Welcome back to Wall Power, your twice-weekly art market check-in. I’m Marion Maneker.

This evening I’m writing to you from the waters of Long Island Sound, where I’ve spent the last few official days of summer sailing in the 60th anniversary Shields National Championship regatta. For some reason, I’m reminded of the motto, “It’s not whether you win or lose that matters, it’s whether I win or lose.” Although we did not place on the podium for the event, there’s always the 70th anniversary a decade from now. Time passes quickly racing classic sailboats.

The art market can be like that, too. It doesn’t really matter how the overall market is performing to any individual buyer or seller, as long as their goals are achieved. Tonight, we’re going to look at some of the art works announced for the fall auctions and try to get some details on what’s being offered in the New York mid-season sales, which can be a good leading indicator for the fall.

But first…

• A Frick succession shocker: Ian Wardropper, who is stepping down from the Frick after 15 years at the helm, had publicly expressed hope that his chief curator, Xavier Salomon, would succeed him—helping to bring into the 21st century a museum whose modernization has been resisted by many interested parties. Instead, in a surprising turn, the Frick’s board chose Axel Rüger, currently the chief executive of the Royal Academy in London and previously the head of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Rüger will assume the post in the spring of 2025. Whither Salomon? Well, the Boston MFA is looking for a director…
• Chinese Art outperforms: The Asia Week auctions in New York were surprisingly strong this year, with Sotheby’s posting $15.3 million in their sale of Chinese art. (The auction house says half of the sold lots made prices above their estimates.) Christie’s is also touting the success of its Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art sale, which totaled $11.6 million. Christie’s says it had a very strong hammer ratio of 1.51, and sold 81 percent of the lots. Both of those measures are quite high for the category.
• Phillips’ Hockney sale makes £1.7M: Phillips has been running an annual sale of David Hockney prints and multiples, part of a broader strategic focus on the so-called “editions” market. This year, the sale totaled £1.7 million ($2.26 million), with high prices for Hockney’s 1998 set of Dog Wall prints (£317,500) and his 1961-63 set of A Rake’s Progress (£254,000). The sale was held in conjunction with a £3.66 million ($4.35 million) editions sale dominated by Andy Warhol prints, which took the top five spots in value. The sale was 91 percent sold by lot.
• Have two minutes?: A reminder to fill out this survey for the Puck Private Conversation, powered by Orchestra, an exciting new product we’re spinning up. We want your unvarnished opinion about everything. Do you think the S&P 500 will be higher six months from now? What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a work of art? (Be honest…) It’s yet another step toward Puck’s goal of bringing you into the conversations that matter in your world.

The painting’s colorful ownership saga may or may not have had an effect on its market appeal. Nevertheless, Sotheby’s has put an attractive $30 million estimate on the work, and secured a third-party backer for the sale. Notably, Untitled (Yellow and Blue) will sell around the same time as the auction house has a different, even higher-value Rothko in its New York sales. (Ideally, the higher-value work would be auctioned first, so that the underbidders might consider buying the lower-value work as a consolation prize.)

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if the Rothko retrospective held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last year has had a lasting effect on the artist’s market. Sales of several Rothkos last November were reasonably strong, but not priced anywhere near the peak of the market for this artist. That said, there was a bidding war for an exceptional smaller-scale work on paper, mounted on canvas, that suggests there are Rothko buyers willing to bid for the right works.

Christie’s announced last week that it had secured 20 works from the collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson for its fall sales. Brown and Wilson are best known as the hoteliers behind the 21c Museum Hotels group, a chain of boutique “art hotels” in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Kansas City, Louisville, Lexington, and Durham. Perhaps more pertinently, Brown is an heiress to the Jack Daniel’s liquor fortune who, along with her husband, has poured millions of dollars into the couple’s collection of sculpture, photography, and video and installation works—particularly by artists of color and women—much of which is not market-friendly.

