Despite the snow, all the usual suspects were present at Sotheby’s New York salesroom on Thursday morning to watch the fate of Titian’s “Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child With Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria.”
The painting, which dates from around 1560, sold to a lone telephone bidder for its low estimate, $15 million, or $16.8 million, including Sotheby’s fees. The auction house would identify the buyer only as “a European collector.” The price was a record for the artist at auction, surpassing the $13.5 million paid at Christie’s in London in 1991.
(Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Sotheby’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)
In addition to strong prices for works being sold by institutions like the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the big news on Thursday was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s purchase of “The Holy Family With the Infant St. John the Baptist,” a painting by the Renaissance artist Perino del Vaga, for $2 million. It had been expected to bring $300,000 to $400,000.
On Wednesday the Met bought a rare drawing by the same artist, who was one of Raphael’s pupils. “It was a double sweep,” Keith Christiansen, the Met’s chairman of European paintings, said in a telephone interview. “Perino del Vaga is one of the very great Renaissance draftsmen, but the minute I saw this painting, I nearly keeled over.”
Though the work sold for more than its estimate, Mr. Christensen said the museum actually benefited from what he called “negative chatter” about it from dealers. Although the painting is in good condition, he said, it is filthy and will go on view only after it is cleaned. Paintings by this Renaissance master are rare.
A RUSSIAN FOR CHICAGO
An abstract canvas of bold geometric shapes floating on a white background by the Russian avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich has been purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago.
The work, “Painterly Realism of a Football Player — Color Masses in the 4th Dimension” (1915), is the first example of Russian Suprematism to enter the museum’s collection.
“We’ve wanted a Malevich for a long time,” said Stephanie D’Alessandro, the curator of modern art at the Art Institute. “And this painting is from 1915, his breakout year, and it has all the remnants of the artist’s hands.”
The painting and four others by Malevich had hung for years in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 2008, settling a longstanding dispute over ownership, the City of Amsterdam returned the works to the artist’s heirs, 35 grandchildren, nieces and nephews, in Russia and elsewhere. They in turn sold this painting to the Art Institute through the Gagosian Gallery for an undisclosed price. (Another abstract Malevich canvas, “Suprematist Composition,” from 1916, sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 for $60 million.)
BRIGHTENING THE OUTDOORS
The bleakest days of winter hardly seem like the right time to present new works of public art, but two installations have cropped up this season in different parts of Manhattan.
Two glass kiosks that served as pop-up holiday shops near the ice skaters in Bryant Park might have been dismantled, but instead they have been retrofitted into miniature art galleries.
Together the kiosks make up “Battle of the Brush: A Civil Re-enactment of Two Painterly States,” a showcase for eight artists that is on view through Wednesday. It is the brainchild of Alexander W. Glauber, a 26-year-old former curatorial assistant for Lehman Brothers who recently founded Corporate Art Solutions, which organizes temporary exhibitions for corporations.
“In my mind, nothing is more counterintuitive to outdoor public art, especially in January, than a painting exhibition,” Mr. Glauber said.
Inspired by Bryant Park’s rich history — during the Civil War it was used as an encampment — he has taken a lighthearted look at an age-old dialogue by filling one kiosk with realist works and the other with abstract canvases. (Because of climate controls, viewers can’t go inside.)
The show is another step toward bringing contemporary art to Bryant Park, which is known more for its performances and film screenings. In May, with the help of the nonprofit Public Art Fund, it presented Kate Gilmore’s “Walk the Walk,” in which seven women in identical yellow dresses and ivory pumps strode across an eight-foot-high yellow box — walking with purpose but with nowhere to go, really, except around the 100-square-foot surface, and into one another.
“While in the past I have been cautious about emerging artists,” said Daniel A. Biederman, president of Bryant Park, “I am beginning to look at proposals.”
For Mr. Glauber the exhibition was an opportunity to give new life to the kiosks. “It’s about adapting existing resources,” he said. “And a way of finding new audiences for young artists.”
