Antiques, Collectibles and Auction News

SOTHEBY’S SPRING 2008 SALES OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN NEW YORK ON MAY 14-15TH TO FEATURE IMPORTANT WORKS BY FRANCIS BACON,

MARK ROTHKO, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG AND

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, AMONG MANY OTHERS

 

WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF HELGA AND WALTHER LAUFFS, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT GERMAN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART TO EVER APPEAR ON THE MARKET, TO BE OFFERED

 

New York, New York - On the evening of May 14th, 2008, Sotheby’s will offer a masterpiece of the 20th century, Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, the most important work by the artist in private hands (est. in the region of $70 million; separate press release available), as the cornerstone of its spring sale of Contemporary Art in New York, which will also be highlighted by works by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among many others. The sale will also feature the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs, one of the most important German private collections of Contemporary art to ever appear on the market. This collection includes major works from artists ranging from Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, to Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tom Wesselmann and Robert Rauschenberg, and comprises important representatives of Minimalism, Pop art, New Realism, Conceptual art and Arte Povera. Approximately 33 works from the Lauffs Collection will be offered in Sotheby’s May 14th-15th sales (est. in excess of $49 million*; property included at the end of release; separate press release also available), with further works being offered in London later this year in sales of Contemporary Art and Prints**. Rounding out the sale is a rich offering of Minimalism and Contemporary Photography from a Distinguished American Collection.

 

Property from Various-Owners

A masterwork of the first order, the potent concentration of imagery in Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, provokes a wide range of possible interpretations in a painting which matches the tragic grandeur of Aeschylus, the 5th century B. C. Greek playwright. The work was the centrepiece of Francis Bacon’s most important show of new work of the 1970s, held at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in 1977, which closely documented Bacon’s unease and restless mind during that time. Speaking of the work by Bacon, Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, said: “This is undoubtedly the most important Bacon in private hands. It has been in the same collection ever since it was acquired from the Bernard show over thirty years ago, and it is a masterpiece of the 20th century. The world has been waiting for a great Bacon triptych, and this is it.” One of only three large-format triptychs in the Bernard exhibition, it was illustrated on the cover of the catalogue. Acquired by the present owner at that time, it has been included in all the major surveys of the artist’s work to date, including the Tate Gallery, London, in 1985; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, in 1993; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1996. In the catalogue from the Museo d’Arte Moderna exhibition, Francis Bacon, 1993, Michael Peppiatt says, “Triptych, 1976, surely ranks among the greatest of Bacon’s paintings” (p. 106). Dense with symbolism, the three panels in Triptych, 1976, are filled with a complex, highly charged allegory and supreme paint-handling which shows Bacon’s imagination at its highest pitch. While living and working in Paris, Bacon produced one of his most powerful paintings on the subject and a masterpiece within his oeuvre. This was the climax of one of the most sustained and productive periods in his career, following the incredible success of his 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. In Triptych, 1976, Bacon draws on Ancient Greek mythology to express his personal tragedy. At the zenith of his mature career, Bacon revisits Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, the same Greek text that inspired Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944, a painting which announced his debut on the world stage. A parallel to that early masterpiece, the present work reveals in a single composition the entire range of Bacon’s iconography over three decades of painting, centering on the tortured figure of Prometheus, the bringer of fire to mankind and the subject of Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound. As punishment for this act, the gods chained Prometheus to a rock where his perpetually regenerating liver is constantly gnawed by a bird of prey. In either side panel, two ominous portraits, like propaganda posters, bear witness to the scene taking place, raised up on structures reminiscent of the rails used for movie-cameras. In the foreground, an imbroglio of human forms - half-dressed, half-naked - exhibit some of the best paint-handling witnessed anywhere in Bacon’s oeuvre, contrasted against areas of bare canvas, Letraset and thick pools of white oil. In the right, two heads and a row of teeth emerge from the conflation of anatomical forms and flesh-coloured shadows. The work is being offered from a Private European Collection.

