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May 4, 2015

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Auction houses hoping to set spring sales records

Source: AFP | May 4, 2015, Monday | Print Edition

Christie’s auction house is hoping to set new world records with a Picasso valued at US$140 million and a Giacometti worth US$130 million on offer when New York’s spring auction season kicks off tomorrow.

Pablo Picasso’s “The Women of Algiers (Version 0),” depicting a scene from a harem, will go under the hammer on May 11 as will Alberto Giacometti’s bronze statue “Man Pointing,” of which there are only six casts in the world.

“Those two works can set a world record,” said Loic Gouzer, Christie’s senior vice president.

“You don’t have another chance to get them,” he added.

The painting and statue are the flagship works at the evening sale entitled “Looking Forward to the Past,” which will see 35 pieces of art created between 1902 and 2011 up for sale, he said.

Giacometti’s nearly 1.8-meter depiction of a wiry man holding up one hand and pointing with the other is the artist’s “most celebrated sculpture,” Gouzer said.

The Swiss sculptor’s masterpiece represents “when Giacometti became Giacometti, the ultimate work, the Holy Grail of sculpture.”

Meanwhile, Picasso’s canvas is “a masterpiece at the level of ‘Guernica’ and ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’” Gouzer said.

Picasso created the painting in 1955 as an homage to Henri Matisse, who had died the previous year.

The work is one of the last major paintings by the Spanish master in private hands.

The world record for a painting sold at auction is US$142.4 million for Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” set in New York in 2013.

The record for priciest sculpture is already held by Giacometti, whose “Walking Man I” sold for US$104.3 million in London in 2010.

Also up for sale will be a painting from Claude Monet’s “The House of Parliament” series, expected to bring in between US$35 million and US$45 million, and Mark Rothko’s 1958 “No. 36, Black Stripe,” with a top estimate of US$50 million.

Rival Sotheby’s is due to present 69 impressionist and modernist works worth an estimated total value of more than US$270 million.

Among them are six Monets, all from private collections, with an estimated value of US$110 million, including a “Water Lilies” painting valued at between US$30 million and US$45 million.

Another star of the evening will be Vincent Van Gogh’s 1888 “Les Alyscamps,” estimated to be worth more than US$40 million.

At a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art on May 12, works worth about US$320 million will be sold in 65 lots, to include works by Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter.

Michael Macaulay, a contemporary art specialist for Sotheby’s, called the auction “one of our biggest sales ever.”

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