Meanwhile, at 50 West Street, just north of the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, a new artwork envelops the site where a 500,000- square-foot glass tower will be erected. The artist, Kinga Czerska, has created “Life, Actually,” a mural of colorful swirls adapted from her paintings.
The work was produced by the Alliance for Downtown New York, a nonprofit business-improvement-district group, with a $1.5 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. This is the 20th such artwork that has been initiated by the alliance as a way of dressing up the area’s construction eyesores. “It’s really developing critical mass,” said Elizabeth Berger, president of the alliance.
The site’s developer, Francis Greenburger, chief executive of Time Equities, is an art collector who in 1992 founded Art-Omi, a three-week summer retreat for artists. It was there that he met Ms. Czerska, whose work he has since collected. Ms. Czerska said she put “Life, Actually” together from six paintings she had made in her Seattle studio.
“I’m an engineer and an artist, so I am particularly interested in how things fit together,” she said of the work’s undulating patterns.
For Mr. Greenburger, until his 65-story hotel and condominium is built, this project dresses up the site. “It’s the difference between giving someone a present in a brown bag or in beautiful wrapping paper,” he said.
A NEW GALLERY
Ann Freedman, the former director of the Knoedler Gallery, who resigned in 2009 after 32 years there, is opening her own space this spring at 25 East 73rd Street in Manhattan. The gallery will feature the work of artists she represents, including Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou and the estate of Jules Olitski.
We've been through this thing before, and it doesn't go down easier the second time: Another Greek tycoon has rented (at no charge) the museum of which he is a trustee, in order to showcase his expensive art hoard.
Fifteen months ago I was the first to complain about the New Museum's judgment and ethics when it announced that it would be hosting "Skin Fruit", a show of work owned by Dakis Joannou.
I don't think I'm the first to complain this time*, since the news was reported by New York Times' Carol Vogel (once again the messenger, as she was for NuMU's plans) a week ago. That article reports the basic facts, that in the coming spring the Guggenheim Bilbao will be hosting "The Luminous Interval", a show of work owned by Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Unlike the article she wrote in 2009, this one asks questions, or rather it appears that the museum itself anticipated questions, defending its decision and arranging for their friendly big-deal collector to be available for a statement.
I'm not satisfied with the answers. While there may be no law against it, the ethical problems are obvious: installing a private collection exhibition in a public museum is just wrong, unless ownership of the work has already been transferred to the museum.
Museum directors should know this.
I know I may sound like a scold, but when it comes to the art world I really don't normally go out of my way to look for things to criticize. My experience of the last year or so has saddened me however, as I watch our museums making some very bad decisions. I'd rather be looking at art, or listening to or watching a performance, but it seems to me that museums are "acting up" (and not in the good way) a lot these days.
Maybe it's because of the ubiquity and curiousity of the internet that so many ethical missteps are being exposed within institutions we really cherish. Perhaps we're just more impatient with custom or superciliousness then we once were. It's even possible we've given up believing we can influence government behavior and so look to our own neighborhoods, our own family. Whatever it is, it's not easy to ignore these institutional failings, or the cant which tries to disguise them.
We have the right to expect better of the people who guard our heritage and our sacred spaces. Philip Kennicott, in his excellent Washington Post commentary on "Hide/Seek", published yesterday, describes the extraordinary importance of the museum to people who do not worship in a church, temple, mosque, or forest:
"The museum has become a quasi-sacred space, with rules as complicated and inviolate as any church liturgy. People who don't find the meaning of their existence in churches are often passionate about museums, where a set of fundamental values - openness, fearlessness, truthfulness - are celebrated with all the historical trappings.
ADDENDUM: Whoa! ARTINFO had the story two months ago. I'm sorry I missed both their scoop, and their complaint about how the Guggenheim stonewalled them:
When preparing the original scoop, "IN THE AIR" [an ARTINFO blog] contacted the Guggenheim for comment, which the museum declined to provide - relegating the news to "rumor" status despite multiple well-placed sources confirming the story, and the now-evident accuracy of its substance.
(http://jameswagner.com/2010/12/guggenheim_bilbao.html)
