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

Tonight, I’m previewing some of the artists in the Christie’s and Phillips sales on Thursday that might be helpful indicators of the state of the market, and where it’s headed. I’ve also got some results from tonight’s $106 million sale at Sotheby’s.

• Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is looking for a new director: The turnover in museum leadership continues. Early this year, the Frick announced that director Ian Wardropper would retire in 2025 after a 14-year tenure. Late last week, Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, announced that he would also retire in 2025 after a decade in charge.

  Teitelbaum, a scholar of Canadian art, had been the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario for 17 years—where he led the $306 million expansion and renovation of the museum by Frank Gehry—before joining the M.F.A. In Boston, there would be no grand building project; instead, Teitelbaum’s tenure was focused on creating stronger ties to the community, renovating conservation facilities and galleries, and building a strategic 10-year plan. The museum will only be halfway through that plan when Teitelbaum retires.

  Although Teitelbaum oversaw the acquisition of important collections of Dutch art, Chinese art, and photography at M.F.A., his tenure will be remembered most for fostering a stronger connection between the museum and the public. At a recent conference, MoMA’s Glenn Lowry underscored the importance of these programming and community initiatives when he expressed his fear that a populist Congress, having intimidated and facilitated the firing of university presidents, would next turn toward museums. He advocated for strong community ties through vibrant programming while acknowledging the challenges to funding these programs. Donors, after all, prefer to underwrite buildings and art, not internships for curators.

• Seattle Art Museum names new director and C.E.O.: The Seattle Art Museum announced today that it has chosen the C.E.O. of Tulsa’s Philbrook Art Museum, Scott Stulen, as its new director and chief executive. As with Teitelbaum in Boston, Stulen’s emphasis will be on engagement. S.A.M. praised Stulen for having a “transformative approach to museum practice, a deep commitment to inclusivity, and a focus on art as a means to increase civic engagement.” During his eight years in Tulsa, Stulen presided over “an exponential growth” in attendance. Before leading the Philbrook, Stulen was the curator of audience experiences and performance at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
• Gagosian hires Mike Ovitz’s curator: For the past 17 years, Viet-Nu Nguyen, who goes by Nu, was the curator of the Ovitz Family Collection. She has just joined Gagosian as a director in Los Angeles, where she will work with artists including Mark Grotjahn and Jonas Wood. Gagosian seems to be shoring up his relationships with the artists who supply his selling machine.
• Christie’s to sell some cool stuff that Paul Allen owned: Christie’s announced today that they would continue their relationship with Paul G. Allen’s estate by holding two online auctions and one live sale in early September. The works on offer range from a Gemini spacesuit (estimated at $80,000) to a signed letter from Albert Einstein to F.D.R. foreshadowing the possibility of an atomic bomb (estimated at $4 million) to a DEC PDP-10 computer (estimated at $30,000), similar to the machine that Allen and Bill Gates used to create Microsoft’s first software product in 1975. The online sales will close on September 12; the live sale will take place on September 10. (Just a reminder: We still haven’t seen some important works from Allen’s art collection. Presumably, his sister and heir Jody Allen is holding on to them.)
• Sotheby’s announces new Paris headquarters: I’ve reported this before, but just to put a bow on it: Yesterday, Sotheby’s officially announced that it would be moving its Paris headquarters down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to the former home of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, in October. The full building gives Sotheby’s a 200-seat auction room on the ground floor, visible from the street, and exhibition spaces that open into the auction room. There is also a “luxury showroom” on the upper floors where “unique and exceptional objects” will be sold for fixed prices. Sotheby’s has been talking about expanding its luxury retailing capacity since Patrick Drahi acquired the company in 2019, but the new showroom in the Paris headquarters is modest in scope—about twice the size of the building’s 30-seat café—so the rollout is going slowly.
• Sotheby’s announces leadership of Modern and Contemporary art in Hong Kong: Tomorrow morning, Sotheby’s will release a raft of personnel changes. The proximal cause is the return of Alex Branczik and Max Moore from Hong Kong, who were seconded to the Asian capital of the auction house for three years to help Nathan Drahi, son of billionaire Sotheby’s owner Patrick, kickstart growth.

  With a new headquarters opening in Hong Kong next month, Elaine Holt, who comes from Christie’s, will lead the Modern and Contemporary art team in Asia, joined by Joseph Yang (formerly of Poly Auction) and Boris Cornelissen (who had left Sotheby’s to run his own gallery in Australia). Moore has returned to New York, where he will work in private sales and run Sotheby’s Sealed, the company’s experiment with blind bidding. Branczik will become the head of Modern and Contemporary art in Europe. Other new roles will be announced tomorrow.

