Scott Reyburn

The opening offer for the “Rhinocrétaire,” a welded metal writing desk in the shape of a rhinoceros dated 1991, was almost three times the low estimate of 700,000 euros (about $775,000) — and the auctioneer hadn’t even started the bidding. The desk eventually sold to another telephone client for 5.4 million euros with fees.

The French sculptors known collectively as “Les Lalanne” — the husband-and-wife team of François-Xavier Lalanne, who died in 2008, and Claude Lalanne — are among the few names capable of creating serious excitement in the niche world of design auctions.

They certainly did so Wednesday night, when Sotheby’s raised 48 million euros from a sellout session of 41 lots, the first in a two-day auction of works from the Lalannes’ personal collection. The low estimate for the entire sale of more than 270 lots was 15.9 million euros.

Most of the pieces at Sotheby’s had been made by the Lalannes in their farmyard studios at Ury, south of Paris, where the couple had lived and worked since 1967. Claude Lalanne died in April at age 93, survived by four daughters. Estates in France valued at more than 1.8 million euros incur inheritance tax of 45%, so the death of a successful French artist is often followed by studio sales.

Blurring the boundaries between art and design, the Lalannes’ playfully surreal bronze creations have had a cult following since the 1960s. Gunter Sachs and Yves Saint Laurent were among the Lalannes’ early patrons, while more recent collectors have included Peter Marino in the United States, François Pinault and Bernard Arnault.

“As always with this kind of sale, what seems expensive will turn out to look cheap, and the cheap will look expensive,” said Ben Brown, a dealer with galleries in London and Hong Kong who has exhibited Les Lalanne since 2007.

Brown, seated in the front row of the salesroom, gave the second-highest bid for “Rhinocrétaire,” the most expensive lot in the auction. “It was the bargain of the sale,” he said. “It was a masterpiece.”

The 8-foot desk was a unique item by François-Xavier Lalanne, but most works included in Sotheby’s auction were editioned pieces, typically made by Les Lalanne in series of eight.

The Lalannes met in Paris in 1952 and began working together shortly after, though they would not marry until 1967. They worked in parallel, rarely collaborating, each having a distinctive vision.

For François-Xavier Lalanne, formative friendships with artists Constantin Brancusi and Salvador Dalí, together with a brief spell as an attendant in the Egyptian and Assyrian departments of the Louvre, inspired animal sculptures that combined form and function in whimsical ways.

Sotheby’s sale also included an example of his “Gorille de Sûreté I,” a 5-foot-high gilded bronze gorilla with a safe concealed in its chest. Made in 2006 and from an edition of eight, it sold for 1.9 million euros, almost four times its high estimate.

And then there were his famous sheep sculptures that function, sort of, as chairs. A trio in gilded bronze, made in 2007, sold at Sotheby’s for 2.1 million euros. In 2011, a flock of 10 sheep of bronze and epoxy stone made $7.5 million at auction.

Claude Lalanne, by contrast, found more inspiration in art nouveau and plant forms, creating exquisite benches and chairs from exotically shaped, gilded bronze leaves.

A 2013 example of her garden bench, “Banquette ‘Les Grandes Berces,’” from an edition of eight, sold Wednesday to London dealer Alan Hobart for 1.1 million euros. An almost identical bench from a 2009 edition sold for $615,000 at a Christie’s design sale in June, according to Artnet.

“This has taken prices to the next level,” Hobart said of the Sotheby’s auction.

He added, however, that he was not surprised by the interest. “It was a studio sale,” he said. “They’re icons in France and respected in America and Hong Kong. And their work is just amazing.”

Claude Lalanne had her own sense of the surreal. One of her celebrated bronze “Choupatte” sculptures, which incongruously set a cabbage on spindly chicken legs, sold for 2.2 million euros, an auction high for the artist. It was bought by the same telephone bidder who bought François-Xavier Lalanne’s rhinoceros and sheep.

What is it about Les Lalanne that inspires such prices?

“Design is supposed to be practical and comfortable,” said Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, founder of the Paris-based Galerie Mitterrand, which has mounted at least 15 exhibitions of Lalanne works since 1990.

But Les Lalanne did more, he added: “They make people dream.”

This article originally appeared in

A Menagerie of French Whimsy Takes Auction Prices 'to the Next Level'

PARIS — “Two million!” screamed a voice from the crush of Sotheby’s staff members taking instructions from telephone bidders.

Owners of big-ticket paintings and sculptures regard these biannual sales as the moment to maximize prices. For Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips, this is also the moment to maximize revenues. Headline-setting prices can create a wider perception that this opaque and unequal market is booming, even if demand slows for other less-publicized businesses in the art world.

This time around, the three houses’ various evening and day auctions will include more than 2,000 lots estimated to raise at least $1.6 billion. The equivalent series last May grossed more than $2.8 billion, including post-sale fees.

Though next week’s auctions don’t contain an obvious $100 million masterpiece, dozens of works by trophy names such as Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne and Jean-Michel Basquiat have emerged from American estates.

Soaring if volatile stock values have given both executors and collectors the confidence not only to release contemporary pieces for sale but also to take the risk of offering more of them without guaranteed minimum prices — which reward the auction houses with a share of the profit if the bidding exceeds the minimum. (If owners turn down the guarantee, they take all the hammer price if it sells — but get nothing if it doesn’t.) The numbers of big-ticket lots with guarantees are down at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan has created expectations that America’s 1% is flush with cash to spend on art. And yet earlier this month, Sotheby’s, the only publicly traded company among the three major auction houses, reported a loss of $7.1 million for the first quarter, worse than the $6.5 million loss registered for the equivalent period last year. Over all, the company had net income of $108.6 million in 2018.