Another highlight of the sale is Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow from 1956, a radiantly beautiful and monumental masterpiece in the artist’s oeuvre (est. in excess of $35 million). In this work the master abstract painter reduces colors to their essence while simultaneously transforming them into form, space, and light. As with many of his paintings from 1950-1956, the present work has a compelling sense of harmony and order as Rothko’s stratification of color achieves its highest level of success. Rothko’s post-war paintings are deeply seeded in an art historical understanding, as he both looked to the past for inspiration and forged ahead into an uncharted future. Rich exuberance of emotive color combined with simplicity and directness define Rothko’s quintessential tense and vibrant equilibrium that can be observed in Orange, Red, Yellow. Three rectangles of color vie for predominance within the overall composition and the actual frame of the canvas. Against an undefined colored background, the rectangles radiate energy and light. The work is completely frontal, yet not flat, and there is a balance of form to the present work that forces the viewer to observe it head on. The painting’s altar-like character has an impactful unmitigated frontality and symmetry, as Rothko liberated swathes of color and allowed them to float. The monumentality of this canvas and its overwhelming effect on the viewer solidify Rothko as one of the greatest painters of his generation and of the 20th century. Orange, Red, Yellow has a refined sense of balance and an astounding blend of colors. Confronting the painting is an intimate and emotional experience, heavy with a sense of human passion. In the present work Rothko masterfully encompasses the viewer in a larger-than-life canvas that is both aesthetically direct and spiritually powerful.

Another cornerstone of the May sale is Robert Rauschenberg’s colored silkscreen painting, Overdrive, 1963 (est. $10/15 million). Beginning with his legendary Combine Paintings of the late 1950s, which incorporated found objects and expressionistic paint handling, Rauschenberg’s early works embraced the unseen detritus of the contemporary experience, transferring the material world into his art through a seemingly endless stream of restless experimentation. The use of diverse techniques and materials increasingly presented themselves as the subject of his art. Following the combine paintings, Rauchenberg’s next formidable innovation occurred in 1962, when he discovered the photo-silkscreen process. For Rauschenberg, silkscreen would prove the ideal means to expand the conceptual and aesthetic concerns of his earlier works through a pioneering new dialogue of materials and techniques. In the elkscreen paintings such as Overdrive, Rauschenberg now collaged images rather than three-dimensional objects. In the case of this work, the sights and sounds of New York City are conveyed in shifting images of street signs, stop signs, the Statue of Liberty and the birds of the cityscape.

In 1981-1982, Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged as an artist of note, soon meeting and collaborating with Andy Warhol and enjoying the critical patronage of New York dealer Annina Nosei. One of three works of a similar title painted in the basement of Nosei’s gallery, Untitled (Prophet I), 1981-82 (est. $9/12 million), is believed to be the only surviving example - the others having been destroyed. The work epitomizes Basquiat’s natural talent for a selective appropriation of emotive gestures, calligraphic signs, and assemblage in a vocabulary heavily influenced by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg. Notwithstanding Basquiat’s responsive disposition towards earlier pictorial traditions, Basquiat’s oeuvre is a visual solution to the multicultural milieu he inhabited. His neo-Primitive frontal figure in Untitled (Prophet I), often seen as a self-portrait, references his deep interest in all forms of art history, including African and Tribal cultures, conveyed in the frenetic style and calligraphic arcs he absorbed from his experience painting on the city streets. In his short life, Basquiat’s paintings such as Untitled (Prophet I) personified the merging of youth culture, excess, art buying and self-destruction of 1980s New York.

Highlighting the offering of works by Andy Warhol is his late canvas, Detail of the Last Supper (Christ 112 Times) Yellow, 1986, which reincorporates the grid composition and seriality introduced in his early Pop paintings (est. $10/15 million). Cropped from Leonardo da Vinci’s grand composition Last Supper (1495-1498), Christ’s head is the fetishistic subject of Warhol’s aesthetic gaze, emphasizing commoditization through the repetition of a single image to a grand extent. The work is a grandiose scale that also references the mural size of da Vinci’s masterpiece. The ubiquitous presence of gilded Byzantine icons and crucifixes which were a part of religious services he attended as a child, compounded with other domestic religious imagery, informed much of Warhol’s fascination with the venerated image. In the Detail of the Last Supper (Christ 112 Times) Yellow, seriality is conveyed with a sense of mutability and transience, both central strategies operating in Warhol’s enterprise. The figure of Christ as subject is not simply transferred from the realm of high art into popular culture. Rather it is appropriated from a classical popular image and re-contextualized to meet Warhol’s technical and aesthetic requirements. The result is the transformation of Christ into a harmony of black and yellow imagery bearing little resemblance to the original painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Nonetheless, the image of Christ retains an overwhelming spirituality in spite of its seemingly detached treatment; a reminder that we should never take Andy Warhol at face value.

