Lichtenstein eschewed the
comic book imagery and familiar household items
that had dominated his work of the 1960s and
catapulted him to international fame. The artist
turned toward more esoteric subjects inspired
instead by the halls of museums and the pages of
art books. Moving from “low” to “high” artistic
sources, from all forms of mass produced printed
materials like newspapers, sale circulars and
newsstand publications, he created a number of
series based on major avant-garde movements of
20th century art.
One might argue that Lichtenstein was tainting
the canon works by older artists with techniques
associated with manufacture and the masses. All
these works drag what was revered as so-called
“high art” into the realm of vulgarity of the
tabloid, the billboard and the magazine.
High art had long provided Lichtenstein with
subject matter however, as was seen in his
diagram version of Cezanne’s portrait of his
wife of 1962. Over the following years, the
haystacks and cathedrals of Monet, the still
life paintings of the Cubists and the Purists,
Surrealism, Expressionism—all these figures and
movements would fall prey to the clinical
precision of Lichtenstein’s idiosyncratic style.
“A deceptively simple interior scene, “Still
Life with Mirror”, (1972) is composed of a table
on which a bowl of fruit, a coffee cup and the
verso of a painting sit, construing a
foreground. In the background of the image, is
an oval mirror to the left on a light blue wall
and bound on the upper right by yellow draping
cloths. These elements seem mundane and
nondescript, “rivaled banality” (D. Waldman “Roy
Lichtenstein” Guggenheim Museum, 1993 p. 213).
But they are a Lichtenstein Stretcher Frame
Painting, a Lichtenstein Oval Mirror and a
Lichtenstein Bowl of Fruit, as indicated in the
title. They are actual works that Lichtenstein
had previously painted, now taking part in an
ensemble that itself would become a painting.
The representation of these “things” are akin to
platonic ideals of a mirror, a table, a curtain,
a stretcher frame, a banana, grapefruit, apple,
grape, cup and saucer. Reduced to elemental
shape, three primary colors of the high
modernism of Mondrian are exercised in support
of a representational scene that is undermined
by its own "flatness" (auction catalog notes for
this lot.)
RICHARD PRINCE
(American, b. 1949)
Wayward Nurse (Crashed)
Acrylic and inkjet on canvas
65 1/2 by 50 1/8 inches
Executed in 2006-2010
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $4,562,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: "Part 1
Contemporary Art"
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #14
Illustration courtesy PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.
IMAGES LTD., 2011
Richard Prince has been mining images from the
low culture of the mass media, advertising and
entertainment since the late ‘70s when he worked
for the tear-sheet department for “Time/Life” in
midtown Manhattan. Beginning with advertising
images of jewelry, furniture and male and female
models from various print campaigns in the late
‘70s, and then famously moving on to one of
America’s most recognizable images of itself in
the Marlboro Man’s ever self-reliant cowboy,
Prince understood that isolating and removing
mass-culture imagery offered an opportunity to
examine various codes of representation
including gender and class. By
re-contextualizing them by severe cropping or
removing any ad copy or simply by
re-photographing a black and white image on
color film, the artist found ways to blur
meaning and to create a critical dialogue with
the objects created to satisfy the perceived
needs of the expanding American consumer.
Playing the role of director, Prince has been
appropriating and then later submerging these
powerful cultural conventions through the
various fine art mediums of photography,
painting and sculpture with the agenda of
exposing universal cultural conventions.
Richard Prince’s “nurse” paintings however,
seemed to have caught the cognoscenti by
surprise, garnering a tremendous amount of
attention since 2005 when “A Nurse
Involved”—executed in 2002—broke the one million
dollar mark at Phillips de Pury & Co.’s spring
contemporary art auction in New York. Selling
for $80,000-$100,000 just three years prior at
the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, the
ink-jet print and acrylic on canvas became the
poster child for the surge in prices leading up
to the art market’s summer of 2008 peak.
Just sixteen months later, Prince’s “Tender
Nurse”, 2002 sold for $2.3 million (also at
Phillips) in New York. One year after that,
almost to the day “Piney Woods Nurse”, (2002),
broke out with a $6.1 million payday at
Christie’s at Rockefeller Plaza. “Man Crazy
Nurse #2” (2002) followed in the spring of 2008
at the Plaza again with a $7.4 million payday.
The peak reached its summit on July 1st when the
aptly titled “Overseas Nurse” hit $8.5 million
in London just before the financial markets and
the real estate bubble began to implode and the
line of willing buyers ready to hand over
whatever it took evaporated. As the fall of 2008
came to a close, Prince’s “nurse” paintings came
back down to price levels attained in 2007 in
the $3-$3.5 million range.