In the accompanying conference call, Mike Goss, the chief financial officer at Sotheby’s, described the New York sales as “all-important” to the company, which has just opened more than 90,000 square feet of new exhibition space at its Upper East Side headquarters.

Sotheby’s, like Christie’s and Phillips, will be looking to the American street artist and designer Brian Donnelly, known professionally as KAWS, to give their figures a boost. Drawing inspiration from cartoon characters including the Simpsons, the Smurfs and SpongeBob SquarePants, KAWS hasn’t been taken particularly seriously by art critics. But his paintings are now popular with wealthy collectors. Last month in Hong Kong, one sold for an extraordinary $14.8 million, almost 20 times the low estimate. For the first time, all three houses will be including works by KAWS in their evening sales.

Amedeo Modigliani, ‘Tête’

Impressionist and modern art tends to yield few surprises at auction these days, now that most wealthy buyers prefer to purchase contemporary pieces. But spectacular results can still be achieved for works that have crossover appeal to the two collecting camps.

Amedeo Modigliani is one of the few modern artists whose auction prices have soared in recent years. In 2015, one of his celebrated paintings of nudes sold for $170.4 million. There has also been a major financial re-evaluation of his hauntingly primitive stone sculptures.

Back in 2010 in Paris, one of the 25 or so “Têtes” he carved in the 1910s soared to $52.3 million, more than 10 times the presale low estimate. Another from the series sold for $70.7 million in 2014.

Christie’s will be offering a limestone “Tête,” dating from about 1911-12, for at least $30 million. This work is certain to sell, courtesy of a guaranteed minimum price, but will it fly like the others?

Claude Monet, ‘Meules’

On Tuesday, Sotheby’s will offer a sumptuous 1890 canvas from Monet’s “Meules” (Grainstacks) series, the Impressionist painter’s first systematic attempt to evoke the same motif in different atmospheric conditions. He produced 25 paintings of the subject, and this is one of just eight left in private hands. Presumably encouraged to sell by the $81.4 million achieved in 2016 for another from the series, the anonymous owner has been guaranteed a minimum price of at least $55 million. The seller bought the painting at auction in 1986 for $2.5 million, according to Sotheby’s.

Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Buffalo II’

American Pop Art is the strength of the Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer Family Collection at Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art. It’s one of the big estates of the season, valued at around $125 million, and it is led by Lot 5B, Robert Rauschenberg’s important 1964 silk-screen painting, “Buffalo II,” completed and purchased shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Evoking a pivotal moment in American history, the piece is estimated to sell at $50 million to $70 million.

Jeff Koons, ‘Rabbit’

The auction market for the work of Koons is no longer as hot as it was, but this enigmatic sculpture inspired by a child’s shiny balloon was first exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1986 and is widely regarded as the artist’s master work. Made in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof, the example at Christie’s is the last left in private hands. Unusually for such a high value lot, ”Rabbit” is being offered (at least at the time of writing) without a guaranteed minimum but is expected to sell for at least $50 million.

Mark Rothko, ‘Untitled’

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the seller of the most highly valued work at Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art on Thursday night.

SFMoMA has deaccessioned Rothko’s 1960 maroon, red, white and gray abstract work to raise acquisition funds to “enhance its contemporary holdings” and “address art historical gaps in order to push boundaries and embrace fresh ideas,” according to the museum’s director, Neal Benezra. The museum is hoping to raise at least $35 million from the sale.

Some critics have suggested that if a museum wants to more broadly diversify its collection — say, for artists of color or women — it could ask trustees for help. This museum’s collection, which contains five other Rothko paintings, has been criticized for a preponderance of white, male, blue-chip artists.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, ‘Self-Portrait’

Two years ago, Jean-Michel Basquiat became a higher-selling artist at auction than his Pop artist mentor Andy Warhol when Basquiat’s “Untitled” sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s. The result confirmed the elevation of street art to the very top of the auction market.

Wrapping up the week, Phillips is selling six works by the artist in its 20th century and contemporary art evening sale on May 16. The pieces come from the estate of Basquiat’s friend, the Los Angeles hip-hop producer Matt Dike, who died in January.

The works include the powerful “Self-Portrait” from 1983. Painted on two found wooden doors and incorporating trademark passages of collage, the work is estimated to raise at least $9 million and is notable for showing the artist’s torso with a single skeletal leg.

“The strength of the piece is the self-portrait and the use of collage,” said Larry Warsh, a New York collector of Basquiat works and editor of “Basquiat-isms,” a collection of quotations by the artist, to be published next month.

“For me the early works using found objects are the ones that make the grade. Sadly the things that sell are shiny and crisp,” Warsh added, referring to the artist’s canvases, which have fetched higher auction prices.

KAWS, ‘Kurf (Hot Dog)’

Sotheby’s is offering the most highly valued work by KAWS, featuring one of the artist’s trademark X-eyed cartoon characters, with a low estimate of $1.5 million. In 2013, Sotheby’s sold a KAWS painting of similar size for $293,000, according to the Artnet database of salesroom results.

Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in Asia, puts KAWS’ work in the category of street art, which is undergoing the same transition that Pop Art made in the 1960s and 1970s, she said. “Collectors are simply responding to what they like and what they aesthetically resonate with the most.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/arts/design/spring-art-auctions.html" id="31d4a260-f943-3c4d-a3e0-6970b4c0caa4">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The marquee auctions of impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York next week are the first crunch moment of the year for the top end of the art market.