Even in soft sales there can be strong showings. Tonight, Françoise Gilot posted her ninth-highest auction price, for a 1944 self-portrait that made $457,200. A bouquet of lilacs that Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted in 1878 sold for more than 2.5 times the estimate to make $8.7 million. Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Agnes Martin, and Lucy Bull all had good nights, too.

But we’re not done yet. On Thursday, Phillips and Christie’s will hold their much smaller London sales. Despite the size, there are still some important works on offer that may foreshadow the direction of the market. From a student of the Surrealists to a painter who toiled in obscurity only to find success late in life, the art market is filled with stories even when the momentum has slowed. Using data from my friends at ARTDAI, here are my picks for what to watch on Thursday.

Yiadom-Boakye’s first million-dollar sale took place in 2017, when The Hours Behind (2011) sold for $1.5 million. Although it would take another four years for a sale to beat that price, another work sold for just above $1 million in 2019. In 2021, Diplomacy III (2009) sold at auction for $1.95 million. Again, half a dozen works sold for prices just below Diplomacy III during the next two years, until Six Birds in the Bush (2015) sold for $3.6 million in October 2023.

In 2021, nearly two-thirds of her auction volume of $5.4 million came from works sold for prices below $1 million. By 2022, 80 percent of her $6.8 million auction volume had come from works sold above $1 million. Last year, that ratio was even higher, with $9.2 million in Yiadom-Boakye’s art sold at auction. So far this year, that figure has already reached $5.7 million, and there are two works on offer in London this week that have a combined estimate of almost $2 million.

Of the two works on offer, Minotaur to Matador (2022), at Phillips, is the higher estimate. The triptych of three figures carries expectations of £900,000 ($1.14 million). At Christie’s, 5am, Cadiz (2009) carries a £600,000 estimate. So far, there seems to be no slacking in demand for Yiadom-Boakye’s work.

In 2018, Hauser & Wirth took over representation of the Förg estate. For much of his career, the market prized a series of works where he painted large blocks of color on lead formed over wood, but over the past six years, the Back and Forth paintings have come to dominate the upper echelons of Förg’s auction results. The auction record for Förg is $1.7 million, for an untitled group of lead paintings from 1990, but almost every other painting by Förg that has sold for more than $700,000 since 2018 has been from the squiggle series. Christie’s version from 2008 is estimated at £400,000; Phillips’ painting from 2007, estimated at £300,000, has a more subdued range of colors.

Now, Christie’s is selling one of the Double Poke in the Eye II works from 1985. This neon comes from a series with examples held by the Tate Museum, the New Museum, and others. One example was sold in 2011 for $338,500. Then in 2014, another sold for $461,000 and that same piece sold again the next year for $665,000. Two years ago, one sold for $478,800. Last year, another made $504,000.

The piece at Christie’s is estimated at £300,000, which assumes a selling price similar to the two recent sales. But the works are on a slight upswing in price, and each sale takes another editioned work from the series out of the market, at a time when potential buyers are being introduced to the artist in Asia. So this will be interesting to watch.

Since then, Boetti’s auction totals have dropped, but only because of the lack of high-value sales. More Boetti lots were sold in 2023 than in 2022. So far this year, as many Boetti works were sold as in all of 2022.

For an artist who made works out of humble materials and commissioned artisans to fabricate his conceptual works, it should be fitting that his market fills out throughout lower price points. In 2023, and so far in 2024, less than half of the auction value has come for works sold for seven figures.

Sotheby’s sold an embroidered work for $914,400. On Thursday, Christie’s will sell the remainder of a large collection of works consigned by a single owner across sales in New York and London, including an embroidered 25 x 25 cell grid of letters with a £350,000 estimate and a third-party guarantee. The guarantee isn’t surprising considering one of these 1988 25 x 25 works, also from the same collection but composed of a series of 25 smaller 5 x 5 cell panels, sold for nearly $900,000 in March.

The one work that sold this year, also at Christie’s, handily exceeded its estimate to make nearly $250,000. That suggests there is still substantial demand for Kahn’s work around the world; Zwirner’s reach as a gallery should be able to capitalize on that demand. With those facts in mind, I'll be watching the sales of two paintings from the early 1990s at Christie’s on Thursday. Both are estimated at a level similar to the work sold earlier in the year.

When Zwirner took over representation of Katherine Bernhardt in 2021, sales volume rose and her top prices increased substantially. Kahn’s auction record was set early in this market run, but he’s had high-value confirmation sales as late as November of 2023.

That representation, combined with a surge in interest in Surrealism among young artists—not to mention a show of Copley’s work at the Fondazione Prada in 2017—provoked new auction demand for Copley’s art. In 2021 and 2022, Copley’s sales volume reached a new high, with the most lots ever auctioned in 2022. This year, Copley’s average price has reached a new high of more than $125,000. A 1973 work, La Grand Bouffe, is on offer at Phillips with a £60,000 estimate.