Prince’s melding of the flotsam and jetsam of
our modern, media-saturated age—in this case the
fetishized and sexualized exploits of nurses
from the covers of the pulpy-underbelly of
mainstream paperbacks—coupled with the
scavenging touches of visual language from the
Abstract-Expressionists, especially Jackson
Pollock, Cy Twombly and Philip Guston, proved
irresistible to Mr. Prince.
As with all his nurse paintings, Prince
dramatically expands the pocketbook-size book
cover to a heroic style, completely transforming
the viewer’s encounter with the melodramatic,
world emblematized therein.
“Wayward Nurse”, a work completed only last
year, creates that striking balance between the
good and the wicked, the lustful and the
naughty. The high aspirations of the first
specifically American art movement to achieve
worldwide influence (Ab-Ex) with the low visual
iconography of the horror/slasher B-movie,
resonate off each other to create the perfect
cocktail. The dark and gory side of nursing,
hinted at by the blood-like burgundy and crimson
paint that trickle down the nurse’s arms soaking
her dress, coupled with those empathic eyes that
seem made to soothe the sick make for a
compelling spectacle that is as provocative and
brilliant as anything the artist has done.
Re-Cap
One of the reasons collectors collect—besides
the aforementioned pleasure, profit and
proximity to fame motives—is that the innovative
work they collect favorably reflects their own
values of creativity and entrepreneurialism.
Collectors could be said to ‘appropriate’ the
ideas and politics of the artists they collect
and these objects of art are integrated into
their business plan and are designed to be
congruent with their image.
For high quality global branded art, it seems
Andy Warhol’s work—which landing first in each
of the three major auction houses’ prestigious
evening sales this season—can draw even the most
price-conscious buyer to the auction podium. Out
of the $718 million of post-war and contemporary
art that sold at the big three auction houses in
New York this spring, Warhol’s sales accounted
for a remarkable $179 million of that total.
Love him or despise him, it seems one cannot
have a serious collection of contemporary art
without the “Prince of Pop” in your collection.
As Andy famously said: “Making money is art, and
working is art and good business is the best
art”.
Thanks go to
www.artnet.com for extending its ‘Price
database’ to track previous prices of some of
the artworks referenced in this article.
RESERVES AND BUY-INS: All lots from all sales
are offered subject to a “RESERVE”, which is a
confidential minimum price below which the lot
will not be sold. The reserve cannot exceed the
low estimate printed in the catalog or on-line.
If the auctioneer decides that any bid is below
the reserve of any article offered, he/she may
invent bids up to the reserve of the article
offered, after which he/she has to find a real
bidder. The auctioneer may reject the same and
withdraw the article from sale if the highest
bidder is below the reserve of the article
offered. The withdrawal is accompanied at the
sound of the hammer and the auctioneer saying
“PASS” as the hammer goes down on the article.
Passed items are also referred to as “BUY-INS”
and appear as missing lot numbers on the results
page published by the house after the sale.
HAMMER PRICE, BUYER’S PREMIUM AND ESTIMATES: For
lots that are sold the last price for the lot as
announced by the auctioneer is the “HAMMER
PRICE.” Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de
Pury & Co. charge a premium to the buyer on the
final bid price on each lot sold. The “BUYER’S
PREMIUM” is 25% of the final bid price of any
lot up to and including $50,000, 20% of the
excess of the hammer price above $50,000 and up
to and including $1,000,000. Prices in the “TOP
25” below include the buyer’s premium.
“ESTIMATES” of the selling price might reflect
vendors’ expectations which might be too high or
reflect an auction house’s strategy to publish
unrealistically low figures to attract potential
buyers. In most cases the estimates reflect
buyers’ and sellers’ expectations and/or prices
realized from previously recorded transactions.
Either way, auction house published low/high
estimates should not be relied upon as a
statement of the price at which the item will
sell, or its value for any other purpose.
Auction house “ESTIMATES” do not include the
buyer’s premium.