Spring Art Sales: Yawns or Records?

Berlin is no longer “poor but sexy,” as its mayor at the time said in 2003. But with an officially estimated population of 20,000 professional artists, including international stars such as Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Sean Scully, the city still has the reputation of being the creative capital of the European art world. How is that reputation shaping up to reality in today’s troubled times?

Last week, some 45 dealerships participated in the 15th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, a slickly organized collaboration that gives collectors and curators a sense of the latest in the city’s art scene. Equally important, it gives galleries a chance to make some sales.

“Berlin is an über-cool city. The economics of the city allow dealers to have really great spaces,” said Danny Goldberg, a collector based in Sydney. Goldberg was viewing new canvases by Leipzig-based painter Matthias Weischer and a video and sculptures by French artist Camille Henrot in König Galerie’s converted brutalist church in a less gentrified part of the city’s Kreuzberg district.

A regular visitor to Gallery Weekend Berlin for the past five years, Goldberg, like many visiting collectors, said he valued the more considered process of viewing and discussing art in galleries, and in artists’ studios, rather than browsing booths at art fairs.

“I’m art-faired out,” said Goldberg, vowing to kick the habit of visiting half a dozen such events a year. “It’s just more of the same,” he added.

While “fair fatigue” has become a common complaint among collectors, Berlin’s leading gallerists value events like Art Basel, FIAC and Frieze as a way of making contact with a global clientele. Unlike New York, London and Paris, Berlin doesn’t host any major international art fairs or auctions.

“There isn’t the social structure or the mentality that supports a collector base here,” said Barbara Huttrop, director of the Berlin gallery Kewenig, which exhibits at the Art Basel fairs in Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. “There’s no industry,” added Huttrop, whose gallery in a historic house has yet to attract significant collectors from Berlin’s tech sector.

Kewenig’s “The Palace of the Perfect,” a presentation of 13 works from the 1980s from the estate of admired American conceptual artist James Lee Byars was, for many, the standout show of the weekend. Byars’ unique brand of magical minimalism was perhaps most powerfully represented by “The Spinning Oracle of Delfi,” a work from 1986 that consists of an enormous gilded amphora lying in the gallery’s red-painted hallway. It was priced at $5 million.

“For us it’s the most important weekend,” said Huttrop, who was hoping to greet at least 20 of the gallery’s most important international clients.

Did they turn up? Top collectors such as Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo from Turin, Italy, Anita Zabludowicz from London and Uli Sigg from Switzerland were certainly in Berlin. But some Gallery Weekend regulars noticed a more general shortage of foreign visitors. American accents were rarely heard.

“I never saw so few international buyers,” said Magnus Resch, the founder of Magnus, an app likened to Shazam for the art world, who is based in New York but has an apartment in Berlin.

The art world calendar is saturated with events, particularly with 2019 being a year of the Venice Biennale, which attracts droves of international collectors hoping to discover the next big names before the market does.

But the shock of the new was in short supply at Gallery Weekend. There was little in the way of performance, installation or digital art. Painting and sculpture by German artists predominated.

By Saturday afternoon, at least half a dozen of Weischer’s 16 enigmatic and painterly images of interiors had found buyers at König Galerie, priced from 28,000 euros to 205,000 euros, or about $31,000 to $229,000.

Similar works were popular with collectors in the late 2000s when Weischer, along with several other contemporary German painters, had been market darlings. Then, large canvases sold for as much as $585,000 at auction; more recently, they have been selling for between $50,000 and $100,000, according to the Artnet database of salesroom results.

Konrad Fischer Galerie formally inaugurated its spectacular new space in an old transformer station with a show of works by Turner Prize-winning British artist Richard Long. “Granite Crossing,” a new and characteristic large-scale floor sculpture made of pale red rocks was priced at 300,000 euros, and was still available Saturday.

More zeitgeisty works by young Brussels-based German painter Jana Euler were at least in demand at Galerie Neu in Mitte in a show titled “Great White Fear.”

Euler jokily incorporated her own features in eight 10-foot-high paintings of a breaching white shark that resembled an erect phallus. All subtly different in their expressionistic technique, these sold out, priced at between 50,000 euros to 90,000 euros.

For all Berlin’s reputation as a melting pot of artistic innovation, many visitors were disappointed by the amount of older works on display and the conservatism of the new presentations. “I only saw known artists, no new discoveries, no disruption, no innovation. Where are the wild days gone?” said Resch, the app founder.

With Hong Kong and Los Angeles both attracting growing attention as must-visit art world hubs, and the calendar getting ever more crowded, Berlin’s Gallery Weekend needs to embrace change. Just as the city itself has.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/arts/design/berlin-gallery-weekend.html" id="00a63602-2cb4-36f7-ac0b-73c9cd97adbe">The New York Times</a>.

BERLIN — Most of the World War II bullet holes have been filled in, the legendary 1990s rave venues redeveloped. Rents are rising and so are block after block of luxury apartments. Tech startups are flourishing.

Poor No More, but Still Sexy? Berlin Seeks Its Art World Niche

Since 1985, the gallery has been a platform for Britain’s most prominent and influential art collector, Charles Saatchi, to exhibit and promote works from his own collection. It was run as a commercial enterprise until last month. But Saatchi now appears to be relinquishing control of the institution, which has recently changed tack to display more art from outside his own holdings.

