Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
After several lean auction seasons, next week’s marquee sales in New York are packed with inventory. On Monday night alone, Christie’s will send 80 works to the block. Across the week, 27 lots carry estimates north of $10 million—a “staggering number for a bumpy market,” as one art adviser recently put it. In May, there were about half as many, with few fireworks in the salesroom. Is the market ready?
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It’s a top-heavy season, and the trickiest price range, one adviser told me, will be the $2 million–$5 million one—because the works on offer in that bracket are, by and large, not the easiest to sell. Take Richard Prince’s Double Nurse (2001), which has an estimate for $3 million to $5 million. Prince’s single-figure “Nurse” paintings are generally considered more desired by collectors. By a similar token, much of the material from the late collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson might be considered challenging to most buyers. Ron Mueck’s uncanny Big Baby (1997), one of the works from their collection headed to sale next week, is hardly the most saleable piece in the world, after all.
There are some terrific estates coming up, chief among them the one for Leonard Lauder. The estate of Robert F. Weis and Patricia G. Ross Weis, who acquired many of their works between the 1960s and the 1980s, is also coming to sale. But beyond estates, it’s hard to find discretionary sellers.
I decided to look at an even lower price point—namely, the sub-million-dollar works in some of the day sales. There are some interesting scenarios.
Steve Parrino’s Screw Ball, a crinkled painting from 1988, last sold in 2020 on Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning platform for nearly $1 million. Now Christie’s has its estimate pegged at $300,000 to $500,000; it’s set to hit the block at the house’s postwar and contemporary art day sale on November 20.
And while auction-house provenances can say much, there are plenty they don’t. Take Lynne Drexler’s Keller Fair II (1959–62), also in that day sale, with an estimate between $800,000 and $1.2 million. Christie’s catalog includes no exhibition history for the work; however, a quick Google search reveals that it appeared in “Shatter: Color Field and the Women of Abstract Expressionism,” the inaugural show at Art Intelligence Global’s Hong Kong space in 2022, where, according to Artnet, prices ranged from $15,000 to $2.5 million.
Also set for the day sale is the 2013 Avery Singer painting The Great Muses, which sold at Christie’s Hong Kong in November 2022—but that sale is nowhere to be found in Christie’s current provenance for the painting. When I reached out to the house, a rep told me that the 2022 sale was canceled. But a result is still listed on Christie’s website, as well as on Artnet and other databases: approximately $3 million. The Singer is now being offered with an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.
Largely missing this time around are the “wet paint” artworks that were selling like hotcakes during and immediately after the pandemic. They’re not completely absent, however.
Three paintings—all bought at the same sale at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2022, the heyday of speculation and Asian buying—are coming back to market in the Christie’s day sale. Louis Fratino’s Turning the Light Off, 11 p.m. (2020), sold in that Hong Kong sale for $115,000; now it’s on offer with an estimate of $50,000 to $70,000. Emily Mae Smith’s As Told in a Garden (2019) sold for $454,000 and now carries an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000. Salman Toor’s Poor Hobo Ghosts (2015), which went for $113,000, is now estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.
It will be interesting to see what happens with Robert Nava’s 2020 painting Tiger Shark, sold to its current owner at Nava’s breakout show at Pace Gallery in Palm Beach in 2021. Nava’s paintings of a similar size have sold for as much as $716,500 (for the 2019 painting Before Minotaur at Phillips in October 2022). Pegasus (BDC), from 2018, sold for $356,000 at Sotheby’s in May 2023, and Sabre Tooth Rose Growth (2021) sold for $356,000 later that same year at Christie’s. Christie’s is now offering Tiger Shark with an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000.
Another thing you won’t find in a provenance is withdrawn lots—like the 2008 Maurizio Cattelan sculpture Daddy Daddy, a face-down Pinocchio meant to be installed in a pool of water, set to go up at Phillips’s modern and contemporary art day sale on November 21. Whoever bought the sculpture, number two from an edition of three plus two artist’s proofs, at Christie’s in 2020 for $1.2 million consigned it to Sotheby’s Hong Kong in October 2022, but withdrew it before the sale. It’s now estimated at $600,000 to $800,000.
You may recognize another piece in the Phillips day sale: a 2013 Carol Bove sculpture composed of peacock feathers in a Plexiglas box. It was featured in Christie’s famous “11th Hour” auction in 2013, where all works were sold to raise funds for environmental conservation efforts supported by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. It was a glitzy event—Bradley Cooper and Salma Hayek were among the attendees—and 13 artist auction records were set, including Bove’s, when the peacock-feather piece sold for $300,000. That buyer, identified at the time by the Baer Faxt as collector-dealer Alberto Mugrabi, is now selling the work at Phillips with an estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.
Two more tasty tidbits from the day sales: It is always interesting to see what’s in an artist’s collection, especially one as celebrated as Joel Shapiro, who died in June. Some pieces by his peers from his collection are going up for sale at Sotheby’s, among them works by Richard Pettibone, Richard Artchwager, and Donald Judd. Other pieces from Shapiro’s collection will go up for sale as a group next week at the auction house Stair Galleries.
And lastly, I’d love to know who is selling their birthday present from George Condo.
