By SCOTT REYBURN and ROBIN
POGREBIN
The sale of “La Muse
Endormie” by Constantin Brancusi for $57.4 million set a new high for the
artist at auction. Credit 2017 Constantin Brancusi, Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, via Christie's
Just when it looked as if
some in the crowd at Christie’s might nod off during a slow-going — albeit
solid — auction of Impressionist and Modern works Monday evening, a bronze
female head by Constantin Brancusi injected a powerful dose of excitement into
the proceedings. The work sold for $57.4 million with fees after nine minutes
of vigorous competition from at least five bidders in the room and on the
phones.
The head was quickly
rumored to have been sold to the media mogul David Geffen over the phone,
although the art adviser who won the lot, Tobias Meyer, declined to comment on
his way out of the auction room and Mr. Geffen, reached by phone, said he was
not the buyer.
“It was a fantastic piece,”
Nicholas Maclean, a dealer, said afterward. “It’s one of the great subjects,
was an early cast and was in extraordinary condition. They just never come up
for sale.”
The auction, which kicked
off this week of spring sales in New York, was respectable despite the room’s
low energy (perhaps in part because of the deliberative auctioneer), raising a
total of $289.2 million with 78 percent of the 55 lots sold.
The auctions are expected
to test the resilience of the art market in the Trump economy, although the
administration’s tax policies — which will affect collecting — remain an open
question.
The active bidders for the
Brancusi pushed the 1913 egg-shaped sculpture, “La Muse Endormie,” to a new
high for the artist at auction. The work had been expected to fetch $25 million
to $35 million and was offered with a guaranteed minimum price by an unnamed Parisian
collector.
The abstract female head
was one of six bronze versions of a sculpture first made by Brancusi, a
Romanian-born sculptor, in Paris in white marble in 1909-10. The stone version
is now in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
The second-highest price of
the night was the $45 million paid for Picasso’s 1939 painting “Femme Assise,
Robe Bleue.” Credit 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, via Christie's
The second-highest price of
the night was the $45 million paid for Picasso’s 1939 painting “Femme Assise,
Robe Bleue,” which was also guaranteed and carried a low estimate of $35
million. It was won on the phone by Rebecca Wei, president of Christie’s Asia.
This head-and-shoulders portrait of the artist’s lover and muse Dora Maar was
sold by the Greek collector and financier Dimitri Mavrommatis, who bought the
painting at Christie’s in 2011 for $29 million.
The painting was first
owned by Picasso’s Paris dealer, Paul Rosenberg, whose collection was
appropriated in France by the Germans during World War II. Rosenberg escaped to
the United States in 1940. Four years later, “Femme Assise, Robe Bleue” was
among 64 Picassos recovered by free French troops from a Nazi transport train
outside Paris. The troops were led by the dealer’s son, Lieutenant Alexandre
Rosenberg, who instantly recognized the artwork. The incident was later
dramatized in the 1964 John Frankenheimer movie, “The Train,” starring Burt
Lancaster.
The total for the night’s
auction was double the $141.5 million Christie’s took at the equivalent sale
last May, which contained 51 artworks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/arts/brancusi-head-christies-picasso.html?_r=0
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