Displaying items by tag: jean michel basquiat

Millions of dollars worth of art was sold in London last week thanks to the Frieze art fairs. Frieze Masters, which is in its second year and presents works created before 2000, included the sale of Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise au chapeau (Acquavella Galleries) for $7 million, an abstract painting by Willem de Kooning for $8 million and two Jean-Michel Basquiat works for a combined $9.3 million.

Frieze London, which features established contemporary artists as well as promising newcomers, saw fewer big-ticket items. As the event drew to a close, Gagosian Gallery, which presented five highly anticipated works by Jeff Koons, had no confirmed sales. A sculpture by Takashi Murakami being offered by Hauser & Wirth was also still available as the fair winded down.

Frieze week also includes a number of contemporary art auctions and a number of satellite events, which added to the week’s hefty art sales.

Christie’s will sell a number of pieces from the collection of Jan Krugier, an art dealer who sold works for Pablo Picasso’s family. The sale will include over 150 lots and is expected to garner at least $170 million. The sale, A Dialogue Through Art: Works from the Jan Krugier Collection, will take place on November 4-5, 2013 at the auction house’s New York location.

Krugier, who died in 2008, was one of the leading dealers in premier 20^th century art for four decades. He operated galleries in Geneva and New York and exhibited at highly anticipated art fairs including Art Basel in Switzerland and TEFAF Masstricht in the Netherlands. Krugier’s Manhattan gallery closed in 2010 and his company no longer participates in fairs.

A Dialogue Through Art will present 30 works by Picasso including a maquette for the 65-foot sculpture Tete, which is located in Chicago. The work is expected to sell for $25 million to $35 million and is the most valuable piece in the sale. Other highlights include a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti made for the Venice Biennale, which is expected to sell for $9 million to $12 million; a Fauvist period landscape by Wassily Kandinsky, which carries a $20 million to $25 million estimate; and a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is expected to sell for $3 million to $4 million.

A selection of works from the upcoming sale will be on view at Christie’s headquarters in London through September 19, 2013.

When notable street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, passed a spiral notebook back and forth with his high school classmates, he surely didn’t anticipate the collaboration being at the center of a heated lawsuit. Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, Basquiat’s adolescent cohorts, are suing Yale University’s Beinecke Library to have their contributions to the “SAMO© high-school notebook” recognized.

 Diaz and Dawson claim that Yale has glossed over their roles in creating the notebook that is bursting with puns, notes, doodles, and scribblings, and are passing it off as a priceless piece of Basquiat’s oeuvre. The duo also claimed that the book was stolen from Dawson and somehow ended up in Yale’s library. The respected institution reportedly paid as much as $40,000 for the notebook.

The lawsuit raises a number of questions concerning artist ephemera, a notoriously difficult thing to trace. The fact that Diaz and Dawson had a falling out with Basquiat after the artist rose to fame also makes navigating the case difficult.

Peter Brant, chairman and chief executive officer of the White Birch Paper Co., has fallen from billionaire status and is turning to his contemporary art collection to help recapitalize the family newsprint business. An early patron of Andy Warhol, Brant recently pledged 56 works to the lending arm of Sotheby’s including works by Warhol, Richard Prince, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Brant also pledged pieces to a unit of the Deutsche Bank AG and his former business partner, including a Warhol from the early 1960s that is said to be worth around $35 million.

Ranked as one of the largest contemporary art collectors in the United States, Brant joins a number of wealthy collectors who have started taking out loans backed artworks to fund their ventures. It is rumored that Brant used his art collection to provide some of the capital needed to buy White Birch out of bankruptcy in 2011.

According to an annual report, Sotheby’s Financial Services provides consignment loans secured by artworks that borrowers have agreed to sell through the auction house, permitting them to get some of the proceeds as much as a year ahead of time. The auction house also makes term loans on works that clients aren’t planning to sell in order to solidify relationships with borrowers that will hopefully lead to future consignments.

While Sotheby's did report record breaking sales during their second quarter and first half that ended June 30, 2012, their overall revenues have decreased from the previous year. "Our operating results reflect some tremendous successes, but also reflect the challenging global economy, a tough comparison to the best quarter in Sotheby's history a year ago," said Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Sotheby's report stated that their second quarter net income was $85.4 million, a 33% decrease from 2011 and total revenues hit $303.9 million, down 18% from last year. For the six months that ended June 30th, Sotheby's reported a net income of $74.8 million, a decrease of 42%, and total revenues came in at $408.9 million, down 16% from 2011. Although there has been a slowdown in the Asian market, Ruprecht says, "art appears to remain an attracting asset for collectors and out consignment pipeline for the Autumn season is very active at the moment."

A testament to that hunch is the world record-breaking sale of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Sold for $119.9 million at the Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale in New York in May, the Evening Sale totaled $330.6 million, Sotheby's highest ever total for an Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide Sale. It was the second highest total for a Sotheby's auction in any category.

Other big sales included one of Andy Warhol's last self-portraits and Flowers, both of which sold from the collection of the late photographer, Gunter Sachs, for $8.5 million and $5.9 million, respectively, in a May auction London. Joan Miro's Peinture (Etoile Bleue) sold for $36.9 million, a record for the artist at auction, at Sotheby's June London sale. Also highlighting the Impressionist and Modern Art sales was Pablo Picasso's late portrait, Homme Assis, which brought in $9.7 million. The June London Contemporary Art series also fared well, bringing in a total of $129.7 million. The top lot was Jean-Michel Basquiat's Warrior which sold for $8.7 million, nearly double the amount it acheived at auction five years ago.

Robert Hughes, who brought a muscular, confrontational writing style to the genteel world of art criticism, and whose books and television programs on art and the history of his native Australia brought him a worldwide following, died Aug. 6 at a hospital in the Bronx. He was 74.

His wife, Doris Downes, released a statement saying her husband “had been very ill for some time.” His health had been somewhat precarious since a near-fatal car accident in 1999.

Mr. Hughes had wide-ranging interests and published a memoir, a book about fishing and biographies of artists, in addition to two monumental surveys of art history. His 1987 book about the settlement of Australia, “The Fatal Shore,” was considered a masterpiece and became an international bestseller.