Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday. Mine was delicious, and not just because of the highly complicated New York Times pomegranate cardamon apple pie my nephew made.

Thanksgiving in the art world also means packing for Miami, but before we take our talents to South Beach, I want to share a remarkable story from the November auctions. The $121 million sale of Magritte’s L’empire des lumières obscured the success of another work, by the same title, that was riding its coattails.

Tonight, I’ll explain how that all came together, because it illustrates how the art market works, where the big numbers come from—when they come—and what we’ll need to see for those kinds of numbers to return to the market again in force.

But first…

• A Basel Miami Trump bump?: Before the holiday, I had a drink with a market veteran who’d been speaking to several primary market galleries in advance of Art Basel in Miami. This veteran said the gallerists seemed pumped and positive about their prospects for the fair, even as many of the parties and public events are being scaled back to fit these sober times. I had that information in mind as I read this quote in the FT from Kasmin Gallery’s Nicholas Olney: “The timing is good—it comes at the end of the year, when lots of collectors have clarity about their finances and just now the fundamentals of the economy are good. Whatever people feel about it, we have got past an election that had sucked up a lot of our headspace and we’ll have to see what the next four years bring. For now, it’s time to get to business.”

• Phillips sold $28.5 million in Hong Kong: Last week, Phillips’ evening sale of contemporary art in Hong Kong totaled HK$171 million ($22 million) with strong results for Moka Lee, Ulala Imai, Kohei Nawa, Claire Tabouret, Louise Bonnet, and Li Hei Di. This is the second strong sale at Phillips within a week for Li, who recently joined Pace Gallery. In New York, Li’s 2022 painting Unfolding a Flood made $127,000. Six days later in Hong Kong, 2021’s Orange Swim sold for $155,000. Phillips’ day sale totaled HK$50.9 million ($6.5 million), with noteworthy results for Atsushi Kaga, Ayako Rokkaku, Chiharu Shiota, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Zao Wou-ki, Chen Yifei, Zeng Hao, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan.
• Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s Groucho Club closure explained: An arrest was made in London over the weekend, revealing the reason for the recent shuttering of the Groucho Club in Soho: the suspected rape of a woman on the club’s premises on November 13. The Westminster City Council suspended the club’s license for 28 days until a hearing can be held, and the club’s chief executive officer said she closed the club voluntarily. Neither the club itself, which is owned by the couple behind Hauser & Wirth galleries, nor its employees have been accused of wrongdoing.

Prior to the announcement that Ertegun’s estate would be coming to market, art advisor Gabriela Palmieri knew that the big painting’s sale would be a singular opportunity for her clients, whose family had owned a version of the image painted on paper for more than 40 years, never showing it or even letting Magritte scholars know they had it. The collectors weren’t active sellers, but Palmieri convinced them the Ertegun sale would set up a once-in-a-lifetime market opportunity. Of the 27 images Magritte made of the night-shrouded street under a daybright blue sky flecked with picture-perfect clouds, 10 were painted on paper using opaque watercolors called gouache. Ertegun owned the largest painting on canvas in private hands; Palmieri’s clients had the largest work on paper.

The Magritte market has been climbing for the last three years. In 2022, $222 million in Magritte’s works were sold at auction. Last year, $192 million worth of the popular surrealist’s art traded hands publicly. Both figures were substantially higher than the previous high-water mark in Magritte’s market; in 2019, $116 million in sales were hammered. So far in 2024, with almost all of the year’s auctions completed, there have been $300 million in Magritte sales, with $177 million spent in November alone, including on the two L’empire des lumières images. After learning of the consignment for Ertegun’s Magritte, Palmieri convinced her clients to craft a unique arrangement: a $6 million estimate that signalled that the 14-by-18-inch work on paper was as important as any that has ever come to auction.

With the proper market signifiers in place, it would come down to Christie’s ability to market the two works in a way that played to their strengths, but didn’t undercut one another. Having the third-party guarantee for the big painting was crucial, alleviating any concern that bidders would be split between the works. In their exhibition, Christie’s placed the big Magritte in an alcove of its own, facing Ed Ruscha’s prized “gas station” painting, which would also be on the block. They placed the small gouache in another alcove, a decent walk away, along with some other surrealist and dada masterworks.

The gouache was being sold as a different class of object: The painting on canvas was a trophy, the work on paper a connoisseur’s piece. But part of the strategy was to attract disappointed bidders on the big painting to the smaller gouache as a kind of value play. If a bidder was prepared to spend more than $100 million for a large painting, the smaller version would seem like a bargain, or maybe a consolation prize.

Once the guarantee was met, all the action came from two telephone bidders. The guarantor and eventual winner was represented by Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of the 20/21 art departments. His opponent was Xin Li-Cohen, the house’s jet-setting deputy chair with strong ties to China. At least one observer who watched the bidding was charmed by the symmetry of Li-Cohen—who is married to Lyor Cohen, a legendary music industry presence—bidding on the prized painting of Mica Ertegun, another glamorous, globe-trotting figure who was married to a legendary music executive. (In fact, Cohen oversaw Atlantic Records, which Mica’s husband, Ahmet Ertegun, co-founded, and whose hits likely paid for the painting in 1968.) Li-Cohen chased the work all the way to $103.5 million; and, for a few moments, it seemed as if she might prevail. A flurry of calculations ensued on Rotter’s side of the room before he jumped his bid another million above the expected next increment of $104 million, to $105 million. With that, the hammer came down.

Christie’s had carefully placed the Ertegun L’empire des lumières as the last lot, a fitting crescendo to her dedicated sale, but selling the gouache required an assist. The hope was that the underbidder on the large painting would switch to the smaller one, but bruised feelings take a little time to get over, and Christie’s would have wanted a little space for the impact of the big sale to sink in. Also, if the big painting sold to the guarantor in an anticlimactic moment, the change of sale from Ertegun to various owners would act as a buffer, allowing bidders to regroup and rebuild momentum.

In the end, there were five lots placed between the big Magritte and its little brother, but the gouache was positioned right before Christie’s other big lot of the evening: Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, priced at $50 million but expected to be bid higher. In setting up the lot order, Christie’s both expressed its confidence in its ability to market both paintings and put all of its eggs into one high-risk basket. The big Magritte had a belt-and-suspenders third-party guarantee, but the small Magritte and the Ruscha were being sold naked, as they say. Both the little Magritte and the big Ruscha had to sell well for Christie’s to call the night a success—and make any money.

In the end, Christie’s didn’t have to worry. Close to a dozen different bidders chased the L’empire gouache. Bidding started in the room for as little as $4.8 million, but quickly escalated in a relay race of bidding and counter-bidding. Max Carter, who had done so much to carry the ball on Palmieri’s consignment in-house, came in at $11 million. There were still several bidders active at $14 million, but Li-Cohen—who’d come in at $12.5 million, presumably representing the under bidder on the big empire painting—pushed to $15.5 million. Carter took one last shot, chopping his bid to $15.7 million, which signalled to Li-Cohen that $16 million would most likely take it. She bid that… and won.

Art auctions rarely adhere to such a tightly choreographed and cinematic script. Minutes before the sale, Michel Legrand’s theme to The Thomas Crown Affair came over the sound system, in homage to a Magritte having been the object of Crown’s larcenous obsession in the 1999 remake. The sale of the gouache provided the necessary subplot to bring the whole story together.

The piece also cites his coup de grâce at the NPG, where he saved an important Joshua Reynolds painting for the British public by forging an alliance with the Getty museum. He’s now applying that same approach to the British Museum’s most famous possession, the statues from the Parthenon also known as the Elgin Marbles.

With that, I will leave you until Tuesday.

M