Top 25
1) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Self-Portrait
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, in four
parts
Overall: 40 by 32 inches
Executed in 1963-1964
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $38,442,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale” #2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #22
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR ANY PORTRAIT BY THE
ARTIST
2) MARK ROTHKO (American, 1903-1970)
Untitled #17
Oil on canvas
93 by 76 inches
Executed: 1961
Pre-sale est.: $18,000,000-$22,000,000
Price realized: $33,682,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #8
3) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Self-Portrait
Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas
106 ¾ by 106 ½ inches
Executed: 1986
Pre-sale est.: $30,000,000-$40,000,000
Price realized: $27,522,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #16
4) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz)
Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen
40 by 40 inches
Executed: 1963
Pre-sale est.: $25,000,000-$35,000,000
Price realized: $26,962,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #8
5) FRANCIS BACON (British, b. Ireland,
1909-1992)
Three Studies for Self-Portrait
Triptych—Oil on canvas
Each: 14 by 12 inches
Executed: 1974
Pre-sale est.: $16,000,000-$20,000,000
Price realized: $25,282,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #36
6) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Sixteen Jackies
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas in 16
panels
Each: 20 by 16 inches
Executed: 1964
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $20,242,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening
Auction”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #21
7) JEFF KOONS (American, b. 1955)
Pink Panther
Porcelain
This work is an AP from an edition of three plus
one AP
41 by 20 ½ by 19 inches
Executed: 1988
Pre-sale est.: $20,000,000-$30,000,000
Price realized: $16,882,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening
Auction”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #10
8) CY TWOMBLY (American, b. 1928)
Untitled
Oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas
48 by 55 inches
Executed: 1967
Pre-sale est.: $10,000,000-$15,000,000
Price realized: $15,202,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #25
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
9) FRANCIS BACON (British, b. Ireland,
1909-1992)
Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail)
Oil on canvas
77 ½ by 54 inches
Executed: 1952
Pre-sale est.: $10,000,000-$15,000,000
Price realized: $9,602,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #13
10) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Flowers
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
48 by 48 inches
Executed: 1964
Pre-sale est.: $8,000,000-$12,000,000
Price realized: $8,146,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #21
11) RICHARD DIEBENKORN (American, 1922-1993)
Ocean Park #121
Oil on canvas
78 ¼ by 78 3/8 inches
Executed: 1980
Pre-sale est.: $7,000,000-$9,000,000
Price realized: $7,698,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #12
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
12) ANDY WARHOL & JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
(American, 1928-1987) & (American, 1960-1988)
Third Eye
Acrylic on canvas
80 ¾ by 128 ¾ inches
Executed: 1985
Pre-sale est.: $2,000,000-$3,000,000
Price realized: $7,200,000
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO.: “Part 1 Contemporary
Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #20
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST DUO
2-WAY TIE
13) URS FISCHER (Swiss, b. 1973)
Untitled (Lamp/Bear)
Cast bronze, epoxy primer, urethane paint,
acrylic polyurethane topcoat, acrylic glass, gas
discharge lamp and stainless steel framework
275 5/8 by 255 7/8 by 295 ¼ inches
This work is number one from an edition of two
plus 1 AP
Executed: 2005-2006
Pre-sale est.: $4,500,000-$6,500,000
Price realized: $6,802,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #32
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Self-Portrait
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
20 by 16 inches
Executed: 1963-1964
Pre-sale est.: $6,000,000-$8,000,000
Price realized: $6,802,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #34
3-WAY TIE
14) PHILIP GUSTON (American, 1913-1980)
Painter’s City
Oil on canvas
65 by 77 ¼ inches
Executed: 1956-1957
Pre-sale est.: $4,500,000-$6,500,000
Price realized: $6,578,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #11
WILLEM DE KOONING (American, b. Rotterdam,
Netherland, 1904-1997)
Woman and Child
Oil on paper laid down on canvas
55 by 36 inches
Executed: 1967-1968
Pre-sale est.: $3,500,000-$5,500,000
Price realized: $6,578,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #60
ROY LICHTENSTEIN (American, 1923-1997)
Still Life with Mirror
Oil and Magna on canvas
96 ½ by 54 inches
Executed: 1972
Pre-sale est.: $6,000,000-$8,000,000
Price realized: $6,578,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #23
15) LUCIO FONTANA (Italian, 1899-1968)
Concetto Spaziale
Waterpaint on canvas
38 ¼ by 51 ¼ inches
Executed: 1965
Pre-sale est.: $6,000,000-$8,000,000
Price realized: $6,242,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening
Auction”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #39
16) JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (American, 1960-1988)
Eroica 1
Acrylic and oilstick on paper mounted on canvas
90 7/8 by 88 ¾ inches
Executed: 1988
Pre-sale est.: $3,500,000-$4,500,000
Price realized: $5,906,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening
Auction”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #49
17) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
The Complete Athletes Series:
O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill, Pele, Mohammed
Ali, Tom Seaver, Rod Gilbert, Jack Nicklaus,
Willie Shoemaker, Chris Evert, Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar
Each: 40 by 40 inches
Executed: 1978
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $5,682,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Auction”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #54
2-WAY TIE
18) JOAN MITCHELL (American, 1925-1992)
Mont St. Hilaire
Oil on canvas
80 by 76 inches
Executed: 1956
Pre-sale est.: $2,800,000-$4,500,000
Price realized: $5,010,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #9
GERHARD RICHTER (German, b. 1932)
Wolken (Rosa)
Triptych—Oil on canvas
78 3/4 by 118 1/8 inches
Executed: 1970
Pre-sale est.: $3,000,000-$4,000,000
Price realized: $5,010,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #14
19) ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Shadow (Red)
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
76 by 52 inches
Executed: 1978
Pre-sale est.: $700,000-$900,000
Price realized: $4,842,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening Sale”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #20
3-WAY TIE
20) JOHN CHAMBERLAIN (American, b. 1927)
Nutcracker
Painted and chromium-plated steel
45 ½ by 43 ½ by 32 inches
Executed: 1958
Pre-sale est.: $1,200,000-$1,800,000
Price realized: $4,786,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “The Collection of Allan Stone,
Vol.1”
N08815
May 9, 2011
Lot #9
*WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
RICHARD PRINCE (American, b. 1949)
Nurse on Horseback
Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas
78 by 58 inches
Executed: 2004
Pre-sale est.: $3,500,000-$4,500,000
Price realized: $4,786,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #5
ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Most Wanted Men No. 3, Ellis Ruiz B.