Last month, a new enterprise, also called the Saatchi Gallery, was registered as a charitable incorporated organization with the British government’s Charity Commission. Johan Eliasch, 57, a London-based Swedish billionaire who in the late 1990s turned around the fortunes of the ailing sports group Head N.V., was named as the lead trustee. Eliasch is a friend of Saatchi’s and a prominent environmental campaigner. He declined to comment.

Introduced by the British government in 2013, charitable incorporated organizations are meant to combine the benefits of being a nonprofit with those of being a company. The status gives a variety of tax reliefs and trustees “have limited or no liability for a charitable company’s debts,” according to the government’s website.

In recent years, the gallery’s finances have been controlled by one of Saatchi’s private companies.

Philippa Adams, the gallery’s director, said in an email that its operations “are continuing as before under the recently formed charity structure.” She added that the new charity was “debt free” and that all the gallery’s staff members had been transferred to it.

Saatchi, 75, is a former British advertising mogul who became one of the contemporary art world’s most influential and astute collectors and dealers. A 1997 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” showcased a provocative new spirit in British art. Signature acquisitions, such as Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark-in-formaldehyde sculpture, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” and Tracey Emin’s 1998 installation, “My Bed,” were later sold for millions.

The Saatchi Gallery, which for the past 10 years has leased the stately Duke of York’s Headquarters building in the Chelsea district of London, has concentrated on showing new works by emerging artists from Saatchi’s collection “to the widest audience possible,” according to the gallery’s website. Free admission to the gallery’s own shows encouraged high attendance figures. Just more than 1.8 million visited the museum in 2017, but last year that figure declined by a third to 1.2 million, according to annual reports of museum attendances published by The Art Newspaper.

Guest exhibitions with ticket sales and renting out the venue for events have become the gallery’s main sources of revenue. Some critics have said that commercial exhibitions, such as a two-day pop-up “immersive experience” in 2017 to celebrate 10 years of the reality TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” or the coming “Tutankhamen: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” blockbuster, a global touring show produced by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and the IMG Group (where Eliasch has been a director), have blunted the gallery’s cutting-edge brand.

“The astonishment of the early Saatchi has now been normalized,” said Stephen Bayley, a cultural commentator and former director of the privately owned Design Museum in London. “The artists he showcased who caused outrage 30-plus years ago have become media-friendly house-trained pop celebrities,” he added. “And the Saatchi Gallery is on its way to becoming an event venue.”

Accounts submitted to Companies House, Britain’s national business registry, by Marchill Investments, the entity Saatchi has used to run the gallery, show that in 2017 the company had a loss of 24,764 pounds ($32,600), compared with a profit of 1.2 million pounds in 2016. Corporate sponsorship in 2017 was down 37 percent year-on-year to 2.2 million pounds. Marchill Investments’ accounts for 2018 were overdue, according to the Companies House website.

Saatchi, who declined to comment for this article, announced in 2010 that he wished to donate his collection (then valued at $37 million) to the nation on his retirement. This proposed gift has never been formally accepted by the British government and Saatchi has yet to formally announce that he is stepping back from public life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/design/saachi-gallery-charity.html" id="3db957d0-f3a0-38ff-a972-0a837fa61dd4">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — The Saatchi Gallery, Britain’s best-known and most popular private museum of cutting-edge contemporary art, is now operating as a nonprofit after a downturn in business and a decline in visitor numbers.

Big Changes at Britain's Saatchi Gallery, as Visitor Numbers Slide

In 2018, tech billionaire Marc Benioff donated a wooden statue of a Hawaiian war god he had bought at auction for about $7.5 million to the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The snarling, muscle-bound deity, known as “The Island Eater,” is now the centerpiece of a major exhibition there, exploring the role of traditional sculpture in Hawaiian culture and society.

This private act of restitution came amid a growing clamor for Western collections to return ethnographic artifacts to their places of origin.

Benioff, chairman and chief executive of software company Salesforce, said in a statement announcing the gift that he felt the sculpture “belonged in Hawaii, for the education and benefit of its people.”

At the sale in Paris, Christie’s said the wooden war god was about 200 years old. But now doubts have emerged about the sculpture’s age, inside and outside the Bishop Museum. Some international experts say the piece could be from the 20th century and worth less than $5,000.

“It’s the sort of thing you see in a tiki bar,” said Daniel Blau, an expert in the art of the Pacific islands who is based in Munich.

Such a wide discrepancy in valuation could be a concern for the IRS, should Benioff wish to claim the donation on his tax return, as well for museumgoers having to pay as much as $24.95 to see the sculpture in Honolulu.

Benioff, who would not comment for this article, currently has a net worth of about $6.8 billion, according to Forbes. In September, he bought Time magazine for $190 million. He strongly identifies with the spiritual values of Hawaii, where he owns a six-bedroom beachfront house. His desire to infuse the corporate culture of Salesforce with the “Aloha spirit” — including turning his employees’ Fridays into Hawaiian shirt days — has, however, led to accusations of cultural appropriation.

Now questions are being asked about Benioff’s act of cultural repatriation. The Christie’s sale in Paris was the last of several from the fabled private collection of Pierre Vérité and his son Claude, both highly regarded dealers in tribal art. The elder Vérité had the distinction of selling artifacts to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and André Breton, among others.

