Posts Tagged ‘art market’

The Color of Money: Mark Rothko and selling out in the art world

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek Web Exclusive
March 26, 2010

When Mark Rothko committed suicide in 1970, he left behind hundreds of unsold paintings. Partly, he didn’t want to flood the market, but he also found it hard to part with them. Rothko considered his artworks to be his children, and he didn’t like to send them off to live with just anybody. So he auditioned his patrons. In the early ’60s, when Jean Kennedy Smith, a sister of President Kennedy, asked to take one or two paintings home “on approval,” he refused: “It is not a matter of my pictures fitting in with something else,” he huffed. When a woman wanted to exchange a dark canvas she’d bought—it depressed her, she said—for one with bright colors, he gave back her money. One collector who did pass muster was David Rockefeller. In 1960, he bought, for less than $10,000, White Center, a painting of shimmery white and yellow bands on a luscious pink field. It hung in his office until 2007, when he sold it at Sotheby’s for $72.8 million—still the auction record for a contemporary American painting. We can only imagine how Rothko would feel about holding the high-water mark in today’s bloated art market, but it would probably drive him right up the wall.

Read more here.

Swann’s African-American Art Auction Soars

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Malvin Gray Johnson
Malvin Gray Johnson’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” 1928-29
Image: Swann, New York

Artinfo.com
Published: February 24, 2010

Earlier this month, the biggest auction houses proved they were back on their game, posting strong numbers in London. Now their smaller brethren are proving that they can notch up sales too. Swann’s auction of African-American fine art took home a healthy $1.24 million total with buyer’s premium yesterday, just barely shy of its $1.3–1.9 million estimate. Of the 162 works on offer, 118 found buyers, netting the auctioneer a respectable 73 percent sold-rate by lot.

Malvin Gray Johnson, a member of the Harlem Renaissance, had a striking auction debut, as a collector paid $228,000 for his Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, 1928-29, which depicts a group of people pointing out at a dark, cloud-filled landscape. Swann declared it the artist’s “best known work,” and the bidder seemed to agree.

The somewhat peculiar premise of the auction led to an unusual mixture of artists, ranging across different time periods and styles. Jacob Lawrence’s circa 1941-42 gouache on board, Untitled (Two Card Players), went for $42,600, followed later by a choice David Hammons print from 1977, Untitled (Body Print), which earned a sporty $114,000, beating its $80,000–100,000 estimate with the addition of the buyer’s premium. It was the second most expensive lot of the evening.

Is the Art Market Restructuring?

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

“2010 will be a year of continued reshaping: auctions will remain smaller and private sales will be preferred by many collectors,” says The Art Newspaper. Read more here.

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