Although the mood for this auction season has been mixed and the overall volume of sales lukewarm at best, there were nonetheless headliners throughout the auction schedule. Amid last-minute withdrawals and past lots, there were works that defied assumptions – and an otherwise gloomy market climate – especially for market professionals willing to watch outside of primetime events. .
We’ve combed through hundreds of offers from this season’s sale at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips in New York to bring you a range of hot bundles.
Lynne Drexler (1928-1999)
summer flower (1962)
Lynne Drexler, summer flower (1962). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.
Auction: Christie’s, A Century of Art: The Gerald Fineberg Collection, Part II
Estimate: $150,000 to $200,000
Sold for: $1.4 million
One of the last works acquired by Gerald Fineberg, who died in December 2022, this small canvas features a sumptuous palette and a tight composition of cascading brushstrokes. The final price represented the second-highest result ever for the reclusive painter, whose work is being re-examined and whose market has boomed since the start of the pandemic.
summer flower was the most expensive of Drexler’s 14 lots on the block in New York this month. Two years ago, the painting was included in Explosions of colors | Dimensions of Sound: The Art of Lynne Mapp Drexler on Jody Klotz Fine Art in Abilene, Texas. Printed on the show’s catalog cover, it had an asking price of just under $150,000, according to Klotz, who played a big role in Drexler’s recent market resurgence. She paid $75,000 for the artist Gloucester Daffodil in May 2021, the highest price for a Drexler coin at auction (it was estimated between $8,000 and $12,000).
Reluctant to sell her show’s best works, Klotz “decided to put up unprecedented prices,” she said. “I had to scratch and fetch to make this show.” But she ended up selling the painting to an Italian collector, through a New York artistic adviser. Fineberg bought it about a year later; the painting was installed in his bathroom to brighten up his last days.
–Katia Kazakina
Fairfield porter (1907 – 1975)
girl in a landscape (1965)
Fairfield Doorman, girl in a landscape (1965). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Auction: Sotheby’s Contemporary Day auction, May 19, New York
Estimate: $500,000 to $700,000
Sold for: $2.8 million
The sale of the 1965 Fairfield Porter painting girl in a landscape set a new auction record for the American artist, nearly $1 million more than the previous record, set in 2018, according to Artnet Price Database. The work was up for auction for the first time since its acquisition by the previous owner in 1980. Sotheby’s declined to reveal who the sender was, saying simply that it was a private company collection, but one archive catalog entry found in the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery indicates the owner was United Missouri Bank of Kansas City.
The market for Porter’s art appears to be steady over the years, with steady sales of his paintings, drawings and lithographs. But girl in a landscapewhich depicts the artist’s eldest daughter, Katie, exceeded pre-sale expectations with a price of $2.8 million (including fees), reaching a price four times higher than the high estimate (without premium).
Charlotte Mitchell, a specialist in the American art department at Sotheby’s, said the market’s enthusiasm was a response to the quality of the work, which combines “two of Fairfield Porter’s most famous motifs: depictions of the landscape of the Maine and portraits of his family”. Another landscape oil on panel by Porter, Large spruce head, was offered at the same sale. It sold for $279,400, more than double the high estimate excluding fees.
–Vivienne Chow
Jenna Gribbon (born in 1978)
Focus on list of sets (2020)
Jenna Gribbon, Focus on list of sets (2020). Image courtesy of Christie’s.
Auction: Christie’s Contemporary and Post-War Art Sale
Estimate: $40,000 to $60,000
Sold for: $403,200
As an avowed fan of Jenna Gribbon, I enjoyed seeing her iconic dreamlike portraits, which the curator and Katy Hessel diffuser described as “almost electrically colored canvases”, everywhere from last fall’s Armory Show to Frick Madison (as part of the program that combines contemporary works with the collection’s famous Old Masters), and recently as part of buzz about “Back viewexhibition at LGDR’s new Upper East Side mansion gallery space. Gribbon’s work in this exhibition is actually included in a “hanging” presentation in a single piece, titled “Full Frontal” which features more explicit works.
It is therefore perhaps not entirely surprising that Focus on list of sets (2020), so far soared above the estimate and set a new auction record. It represents a musician seated on the floor of a stage in the middle of a tangle of black wires, against a fluorescent pink canvas. She seems focused on a presumably imminent musical performance. The second highest price of $123,400, a third of the current highest price, was achieved at Christie’s last fall. To date, a total of 23 works by Gribbon have been auctioned.
The painting “vibrated with energy…[and] has it all,” said Kathryn Widing, co-director of postwar and contemporary sales. “Gribbon’s decidedly bold brushwork, a scene that is both familiar and otherworldly, and the neon pink hue of the paint, created a halo around the canvas. It was a painting that I kept coming back to appreciate during our preview.
—Eileen Kinsella
Yellow Quick-to-See-Smith (born 1940)
Playground (1987)
Yellow Quick-to-See Smith, Playground (1987). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Auction: Sotheby’s Contemporary Day auction
Estimate: $100,000 to $150,000
Sold for: $546,100
If you suspect this propelling result stems from April 2023, when Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith opened the first-ever retrospective by a Native American artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art, your hunch is both correct and only a part of the story. Playground is in fact the tenth work by the artist to more than triple its high estimate (including fees) at auction since November 1, 2022, according to the Artnet price database. It is also the seventh batch from the same period to sell for an all-inclusive price of at least $337,500. Not bad for an artist whose bidding peak was just $8,125 through December 2020.
The excitement around the Quick-to-See-Smith practice no doubt has roots in his Whitney show, but that’s just a manifestation of the art establishment more important last minute interests among contemporary artists from Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous communities since around 2016. The years since have seen the work of Northwest Coast Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick curated in Documenta 14 in 2017; Tlingit/Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial; the Met commissioned murals from Cree-Canadian artist Kent Monkman for the walls of its Great Hall the same year; and a selection of these and other Native American and First Nations artists appear at a variety of major art fairs over the past six plus years, to name a few examples.
It would be simplistic to say the least to describe the recent success of Quick-to-See-Smith as strictly part of a macro-level trend. She has exhibited commercially with New York’s highly respected Garth Greenan Gallery since 2018, cultivated significant curatorial relationships for years, and developed a distinctive visual vocabulary with a combination of figuration and abstraction that matches the aesthetic of the moment. . Sometimes personal vision, institutional recognition and a broad change in taste merge.
—Tim Schneider
Maurice Sievan (born in 1898)
Zoogarluk (1960)
Maurice Sivan, Zoogarluk (1960). Courtesy of Philips.
Auction: Phillips’ Contemporary and 20th Century Art Day Sale
Estimate: $15,000 to $20,000
Sold for: $279,400
Typically, hot lots are associated with young artists of the moment whose market is just starting to recover. But that’s not always the case, as evidenced by the runaway success of Maurice Sienna’s Zoogarluk (1960), which stunned Phillips’ 20th Century and Contemporary sales when it grossed $279,000. about thirteen times its high estimate of $20,000.
Sievan is a Russian painter who died in 1981 at the age of 82. His success came in the 1940s, when he painted landscapes of the American suburbs, earning him the nickname “award-winning suburban artist”. Although his name is no longer heard often, his work is part of the permanent collections of the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Hirshhorn.
What is interesting about the success of this piece is that it is a later, more abstract work, whereas Sievan’s practice is usually associated with a more moody interpretive canvas. It was the artist’s first auction. Other of his paintings are estimated to sell for just a few hundred dollars, according to the auction site Invaluable. To add to the mystery, Zoogarluk has no provenance and was purchased directly from the artist’s studio.
—Annie Armstrong
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