THE 5 POWER MOVES TRANSFORMING THE ART MARKET THIS FALL

Nate Freeman

Each fall, the art market awakes from its summer slumber with a sonic boom. In the weeks after Labor Day, hundreds of galleries open some of their strongest shows of the year, followed by a mushrooming of fairs in October and November in London, Paris, and Shanghai. The season is capped by the fall evening sales in New York in mid-November, which set the tone for Art Basel in Miami Beach just a few weeks later.

Out of the torrent of gallery shows, fair booths, or auction lots set to be parsed over by the art market this fall, we identified the key takeaways to focus on this season. Let the games begin.

More big estates are coming to auction

Edward Hopper, Chop Suey, 1929. Courtesy of Christie’s.

It’s only been a few months since the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller grossed $832.6 million at Christie’s, making it the most valuable estate sale in history.

This fall, the auction house will follow it up with a stand-alone sale of a collection that’s nearly as impressive: work from the collection of Barney Ebsworth, the Seattle collector who assembled what is widely considered one of the great collections of American art. When Ebsworth died in April, he left five works to his local Seattle Art Museum, and six to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with each institution getting one of his two masterpieces by Georgia O’Keeffe: Black, White and Blue (1930), and Music—Pink and Blue No.1 (1918).

One work that was reported to be donated, as well, was Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey (1929), a depiction of two women in pillbox hats waiting for their food at a Chinese restaurant—an iconic and instantly recognizable work of 20th-century American art. A profile of Ebsworth in the November 2007 issue of Seattle Met said it would be among the works given to the Seattle Art Museum, but instead it was bequeathed to the family, who decided to included it in the sale after Christie’s successfully pitched them.

“When we were pitching for the collection, [Chop Suey] was always the centerpiece of the sale,” Sara Friedlander, head of the post-war and contemporary department at Christie’s, told Artsy. “This was a collection that everyone has always been after—private collectors and institutions.”

It’s part of a number of exemplary collections that have been given to auction houses to sell in recent years. In 2016, Sotheby’s won the Steven and Ann Ames collection, and 25 of the couple’s paintings sold at the contemporary art evening auction that November for $122.8 million, above a $100 million guarantee. At this year’s post-war sale, Sotheby’s will offer work from the collection of late Museum of Modern Art trustee David Teiger, and these works are expected to bring in $100 million……………

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