New York’s heavyweight 20th-century art evening sales this week brought a $121mn record for René Magritte, while the contemporary art auctions, ongoing as this column went to print, will likely be remembered for a banana selling for $6.2mn.
The 20th-century evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were down nearly 40 per cent from last year’s equivalent sessions, but are keeping the selective and recalibrated market ticking. This year, each opened with a single owner collection, 25 classic art and design pieces owned by beauty magnate Sydell Miller at Sotheby’s, and 19 more adventurous works from the interior designer Mica Ertegun at Christie’s. The latter provided the star lot of the 20th-century sales: René Magritte’s famed “L’empire des lumières” (1954) which sold in a three-way telephone battle for $105mn ($121.2mn with fees, unpublished estimate $95mn) and looking like the highest auction price of 2024 by far. Miller’s works made a total within-estimate $190mn ($216mn with fees), topped by Claude Monet’s late “Nymphéas” (c1914-17), which was at auction for the first time and took a long 18 minutes to sell over the phone to Sotheby’s deputy chair in Asia for $59mn ($65.5mn with fees, unpublished estimate $60mn).
On Wednesday night, the banana — aka Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019) — was bought by Justin Sun, founder of the cryptocurrency Tron, for $5.2mn ($6.2mn with fees, est $1mn-$1.5mn). After the sale, Sun said “in the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience”.
The mixed-owner sales were patchy, all coming in below their estimates with Sotheby’s making a total $79mn ($93mn with fees); Christies $253mn ($302mn with fees) and Phillips $44mn, including contemporary art ($54mn with fees). High-wattage disappointments included Henri Matisse’s topless “Torse de jeune fille” (1921-22), estimated at $12mn-$18mn and guaranteed by Sotheby’s, which now owns the unsold work, and Henri Rousseau’s “Femme en rouge dans la fôret” (c1905), estimated between $10mn and $20mn and unsold at Christie’s. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 double “Self-Portrait”, once owned by actor Johnny Depp, had a similar fate at Phillips (est $10mn-$15mn).
Christie’s had a hit, though, with Ed Ruscha’s “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half” (1964), reportedly sold by oil billionaire Sid Bass, which went for $59mn ($68.3mn with fees), above its unpublished $50mn estimate. At Phillips, an unusual wearable sculpture by Alexander Calder, “Reclining Bride” (1948), sold for $250,000 ($317,500 with fees) on a $50,000-$70,000 estimate.
Notable this season is an appetite for design, which has crept into the supply-hungry evening sales. At Sotheby’s, a Tiffany Studios stained-glass window, commissioned for an Ohio church in 1913, where it remained until the building was dismantled in 1990, went for $10.8mn on Monday ($12.5mn with fees, est $5mn-$7mn). Its seller, the cable TV billionaire Alan Gerry, had bought the window for $2mn in 2000. At Christie’s the next evening, a drop-front bar in the shape of a large carp designed by François-Xavier Lalanne in 1972, sold for a within-estimate $6.1mn ($7.4mn with fees), nearly 10 times more than it was bought for in 2014 ($725,000 with fees). A 2001 Lalanne table adorned with gold-patinated elephants generated punchy bidding in the Sydell Miller sale and made $10mn ($11.6mn with fees) against a pre-sale estimate of $4mn-$6mn.
Untitled Art, which opens its 13th edition in Miami on December 4, will launch a new fair in Houston, Texas, in September 2025. It is the second time that the fair has branched out in the US — a San Francisco event opened in 2017 but did not return after the Covid-19 pandemic. “We were focused on getting Miami back on track,” says founder Jeff Lawson.
The much-larger city of Houston was on management’s radar well before then, he says, and that now is the right time to realise their ambitions. “It is the fourth biggest city in the country and predicted to be the third [overtaking Chicago]. It is also very diverse, with so many languages spoken, and its cultural scene — including the Museum of Fine Arts — is expanding,” Lawson says. Exhibitors already committed include Jessica Silverman Gallery, Megan Mulrooney and Houston’s Seven Sisters.
The city has no other art fair and is associated more with older oil and gas money than cutting edge contemporary art. To date, Dallas has been the go-to Texas marketplace and Austin also has a lively scene. Earlier this month, though, New York’s Art Dealers Association of America event zoned in on Houston, citing “the vibrancy of the city’s fine art community”.
Untitled will be in the to-be-renovated George R Brown Convention Center, part of a $2bn modernisation of the East Downtown area. The art writer and curator Michael Slenske will direct the new fair, though remain based in Los Angeles. The previously independent Untitled was bought by the luxury portfolio group South Florida Ventures earlier this year.
An unfinished and previously unknown portrait of Oliver Cromwell comes on view and for sale for £75,000 at Dickinson Gallery in London this month. Painted by Robert Walker, a Cromwell favourite, and dated to c1649-55, there is limited information concerning its history since, other than that the current owner bought it from a collection in Yorkshire, “said to go back several generations,” says the gallery’s managing director, Milo Dickinson. The work was authenticated by Walker expert Angus Haldane in October, Dickinson confirms.
The painting shows one of England’s most divisive and influential leaders being prepared in battle by a page. During a two-month cleaning and restoration process, more details of its unfinished nature emerged, says Dickinson, including that Walker had painted the highlights on Cromwell’s face, but not yet the shadows. The gallery believes that as the work was painted “during a period when Cromwell was facing military challenges in Scotland and Ireland and unrest at home”, it “fell victim to the changing fates of the period”.
It goes on display at the gallery between November 25 and December 10, with portraits by other 17th-century painters based in England, including Anthony van Dyck, Cornelius Johnson and Mary Beale, the most renowned female artist working in Britain at the time.
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