 

Warhol’s vast and mesmerizing depiction of the ultimate artistic shaman of twentieth century Europe, Joseph Beuys, 1980, is from a group of portraits generated after the two met at Beuys’ major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in November 1979 (est. $5.5/6.5 million). The shimmering resplendence of diamond dust demarcates the unmistakable drawn cheeks and ceaselessly quizzical eyes of an artist who had spent over thirty years redefining the very boundaries of art. Indeed, this portrait exactly crystallizes that tireless curiosity that drove Beuys’ groundbreaking achievements. It is difficult to conceive of a more iconic or artistically self-referential painting from the twentieth century, or one that more wholly encompasses the radical advancements in post-war transatlantic art history. Warhol, the progenitor of Pop and subsequent catalyst of a new cultural age, and Beuys, the ideologue radical who didactically transformed the landscape of the performance and the conceptual in art, are sublimely conflated in this monumental eulogy to both their talents.

Following the record-setting price achieved last fall at Sotheby’s for a painting by Takashi Murakami at auction, the May sale will feature the most important work by Murakami ever offered at auction, My Lonesome Cowboy, 1998 (est. $3/4 million). One of the key pieces of sculpture from the past twenty-five years, the work is from an edition of three with two artist’s proofs from the provocative series depicting a manga-inspired Japanese young man with a shock of yellow hair ejaculating in a lasso-like form, symbolizing artistic energy and reminiscent of the waves depicted in the work of famed Japanese print artist, Katsushika Hokusai. Murakami has said, “Art is sensational when it is able to communicate a message without using language.” The figurative, life-size sculpture, made of oil, acrylic, fiberglass and iron, shows the unashamed subject in a high moment of ecstasy, opening up a dialogue about the freedom of creativity and sexuality that challenges the confines of Western morality. Drawing upon the work of Japanese otaku-animator Yoshinori Kanada, the work was influenced by Yoshio Kataoka’s R?nsamu kauboi (Lonesome cowboy) from 1975 and Andy Warhol’s 1968 pseudo-Western film, similarly titled Lonesome Cowboys. The present My Lonesome Cowboy, the first to appear at auction, was previously exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Other editions have been on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the “© Murakami” exhibition which began at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is currently at the Brooklyn Museum before continuing on to the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The sculpture’s counterpoint, Hiropon, a cartoon-like Japanese female with inflated, lactating breasts, was created in 1997.

An artist renowned for his impeccably slick photographic appropriations of stock symbols of American consumer culture, Richard Prince is represented in the sale by Millionaire Nurse, 2002 (est. $3.5/4.5 million). With its vivid, drippy swathes of autumnal red and yellow hues, it is a virtuoso display of svelte painterly expression. The motif of the nurse, gleaned from the covers of the artist’s extensive collection of racy 1960s paperback pulp-fiction, is first transferred onto canvas using an ink-jet print, a process that results in an anonymous facture that was the hallmark of the artist’s earlier oeuvre. In a creative process which is the reversal of Andy Warhol’s celebrated screen-printing technique, this surface is then worked on by smearing deep layers of drippy, acrylic paint onto the smooth, inkjet surfaces, so that layer upon layer of brilliant pastel hues simultaneously obscure and reveal the image that lies beneath, creating a hazy film of paint that consciously allows ghostlike traces of the background to emerge and recess into the mysterious depths of the composition.

 

Property from the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, said: “The Lauffs collection, with its seamless range of important examples of works from every major American and European art movement of the 60s and 70s, creates a uniquely coherent ensemble. At the same time, Helga and Walther Lauffs added a personal touch and distinctive direction to the body of works. The melding of these components plus the remarkable collaboration with their percipient friend and advisor, Paul Wember, forge the key to this extraordinary treasure.”

Acquired in 1968, Yves Klein’s 1960 ultramarine masterpiece, IKB 1, was among the Lauffs’ first purchases (est. $5/7 million). The deeply penetrating and intense International Klein Blue is synonymous with the artist’s proposition that paint was not a surface application but a pure and metaphysical substance, allowing monochromatic color to become pure space and extend painting beyond the canvas and into the existential Void. Several additional works by Yves Klein, including the sumptuous gold and pink Monochromes, MG 9, circa 1962, (est. $6/8 million) and MP 13, circa 1960, (est. $2/3 million), respectively, joined the collection shortly thereafter and, together with an Achrome, 1958, by Piero Manzoni (est. $4.5/6.5 million), sets the tone of the collection.