Lot 153 in Christie’s sale was cataloged as “Hawaiian figure, kona style, circa 1780-1820, representing the god of war, ku ka ‘ili moku.” Hitherto unknown, with no documented history of ownership, the 21-inch sculpture, carved from wood of the Hawaiian metrosideros tree, was thought to have been acquired by Pierre Vérité from dealer and collector Marie-Ange Ciolkowska during the 1940s, according to Christie’s. It was estimated to sell for 2 million to 3 million euros ($2.3 million to $3.4 million).

“We couldn’t imagine that such a work could still exist in a private collection,” Susan Kloman, head of African and Oceanic art at Christie’s, said in the pre-auction promotional content for the Verité sale. “It’s an incredible discovery,” she added. “This figure could stand on the world stage.”

Kloman declined to comment on the doubts subsequently raised about the sculpture, but a Christie’s representative said last week in an email that it was “an important rediscovery that is sure to inspire continued scholarship and interest.”

Anthony Meyer, a dealer based in Paris and a specialist in Oceanic artworks, said: “I don’t think it’s a pre-contact or post-contact sculpture carved by someone with the belief systems of that period or place,” referring to Captain James Cook’s arrival in Hawaii in 1778. “I think it’s made later, but I don’t know when,” Meyer added.

He added that if the sculpture is of a much later date, it could have a financial value of less than $5,000.

But Julian Harding, a respected private dealer and expert in Pacific Island artifacts, said in by telephone last week that he remained convinced that the wooden war god was “a masterpiece of Oceanic art.”

“If I had $7 million to spend,” he added, “I would have spent it on that figure.”

Harding said he had told Christie’s before the sale that the sculpture was the “mate” of a similar-looking figure made from the same type of wood in the British Museum; records show that sculpture was acquired by the London Missionary Society in Hawaii in 1822.

George Bennet, a voracious collector, was on that voyage, and Harding believes that the figure sold at Christie’s was very likely from his personal collection. “I’m 90 percent sure it’s a Bennet piece,” Harding said. This provenance, “George Bennet collection, London,” which has no documentary corroboration, was included in marketing materials from Christie’s.

Last fall, a fact-finding delegation of curators from the Bishop Museum visited experts in London and Paris, including Meyer, to investigate the history of the sculpture. The museum’s current “Transformative Images” exhibition, in which the figure is on show, presents it cautiously, describing it as “long held in a private French collection,” but not specifying when it was carved.

Melanie Ide, the museum’s president and chief executive, said the museum was aware of “a question about its history and provenance,” adding that curators were doing “additional research.” The wood has been scientifically analyzed, she said, adding that further testing “may be informative.”

Blau and other experts point out that radiocarbon testing can narrow down the age of the wood, but not when it was carved.

Adrienne Kaeppler, curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and one of the world’s foremost experts on Hawaiian art, said in an email that Christie’s had contacted her about the figure before the sale. “I told them it looked like a similar replica of the sculpture in the British Museum, only smaller,” Kaeppler said. “I was concerned that its history only went back to the 1930s.”

A spokeswoman for Christie’s said Kaeppler had only seen photographs of the sculpture and had not viewed it person.

The issue could be given closure if Benioff were to claim a charitable tax deduction for his $7.5 million donation to the Bishop Museum. Having been bought at auction for more than $50,000, the sculpture would have to be appraised by the IRS Art Advisory Panel, which would recommend a true market value.

“The IRS generally won’t accept an auction receipt as an appraisal,” said David Shapiro, a senior appraiser at Victor Wiener Associates in New York. “The IRS requires an appraisal, and at this level the Art Advisory Panel will take a good look at it. Values of an ethnographic artwork can be wildly different if there are doubts about it.”

But Shapiro also pointed out that donated artworks generally qualify for significant tax deductions only if they have been owned by a collector for at least a year. This was not the case with Benioff’s Hawaiian sculpture.

Benioff said through a Salesforce spokeswoman that he would not comment for this article, and did not respond to further emails asking if he intended his gift to be tax-deductible.

And so the debate, and the uncertainty, goes on. Marques Marzan, a cultural adviser at the Bishop Museum who has been coordinating the museum’s research, said that a date for the donated sculpture “cannot be confirmed at this time.”

But, he added, the exhibition in which it is featured focuses on what this enigmatic Hawaiian sculpture “represents to the living people today.”

“Provenance and dates are helpful in better understanding the cultural and global context of objects,” Marzan said. “But if a piece cannot provoke discussion or appreciation, what really is it worth?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/arts/design/hawaii-sculpture-bishop-museum-marc-benioff.html" id="012ac925-1ca6-3ae5-a4ca-1100bf105f43">The New York Times</a>.

It was a generous gift — and one completely in tune with our cultural times.

Masterpiece or Mistake? A Hawaii Museum's $7.5 Million Question

On Monday, Christie’s announced that Loic Gouzer, its innovative co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art in New York, would be leaving the auction house by the end of the year. Gouzer said in a statement that he intended to spend the next few months “concentrating on conservation and climate issues before coming back to the art world with a new project.”

Gouzer is the third prominent auction house executive whose departure has been announced recently. On Nov. 21, Christie’s said Francis Outred, its head of postwar and contemporary art in Europe, would be leaving. On Dec. 3, Sotheby’s said Adam Chinn, its chief operating officer, would also be stepping down, with his role eliminated.

Guillaume Cerutti, chief executive of Christie’s, said in an email to The New York Times that the auction house would “primarily count on our existing teams in Europe and in New York” to replace Gouzer and Outred. “I strongly believe the real stars are the brand and the team,” Cerutti added.

