It was the week of a big spring auction in New York, where art collectors left a little in their pockets starting with Fair Weekend, and now their focus shifts to three huge houses. Last year, Christie, Sotheby's and Phillips sold $1.4 billion this season, down 22% from 2023. Will we see the rewards this week? Christie's assembles a bunch of expensive works, led by Jean-Michel Basquiat Baby Prosperity (1982), for sale on Wednesday evening of the 21st century. We caught up with Isabella Lauria, the head of sales, to learn about it Baby Prosperity Some other works that went to the block that night.
Basquiat's output is wild and varied. What can you tell me Baby Prosperity? What makes it special? 1982 would have been pretty good early in his career, right?
Baby Prosperity It was painted in 1982 and was drawn in November 1982 with the Fun Gallery in Basquiat's famous solo performance. Many consider this the most important performance of the artist's life, revealing the young Basquiat at the age of 22, whose artistic freedom begins to pay tribute to the Graffiti community. He is also where he showed his first stretcher painting (with hand-supported) in which the work is located. Baby Prosperity interpreted as a family portrait of Basquet. After World War II, it mentioned the title of the influx of birth rates, a triple portrait that is believed to portray Basquet's father (Gerard), whose mother (Matilda) is on the right and the young artist to the left. So it is incredibly personal, and it is a rare thing to see something like this autobiography in his work. The work is exhibited in a monograph exhibition of no less than twenty Basquet's career, spanning over a dozen countries and four continents, as well as a post-review including the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, Foodation Beyeler in 2010, Gagosian in 2013, Gagosian in 2013, and Louis Vuitton in 2019.
I was at the 2017 auction and a painting by Basquiat was sold to breathe for $110.5 million. What has happened to the Basquet market since then?
Since 2017, Basquet's relevance to contemporary culture has continued to spread far beyond the art world and into music, media and fashion. In the seven years since reaching the record price mentioned above, he has conducted several major institutional retrospectives that continue to advocate his importance in art history canons, including “King's Pleasure” in New York and Los Angeles in 2024, on Fordation the Foody the Louis Vuitton, Jean-Michel-Michel Basquiat (Jean-Michel-Michel Basquiat' (Jean-Michel Basquiat' (Jean-Michel Basquiat) (2018-2019 and “Basee throres) and “Basee x warte and “painting” everywhere: the Brandt Foundation in New York, which includes the work.
Why did sales in the 21st century take place despite the 20th century? This makes me a tactical decision.
Christie's 21st Century Night Sale introduces masterpieces from the past 50 years of art history to paint the landscape of today's art culture. The famous blue-chip artists of the late 20th century brought background to emerging creators in the 21st century, and thus brought a new life to a new life. Basquiat, the cornerstone of this strategy, was a late 20th century artist who had pre-exhibited in almost every major art movement we see today.
Your sales also contain a section Objects selected by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian. Can you tell us more about this set of work?
The first sixteen works sold in the evening of the 21st century, as well as about forty pieces sold after the war and contemporary, are from famous collectors, patrons and writer Tiqui Atencio, as well as her husband, Ago Demirdjian. Tiqui's collection philosophy is wrapped up by a term she coined “travel” She links art to specific times and places, not only marks a moment in the couple’s lives, but also a way to help them understand the people and their history. So the highlights of the series reflect the lives they spent in Latin America (Herrera, Clark, Gego), New York (Hodges, Horn, Mehretu, Ruscha) and London (Brown, Hirst), who collected all of them in depth and all of them with extraordinary timing. Tiqui's highly sophisticated eyes have led her to become a highly sought after consultant for museums around the world, and she and formerly served on the influential committee of Tate Gallery, where she founded the Latin American Acquisition Foundation, Solomon R. Tiqui Could have, there should be (Art/Books, 2016), this is a series of interviews with collectors, For art reasons: at home of art dealers (Rizzoli, 2020) and In the Artist's Home: For Art (Rizzoli, 2024).
One of their chosen works was the late great Carmen Herrera. Can you tell me a little about this artwork and why it might attract auction buyers?
Carmen Herrera, a champion of “pure” or geometric abstraction, demonstrated transatlantic dialogue in the international history of 20th century abstraction, covering European constructivism and oncology, toward Brazilian and Cuban concrete art, Argentinian Madi and New York’s color fields and hard painting. Level, is an important example; it encapsulates Herrera's mature style, including clear lines and contrasting planes, creating infinite motion, rhythm and spatial tension.Level Belongs to a series of rare round or tondo paintings performed in 1965, a format briefly explored in the 1950s, but she returned to the 1960s with amazing color effects in the mid-1960s. The current example is contained in its contrasting diamond shape within a circle and pierced horizontally along the central axis and pierced with a color band, indicating that a beam of light radiates outward. rondo (blue and yellow) (1965), held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and was the most popular work since the mid-1960s, as they reflect the artist's full maturity of the artist's unique approach to hard edges or geometric abstractions. Level In 2016, in a career review by Herrera at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show cemented her place in the history of 20th century abstraction.
Your Simone Leigh’s work may set records for artists. Does this bring excitement to potential collectors? Paying is easy when you know you have the most expensive one?
The most exciting collector is excellent quality. Buyers want the best thing, what is this absolutely Sentinel IV yes. It is one of the most famous forms in Leigh's Oeuvre and is currently exhibited in MOMA and National Gallery.
I know one late addition to the lineup is Marlene Dumas Miss January (1997). There is a high estimate of this. What makes it so special?
Miss JanuaryThe huge scale and iconic theme establish the work as the Magnum Opus of Dumas. It masters the female form with triumph, while picking on the male-centered nudes of women. Dumas Miss World. It shows a model of charm in ten ideal forms, demonstrating her lifelong fascination with the censored female form. She's back to the topic Miss January More than thirty years later, perhaps her most ambitious work. Dumas' paintings are already rare at auctions. However, one of this quality has never been available. There is a third party assurance, which means the work has been sold in the artist's new auction record. This will also be the highest price to pay for the living female artists at auction.
Finally, the simplest question is: the annual UBS/Basell Market Report, public and private sales fell by 20% last year. What do you think of the art market?
While the total supply has declined, the quality of the art passed is still outstanding and customers are willing to compete for these best examples. Our sales rates and performance on estimates have remained stable in recent years, indicating that demand remains very strong.