American Minimalist art was also part of the Zeitgeist of the day and is represented by key works such as Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1964, a landmark at the advent of Minimalist art and a dramatic statement of Judd’s emerging aesthetic practice (est. $5/7 million). This bold structure - in the artist’s favored color of red - unites painting and sculpture as well as void and form with amazing sophistication, considering its place so early in the artist’s oeuvre. Untitled is Judd’s first floor sculpture in sheet metal and amounts to a declaration of a dramatic shift in his work. In scale, aesthetic presence, grand design and seductive simplicity, Untitled betokens Judd’s arrival on the New York scene as one of the progenitors of Minimalist’s art - it was the centrepiece of a group exhibition, Shape and Structure: 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which is counted as one of the earliest shows of Minimalism. Other works from this area include Dan Flavin’s Untitled, 1964 (est. $700/900,000), Frank Stella’s Concentric Squares, 1966, (est. $2/3 million) and Carl Andre’s 36 Copper Square, 1968 (est. $2.5/3.5 million).

Other American art is also prominently represented in the Lauffs Collection with key works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s 1961 combine, entitled Slug (est. $3/4 million). This innovative work entered the collection only eight years later and serves to highlight Wember’s immensely prescient understanding of American Pop Art at a time when its appreciation in Europe was still in an embryonic stage. Despite the controversy surrounding Rauschenberg’s unexpected win of the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1963, Wember recognized this maverick genius with an exhibition of his work in Krefeld in 1964, only months after the completion of the artist’s first retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York. Close on the heels of the 1969 acquisition came works by Robert Indiana (Love Wall (Red Green Blue)), 1966, est. $2.5/3.5 million), Claes Oldenburg (Soft Doors for Airflow Model #5, 1965, est. $600/800,000 million) and Tom Wesselmann, (Great American Nude no. 48, 1963, est. $6/8 million).

Property from a Distinguished American Collection

Rounding out the May 14th-15th sales is an offering of 79 works of predominantly Minimalism and Contemporary Photography from a Distinguished American Collection (est. in excess of $27 million), including works by Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Robert Smithson, Ellsworth Kelly, Sigmar Polke, Ad Reinhardt, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among many others. Attracted by the underlying rich complexity of the seemingly simplistic Minimalist aesthetic, these collectors believed in the idea of making the maximum statement with Minimal artwork, a feat that has been fully achieved by this tribute to the Minimalist school. Yet, the Conceptualist basis that underlies much of Minimalism and so resonated for the collectors continued to inform their acquisition of artists of the late 1970s and 1980s whose artistic instrument became the photograph. This legacy is fully alive in the post-Conceptual school of photography that continues to this day with the work of John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Hiroshi Sugimoto which also joined the collection. Anthony Grant, International Senior Specialist in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art department, said: “The art in this collection was always cutting edge; when you compare the date of acquisition with when the pieces were made, you can see that these acquisitions were truly contemporary.” Highlighting the collection are Brice Marden’s Glyphs, 1986 (est. $2/3 million); Donald Judd’s Untitled work from 1982, comprised of multiple boxes (est. $1.25/1.75 million); Robert Mangold’s ½. V Series, 1968 (est. $600/800,000); John Baldessari’s Stairs Up (With Void), 1986 (est. $300/400,000); and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #89, 1981 (est. $200/300,000).

 

Sotheby’s set the record for a work by Francis Bacon at auction when Study for Innocent X, 1962, sold in New York for $52.7 million. Sotheby’s also holds five of the top six prices for Bacon: in addition to Study for Innocent X, significant prices were achieved for Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969 ($45.96 million at Sotheby’s New York); Self Portrait, 1978 ($42.6 million at Sotheby’s London); Study of Nude with Figure in a Mirror, 1969 ($39.8 million at Sotheby’s New York); and Nude with Figure in a Mirror (Study), 1969 ($38.8 million at Sotheby’s London).

*Estimates do not include buyer’s premium

**Details about the London offering will be provided later this season

 

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