Gouzer’s leaving Christie’s represented the biggest shock, given that he was the architect of the mold-breaking $705.9 million “Looking Forward to the Past” auction of 20th-century art in 2015, as well as the inclusion of a $450.3 million Leonardo da Vinci in a contemporary art sale in New York in 2017. But the abrupt departure of three such senior figures reflects the intense competitive pressure that deal-makers are under at the top end of the auction market.

“The equation is more complex today than 10 years ago and even than five years ago,” said Cerutti. “Winning deals or convincing the owners to sell has become more sophisticated.”

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as their would-be rival Phillips, frequently find themselves competing to offer the most generous possible terms to finance-savvy owners of multimillion dollar artworks.

Sellers at this level are not charged commission, leaving the auction houses to tempt them with higher valuations and bigger percentages of the fees they charge buyers. Increasingly these complex arrangements are pegged to a minimum price guarantee, with the guarantor earning a share of the profit if the work sells above that figure. It is a risky business, and auction houses like to pass on that risk to a third party, who guarantees the sale with a so-called “irrevocable bid” at the auction.

This leaves auction houses making meaningful returns on high-value lots only when they sell significantly over estimate. But demand at the very top end of the market has cooled. The two highest-selling auction lots of the year — a $157.2 million Modigliani nude at Sotheby’s and a $115 million Picasso at Christie’s — both failed to surpass expectations, selling to single bids from their third-party backers and so yielding no upside to the auction house. Competition for the best available works has pushed up the value of guarantees, but this often discourages competitive bidding at the auction itself.

Ed Dolman, chief executive of Phillips, said that third-party guarantees have “changed the dynamics” of big-ticket auctions. “You prearrange the sale and execute it at the auction. Buyers are locked into deals, so they don’t have the flexibility to bid on other lots,” he added.

Because of this, the risk of offering high-value lots that don’t have guaranteed bidders has risen. In October, at Christie’s in London, a Gerhard Richter skull painting and a Jeff Koons “Cracked Egg” sculpture — both seemingly “blue-chip” contemporary masterworks, one estimated at $15 million and the other at $13 million — failed to sell.

Things get even riskier when the auction house guarantees a work with its own money. At last month’s sales in New York, Sotheby’s couldn’t find a buyer for “Prewar Pageant,” one of an admired group of abstracts by the early American modernist Marsden Hartley, which the house had guaranteed for about $30 million.

Sotheby’s also took financial hits on third-party guarantees in May, when the $157.2 million Modigliani sold below its published estimate, and in June, when a Picasso undersold at $36 million.

The auction house, explaining a 26 percent decline in net income in the second financial quarter, said its margins had been “negatively impacted” by “auction guarantee shortfalls” on two paintings. In other words, Sotheby’s had to use its own cash to top up the amounts promised to the sellers.

Yet thanks to all those guarantees, and to prestigious estate auctions, such the David and Peggy Rockefeller ($835.1 million) and Barney A. Ebsworth ($323.5 million) sales, both of which were guaranteed by Christie’s, and the Pierre Bergé ($32.4 million) sale at Sotheby’s, the overall numbers for 2018 will be impressive enough.

Official figures have yet to be released. However, Christie’s (which, being a private company, doesn’t have to report profits or losses in the way a listed company would) said it raised a total of $6.2 billion at auction in 2018, a 6 percent increase on the previous year. Total auction sales at Sotheby’s were at least $5.2 billion, 13 percent up on 2017.

With economic indicators looking ominous in America, China and Europe, 2019 could be a more difficult year for the art world.

“Next year, we’re going to see a lot of recalibration,” said Evan Beard, an art adviser in the wealth management unit of Bank of America. Beard said that the auction houses were already “dampening down” the expectations of sellers.

But the “three Ds” of death, divorce and debt will keep supplying the market. Last week, a divorce judge ruled that the $2 billion fortune of the New York real estate magnate Harry Macklowe and his estranged wife, Linda, should be split. That means the Macklowes’ collection of modern and contemporary art, valued at about $700 million, will have to be sold.

And while auction house executives come and go, there also remains a select group of ultrawealthy collectors whose buying and selling keeps the machine churning. The Irish businessman John Magnier, who sold that $157.2 million Modigliani, was one who oiled the wheels in 2018. The Bahamas-based financier Joe Lewis, the seller of a $90.3 million Hockney, was another.

“They’re uninfluenced by interest rate rises and other things that happen in the wider economy,” said Beard. “Their arbitrage unlocks the capital that allows the top end of the market to continue,” he added, estimating that the most influential “mega-collectors” amounted to a group of about 40 individuals. “It’s a small club.”

And that club isn’t going anywhere.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/arts/christies-sothebys-loic-gouzer.html" id="6b7f5e7f-2409-392b-acfe-b3866f9e55fb">The New York Times</a>.

Going, Going, Gone: Explaining Auction Houses' Executive Exodus

It’s been a memorable year in the art world, not for what happened, but for who left.

<h1>LONDON — Works by female artists of African origin created the highest-energy moments in Phillips’ summer sale in London on Thursday. It was the last of the evening auctions that are the traditional finale of the contemporary art market’s hectic seasonal cycle.</h1>

British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the more established South African painter Marlene Dumas both had paintings sell to telephone bidders for about twice their estimates.

“There’s been a correction. Buyers are looking to discover something new,” Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Phillips, said, referring to how price growth for some established male artists, particularly abstract painters, has stalled. “There’s a return to figuration, and the artists are very diverse,” she added. “A global audience responds to that.”