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
48 by 39 1/8 inches
Executed: 1964
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $4,786,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #24
21) JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (American, 1960-1988)
Gas Truck
Triptych—acrylic and oil stick on canvas
50 by 169 inches
Executed: 1984
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $4,674,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Evening Sale”
#2440
May 11, 2011
Lot #19
2-WAY TIE
22) WILLEM DE KOONING (American, b. Rotterdam,
Netherland, 1904-1997)
Event in a Barn
Oil, enamel and paper collage on board
24 ¾ by 33 inches
Executed: 1947
Pre-sale est.: $5,000,000-$7,000,000
Price realized: $4,562,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “The Collection of Allan Stone,
Vol 1”
N08815
May 9, 2011
Lot #11
RICHARD PRINCE (American, b. 1949)
Wayward Nurse (Crashed)
Acrylic and ink-jet on canvas
65 ½ by 50 1/8 inch
Executed: 2006-2010
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $4,562,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #14
23) WILLEM DE KOONING (American, b. Rotterdam,
Netherland, 1904-1997)
Untitled V11
Oil on canvas
77 by 88 inches
Executed: 1986
Pre-sale est.: $4,000,000-$6,000,000
Price realized: $4,282,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “Contemporary Art Evening
Auction”
N08744
May 10, 2011
Lot #34
2-WAY TIE
24) ROBERT INDIANA (American, b. 1928)
Love Red/Blue
Painted aluminum
144 by 144 by 72 inches
Executed: 1990
This work is number one from an edition of three
Pre-sale est.: $2,000,000-$3,000,000
Price realized: $4,114,500
CHRISTIE’S, N.Y.: “Post-War & Contemporary Art
Afternoon Session”
#2442
May 12, 2011
Lot #393
GERHARD RICHTER (German, b. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild
Oil on canvas
78 ¾ by 63 inches
Executed: 1988
Pre-sale est.: $3,000,000-$4,000,000
Price realized: $4,114,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2011
Lot #19
2-WAY TIE
25) WAYNE THIEBAUD (American, b. 1920)
Pies
Oil on canvas
22 by 28 inches
Executed: 1961
Pre-sale est.: $2,500,000-$3,500,000
Price realized: $4,002,500
SOTHEBY’S, N.Y.: “The Collection of Allan Stone,
Vol. 11;
The Art of Wayne Thiebaud”
N08815
May 9, 2011
Lot #30
ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Mao (Mao 10)
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
26 by 22 inches
Executed: 1973
Pre-sale est.: $3,500,000-$4,500,000
Price realized: $4,002,500
PHILLIPS de PURY & CO., N.Y.: “Part 1
Contemporary Art”
#NY010111
May 12, 2010
Lot #25
2011 / Spring / Contemporary Art / Auction
Totals
$718,451,124 / Andy Warhol $179,009,475
Sotheby’s / $242,883,374 / Andy Warhol
$39,662,750
*Evening Auction N08744 / $128,104,500 /
Andy Warhol $35,999,000
*Day Auction N08475 / $59,973,375 / Andy
Warhol $3,663,750
*Allan Stone Vol 1 & 11 N08815 / $54,805,499
/ Andy Warhol (nil)
Christie’s / $367,425,350 / Andy Warhol
$97,321,350
*Evening Sale #2440 / $301,683,000 / Andy
Warhol $90,988,000
*Morning Sale #2441 / $31,406,625 / Andy
Warhol $5,610,850
*Afternoon Sale # 2442 / $34,335,725 /
Andy Warhol $722,500
Phillips de Pury & Co. / $108,142,400 /
Andy Warhol $42,025,375
*Part 1 / #NY010111 / $98,825,500 / Andy
Warhol $41,770,000
*Part 11 / #NY010211 / $9,316,900 / Andy
Warhol $255,375
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