Sentimental figurative painters of the world, take hope! Mainstream art critics may have a dim view of your approach to the world -- remember Jerry Saltz’s witty "Just Say No" review of the 2001 Norman Rockwell show at the Guggenheim Museum? -- but art collectors just can’t get enough. The proof came with the handsome prices paid for classic 19th- and 20th-century "American" paintings at back-to-back auctions this week at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York.
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At Sotheby’s on Nov. 28, 2007, the sale of "American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture" totaled $65,198,000, with 148 of 196 lots finding buyers, or almost 76 percent. Prices given here include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $20,000, 20 percent of the remainder up to $500,000, and 12 percent of the rest.
In the past few years, the American illustrator Norman Rockwell has clearly become the Andy Warhol of the American paintings market. The Sotheby’s sale featured 13 Rockwell works, including the top lot and two others in the top ten. Rockwell’s Gary Cooper as "The Texan" (1930), an admittedly amazing image of the laconic actor in full costume getting tarted up with lipstick and makeup before going on camera, sold for $5,921,000, more than double the presale high estimate of $2.5 million.
New auction records were set for several artists, including Milton Avery, whose The Reader and the Listener (1945), a parlor scene that seems one part Henri Matisse and one part Stuart Davis, sold for $2,505,000, well above its $900,000 presale estimate (as well as the previous auction record of $992,000).
Stanton MacDonald-Wright’s Synchromy, a curious 1918 Synchromist portrait of a sitting lady in a hat attending to what looks like knitting, sold for $2,281,000, more than tripling its $600,000 presale estimate and setting a new record for the artist.
And Charles Burchfield’s mystical A Dream of Butterflies (1962) sold for $1,329,000 (est. $500,000-$700,000), a new record for the artist.
Other notable lots included a magisterial Winslow Homer gouache and ink wash en grisaille titled Three Men in a Canoe (1895), which sold for $1,049,000 (est. $300,000-$500,000), and a portrait of a young woman by Robert Henri, Berna (1922), that was purchased for $685,000 (est. $300,000-$500,000).
The next day, on Nov. 29, 2007, Christie’s sale of "Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture" totaled $71.3 million, a record for the category at the firm. Of 218 lots offered, 166 sold, or 76 percent. Twenty lots sold for more than $1 million, and the sale set 21 new auction records.
Top lot was Andrew Wyeth’s The Intruder (1971), a ca. 31 x 50 in. tempera-on-panel of a white hunting dog peering out over the Goose River in Maine. It sold for $5,753,000 to an anonymous buyer, the second highest price for a Wyeth work at auction.
The sale featured a good collection of Western art, and fully half of the top ten were paintings and sculptures in that category. Frederic Remington’s 1901 oil The Signal (If Skulls Could Speak), a rousing illustration of an Indian rider on a rearing horse, sold to a U.S. dealer for $4,409,000, just above the $4 million presale low estimate. Remington’s 1901 bronze, The Cheyenne, went for $3,177,000, and a cast of his emblematic The Bronco Buster (1895), sold for $2,617,000.
Count the Rose Art Museum among those art institutions that are cashing in on the market surge. The Rose sold Childe Hassam’s Sunset at Sea (1911), a rather bland Impressionist scene, for $3,737,000, above the presale high estimate of $3 million. Proceeds are earmarked for contemporary art acquisitions, presumably as selected by the museum’s crackerjack new director, Michael Rush.
A cheerful painting by Norman Rockwell of Santa Claus, sitting on a stepladder and examining his book of Extra Good Boys and Girls (1939), proved to be a relative disappointment, selling for "only" $2,169,000, below the $2.5 million presale low estimate.
For most lots, beating the presale estimate seemed almost routine. Emanuel Leutze’s The Last of the Mohicans sold for $2,169,000, well above the $1 million high presale estimate and a new auction record for the artist; and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s The Check (n.d.), went for $2,841,000, more than double its presale high estimate of $1.2 million and a new record for the artist.
New auction records were also set for Martin Hennings ($1,553,000), Samuel Colman ($505,000), Frank Duveneck ($385,000), Ernest Paul Sample ($241,000), Edward Cucuel ($229,0000), Henry Ossawa Tanner ($229,000), Wilhelm Hunt Diederich ($205,000), Theodore Earl Butler ($145,000), Xanthus Russell Smith ($91,000), and several others.
RUSSIAN ART IN LONDON
Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s held multipart sales of Russian art in London this week, and the results were good.
Sotheby’s total was £38.6 million ($79.8 million), a new high for a series of Russian sales. Its evening sale of Russian art on Nov. 26 totaled £25,731,100 ($53,137,295) and set new records for 12 Russian artists. Top lot was Natalia Goncharova’s primitivist Bluebells (1903), which was bought by an anonymous buyer for £3,044,500, just above the presale low estimate.
New auction records were set for Konstantin Makovsky (£2,036,500), Nikolai Roerich (£1,756,500), A.V. Lentulov (£1,700,500), Liubov Popova (£1,700,500) and Petr Konchalovsky (£894,100).
Records fell in the day sale of paintings on Nov. 27 as well, with new highs coming for S.A. Vinogradov (£513,300), David Burliuk (£322,900), Paul Kotlarevsky (£234,500) and L.L. Survage (£180,500).
At Christie’s London, the pink Rothschild Fabergé Egg (1902), which carried a presale estimate of £6 million-£9 million, sold on Nov. 28 for £8,980,000 -- about $18.5 million, and a new record for Fabergé -- to Russian businessman Alexander Ivanov, who was bidding in person at the auction, according to press reports. Ivanov said that the egg would go to the new Russian National Museum, which he helped found.
Christie’s "Russian Art Week" totaled £44,891,640.
For complete, illustrated auction results, see Artnet’s signature Fine Art Auctions Report.
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