Four bidders pushed Yiadom-Boakye’s “Leave A Brick Under The Maple” (2015) a life-size portrait of a standing man, to 795,000 pounds, or about $1 million, almost double its high estimate. Institutional validation always gives confidence to bidders, and Yiadom-Boakye, who will have a retrospective at Tate Britain in May, also features in the much-praised Ghana pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Dumas’ haunting 1988 canvas, “Losing (Her Meaning),” which depicts a nude woman floating facedown in a pool, has been included in some 18 public exhibitions but had never been offered at auction. One of the few true museum-quality works in the summer sales, this piece climbed to 1.2 million pounds ($1.5 million), double its high estimate.

Phillips’ sale raised 35.9 million pounds ($45.5 million) from 36 lots, slightly above last year’s London total.

The Wednesday night sale at Sotheby’s reflected a similar shift: Toyin Ojih Odutola’s self-portrait on paper, “Compound Leaf,” sold for 471,000 pounds ($597,000). It was a record price for a work by her at auction and one that far exceeded the work’s high estimate of 150,000 pounds ($191,000).

Tuesday at Christie’s, when “Out of Body,” a 2015 oil-and-fabric collage of stylized female figures by young African American artist Tschabalala Self came up, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer and global president of the auction house, told those assembled, “There are 19 bidders on the telephone, so be brave with your bidding.”

And they were. Intense competition from telephone bidders led the buyer, Jose Mugrabi, a New York collector, dealer and market-influencer who was in the room, to pay 371,250 pounds ($415,000) for the piece, a new auction high for the artist and more than six times the Christie’s estimate of 40,000 to 60,000 pounds.

Dealers have lengthy waiting lists of buyers seeking work by the hottest names, so when these works appear on the auction market, they can fetch far more than gallery price tags.

At Art Basel this year, for example, Pilar Corrias, Self’s London gallerist, sold a new work for less than $100,000. Such gulfs between “primary” and “secondary” market prices inevitably encourage speculation.

“I am trying to keep a level head in regard to the auction prices,” Self said in an email Thursday. “I do not personally base the value of my work on these results.” Self is an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and recently designed a limited-edition handbag for Louis Vuitton.

London hosts three series of high-end contemporary auctions each year. But the continuing uncertainties surrounding Brexit have made collectors reluctant to consign trophy works here, particularly in the summer. Christie’s held no evening contemporary auctions in London for two years before returning this June.

Sourcing top-quality material remains a problem, dealers say. “It’s very mixed. Not a strong sale. You wouldn’t come back from holiday for this,” Ivor Braka, a private dealer and collector, based in London, said, commenting on the 32 works up for auction at Christie’s on Tuesday.

In the absence of a Gerhard Richter abstract painting, Christie’s offered one of his large-scale abstract tapestries from an edition of eight created in 2009. It sold in line with its estimate for 1 million pounds ($1.3 million).

Thanks to blue-chip 20th-century pieces like Jean Dubuffet’s vibrant 1961 painting “Cérémonie,” bought for 8.7 million pounds (about $11 million) by Daniella Luxembourg, the London and New York art dealer, Christie’s raised a respectable total of 45.2 million pounds ($57 million). It was a far cry from the record 137.4 million pounds ($174 million) the company achieved in March 2018.

The 42-lot sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening raised 69.6 million pounds (about $88 million), 37% less than the equivalent sale raised last year. Like Christie’s and Phillips, Sotheby’s had lined its galleries with the sort of big-statement pictures that appeal to today’s wealthy art collectors, if not biennial curators.

Jenny Saville’s 9-foot-high canvas, “Shadow Head” (2013), sold to a bidder for 4.2 million pounds ($5.3 million). A barely less monumental “Self-Portrait With Empty Hands” (1998) by German painter Albert Oehlen, who will be the subject of an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in October, took 6 million pounds ($7.6 million) from Per Skarstedt, a New York and London dealer.

Sotheby’s said after the auction that it had achieved a price of “92,500 pounds per square inch” for a small Francis Bacon self-portrait from 1975, which sold for a single bid of 16.5 million pounds. But otherwise, this auction settled into a metronomic session of middling-value works by “investment-grade” names valued between $300,000 and $3 million. Each attracted one or two bidders.

“It was business as usual tonight,” said Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art. “It was a sale of established names that are the mainstays of the art market.”

But as demand shifts toward younger and more diverse artists, how long will established names like Richter, Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel be “mainstays,” particularly if they aren’t making collectors a profit?

The seller of the untitled 1992 word painting by Wool, “WANT TO BE YOUR DOG,” had paid $1.5 million for the work at auction in 2000, according to the Artnet database of salesroom prices. But no one was prepared to bid a low estimate of 3 million ($3.8 million) for it at Sotheby’s.

Fabrizio Moretti, a London dealer in old masters who collects contemporary art, said “the estimates are too high,” for these established names. “And the market has got a lot more selective,” he added.

Stingel is the subject of a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, but the exhibition has not galvanized his auction prices. At Sotheby’s, a pale purple “Untitled,” inspired by an Oriental carpet, was bought by Gagosian, the artist’s dealer, with a low-estimate bid of 1.3 million pounds. The seller had bought it at auction in 2017 for $2.9 million.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/arts/design/female-artists-with-african-backgrounds-are-winners-at-phillips-auction-in-london.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Female artists with African backgrounds are winners at Phillips auction in London

British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the more established South African painter Marlene Dumas both had paintings sell to telephone bidders for about twice their estimates.

Robert E. Mnuchin, an art dealer and the father of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, made the winning bid for Koons’ 1986 “Rabbit” from an aisle seat in the front of the salesroom. He was seated near Peter Brant, the collector and private museum-owner.