Having bought paintings—which are market-friendly—by many now in-demand artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Simone Leigh, Nick Cave, Bisa Butler, and Titus Kaphar early in their careers, Brown and Wilson are now selling some of these works to fund their continuing acquisition of emerging art. Two of the top lots in the consignment are Leigh’s Meridian, from 2014, which is being offered with a $250,000 estimate; and Titus Kaphar’s An Icon for Destiny, from 2015, with the same estimate. Similar works by Leigh have sold for a wide range of prices, including one that made nearly $2.2 million two years ago; however, a vaguely comparable work failed to sell against a $500,000 estimate in December. The Kaphar is one of his works that employs tar alongside oil paint. Three of those have sold for prices between $750,000 and $1 million.

Beyond the Brown-Wilson consignment, there are a number of high-value works in these sales, including three different works estimated at $2 million at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. One is a large Ed Ruscha painting from 2015, which has a guarantee. Another is a small-scale Gerhard Richter abstract painting. Nine similar works have sold for prices above $2 million, and the work is backed by a third party. Sotheby’s has one of Ruth Asawa’s gnostic chainmail works, Untitled (S467), which is not backed by a guarantee. The $2 million estimate is high, but these works have sold for as much as nearly $5.4 million, though recent auction prices for comparable works have been closer to the $2 million mark.

Just below that level, Sotheby’s has a Cecily Brown landscape-inspired painting from 2001 that is estimated at $1.8 million. Less than a year ago, a similar landscape-inspired work from 2003 sold for $2.7 million. Christie’s has a very large (7 x 12 feet) Alex Katz painting, Springtime, from 2009, estimated at $1 million. These large-scale works by Katz don’t automatically command correspondingly high prices. But the pricing doesn’t seem out of line with paintings like On Time, which sold for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s last year. Meanwhile, Dana Schutz’s Eye Eater is at Sotheby’s with an $800,000 estimate. It’s been a year since anything of that value by the artist has hit the auction block. This is a bit of a surprise, since one of the highlights of last year’s Art Basel Paris was a huge retrospective—both in the number of works by Schutz and the sheer size of many of them. Schutz’s auction market peaked in 2021 with sales of $16 million worth of art, a big jump from the previous two years’ sales of around $10 million and a record price of $6.45 million paid in Hong Kong at the end of 2020.

The combined low estimate for all three auction houses is $64.9 million, including the works from the Abrams family collection sale. The artists with the most work are Andy Warhol (11), George Condo (10), Richard Prince (7), Vaughn Spann (6), Alexander Calder (6) and Tom Wesselmann (6). There are also five Robert Rauschenberg works on offer between Sotheby’s and Christie’s; each has a late-1970s work with estimates of $300,000 and $400,000, respectively. (The one at Sotheby’s is being deaccessioned from the Nassau County Museum to raise money for collections care.)

Across the sales, there are a number of works worth watching. Phillips has paintings by Robin F. Williams, Loie Hollowell, Yuan Fang, Nadia Waheed, Sara Anstis, and Daisy Parris to open the sale. Sotheby’s, for its part, starts with the in-demand Emmi Whitehorse, before offering works by Faith Ringgold, Sam Gilliam, and the recently deceased Richard Pettibone, among many others. Finally, at Christie’s, there’s a good run of opening works by Lois Dodd, Bob Thompson, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Hawkins, Takako Yamaguchi, and Ringgold, as well as more works from the Rosa de la Cruz collection, a few more of Gerald Fineberg’s works, and property from Robert Shimshak and Marion Brenner. According to Christie’s Post-War to Present sale head, Julian Ehrlich, Christie’s presale estimate is the highest ever for this event.

Does that imply an awakening of the market’s appetite? It seems nearly time for that. The market needs some good rotation into different names. And there are some works in these sales, including several tabletop John Chamberlain sculptures, that suggest tastes are indeed changing. That’s what these sales are good for, directional clues—even if how those trends play out, exactly, will take some time to discern. What we’re looking for in the meantime is information about demand that will be used to generate supply. (In other words, if there’s consistent demand for a particular artist, specialists will be able to find more of their work to sell by telling collectors now might be a good time to sell.)

As far as the broader health of the art market goes, well, things don’t change that quickly. As I tried to convey this summer using data from ARTDAI, there’s reason to believe the art market reached a bottom earlier this year, and that the expectations of sellers have begun to match the appetite of buyers. This season—we hope!—we’ll get to see some confirmation of that. But it will take some time before the big numbers at the top of the market swing back enough to move the needle.

See you Tuesday,
M