It was the ultimate prize among six works offered at Christie’s from the collection of magazine publisher S.I. Newhouse Jr., who died in 2017. Estimated to raise at least $50 million, the sculpture had three animated telephone bidders and another in the room. Made in an edition of three, and one artist’s proof, this sculpture was the last example left in private hands, according to Christie’s.

The price — surpassing the $90.2 million with fees achieved last November, again at Christie’s, for Hockney’s 1972 painting, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)” — confirmed how Koons’ metal sculptures have become the ultimate billionaire trophies produced during the contemporary art boom of the 1980s and ’90s. In November 2013, the artist’s reflective “Balloon Dog (Orange)” from the 1990s sold at auction for $58.4 million.

Critics pointed out that the “Rabbit” sculpture elegantly and enigmatically alludes to earlier pieces by such artists as Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

“I always thought it would be in the pantheon,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the dealer. “It was instantly embraced by artists and cultural critics, and it’s kept its resonance for all these years.”

This validation is all the sweeter for Koons, whose career trajectory has been contradictory, controversial and uneven. In 2017, slowing demand for some of his more recent works necessitated a major downsizing of his studio. Auction prices for his most valuable sculptures have also slumped. In the past five years, the most recent spike in sales of contemporary art, the highest price paid for a Koons sculpture at auction was $22.8 million, for the colored aluminum sculpture “Play Doh,” according to the Artnet database of salesroom prices.

Koons has been embroiled in suits accusing him of copying, and in 2016, he upset the French cultural establishment by giving Paris a colorfully upbeat “Bouquet of Tulips” sculpture, inspired by the Statue of Liberty, as a memorial to victims of recent terrorist attacks in France.

“There are so many strange, disconcerting aspects to Jeff Koons, his art and his career that it is hard to quite know how to approach” it, Roberta Smith wrote in the The New York Times, reviewing his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2014, then its largest survey devoted to a single artist.

His work ranges from the notorious pictures that depict the artist in flagrante with his then-wife, Ilona Staller, known in her porn-star days as La Cicciolina; to knowingly kitsch sculptures like one of Michael Jackson with Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee; to his reflective, oversize “Rabbit” that “turns the hare into a space-invader of unknown origin,” Smith wrote.

In all, the six contemporary works from the Newhouse collection raised $115 million Wednesday evening. On Monday evening, five Impressionist and modern works owned by Newhouse had raised $101 million. Before this week, this group of 11 had been estimated at $130 million.

Because Christie’s offered the two choicest estate collections of the week, the sale was packed with classic works by major names of American postwar and contemporary art. The auction began with 11 works from the Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer family, based in Chicago. Buying directly from dealers in the 1960s, the Mayers’ amassed a formidable collection of Pop Art.

“They were important collectors, and they bought early,” said David Nisinson, a collector and art adviser in New York. “Christie’s had a lot of fresh material from well-known collectors that hadn’t been seen for years.”

The pick of the Mayer works was Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 silk-screen painting, “Buffalo II,” evoking the febrile political climate after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It sold for $88.8 million with fees. The couple had acquired the painting in 1965 from the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.

“It’s a very significant painting,” said Nisinson. “And Rauschenberg has been undervalued compared to other artists.”

Most of Rauschenberg’s most innovative works from the 1950s and ’60s, particularly his trailblazing “Combines,” have long been held in museums and rarely appear on the market. This early silk-screen painting, packed with evocative imagery, is the most significant Rauschenberg to appear at auction in years. The previous high for Rauschenberg had been $18.6 million in 2015, according to Artnet.

Other Pop trophies from the Mayer collection included Roy Lichtenstein’s “Kiss” (1962), which brought in $31.1 million.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8c15d52b-313f-3ac4-ab22-8936b75f36bb" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/jeff-koons-rabbit-smashes-record-for-work-by-a-living-artist.html">The New York Times</a>.

Koons sculpture smashes record for work by a living artist

NEW YORK — A shiny stainless steel sculpture created by Jeff Koons in 1986, inspired by a child’s inflatable toy, sold at Christie’s on Wednesday night for $91.1 million with fees, smashing the record at auction for a work by a living artist, set just last November by David Hockney.

Robert E. Mnuchin, an art dealer and the father of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, made the winning bid for Koons’ 1986 “Rabbit” from an aisle seat near the front of the salesroom. He was seated near Peter Brant, the collector and private museum-owner, and Jeffrey Deitch, the dealer.

The price — surpassing the $90.2 million with fees achieved, again at Christie’s, for Hockney’s 1972 painting, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)” — confirmed how Koons’ metal sculptures have become the ultimate billionaire trophies produced during the contemporary art boom of the 1980s and ’90s. The Hockney milestone came at the expense of Koons, the previous record-holder, whose “Balloon Dog (Orange)” sold at auction for $58.4 million in November 2013.

“I always thought it would be in the pantheon,” said Deitch. “It was instantly embraced by artists and cultural critics, and it’s kept its resonance for all these years.”

This validation is all the sweeter for Koons, whose career trajectory has been contradictory, controversial and uneven. In 2017, slowing demand for some of his more recent works necessitated a major downsizing of his studio. Auction prices for his most valuable sculptures have also slumped. Since 2014, the most recent spike in sales of contemporary art, the highest price paid for a Koons sculpture at auction was $22.8 million, for the colored aluminum sculpture “Play Doh,” according to the Artnet database of salesroom prices.

Scott Reyburn

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