The primary of Christie’s two-part public sale of actual property investor Gerald Fineberg’s assortment featured large names and generated $153 million in gross sales, however most tons garnered hammer costs beneath or close to their low estimates, with a number of works going unsold.
The night sale, which passed off after the primary day of the Frieze New York, featured 65 plenty of trendy, postwar, and modern works spanning 100 years by blue-chip artists like Picasso, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christopher Wool, and Gerhard Richter. The Fineberg two-parter may even end off the public sale home’s Might gross sales in New York, which earlier this month noticed works from the collections of Paul Allen, S.I. Newhouse, and Alan and Dorothy Press hit the block.
Associated Articles
Fineberg’s holdings have been described by Christie’s as “distinctive and particular” for the breadth of types, actions, and artists spanning a century of artwork. Telephone bids got here in from Taiwan, Germany, and Amsterdam, however the last outcomes resembled the tepid gross sales at the Newhouse auction last week. The night did set 5 new public sale information for artists similar to Barkley L. Hendricks, Alma Thomas, and Alina Szapocznikow.
The night’s high lot was Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1963), which additionally had the most important estimate going into the night time at $15 million to $20 million. However, the work, which options the sentence “FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE” in colourful stenciling, hammered for less than $8.4 million, or $10.07 million with charges.
That discrepancy between estimates and hammer costs additionally occurred for works by Lee Krasner, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and Willem de Kooning. Richter’s 1967 portray Badende, which was exhibited on the 1972 Venice Biennale, carried an estimate of $15 million to $20 million, however bought for simply $9.61 million.
The Koons, a 1987 stainless-steel sculpture titled Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty), went for slightly below $2 million (estimate $3 million–$5 million), whereas a 1983 de Kooning bought for $5.3 million (estimate $8 million–$12 million) and a 1977 bought for $3.7 million (estimate $6 million–$8 million). The night’s two Krasners bought for $4.3 million (estimate $6 million–$8 million) and $3.4 million (estimate $4 million–$6 million).
Equally, Picasso’s 1969 Buste d’homme lauré realized a last public sale value of $8.46 million. This isn’t solely beneath the low finish of Christie’s estimate of $9 million to $12 million, however not far more than the $7.8 million Fineberg paid for portray at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in September 2018, which when adjusted for inflation is round $9.3 million.
Works by James Rosenquist, Norman Lewis, Louis Bourgeois, Francis Picabia, and Mark Grotjahn have been marked as handed and didn’t discover consumers.
The night, nonetheless, did get off to a momentous begin. The primary lot, a blue porcelain sculpture titled 109 (Face Jug Sequence) by Simone Leigh, bought for $630,000, above its estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. It was shortly adopted by a Beauford Delaney oil portray from 1960, Composition Blue, which bought for $781,200 (towards a $300,000–$500,000 estimate).
Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.410, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Three-Half Steady Kind (Stripes)), from ca. 1955, and Alice Neel’s The De Vegh Twins (1975) each prompted speedy bids from paddles within the showroom and purchasers on the telephone with specialists. Asawa’s galvanized metal and brass wire sculpture bought for $2.47 million, in between its estimate of $2 million to $3 million, and Neel’s portray bought for practically $2.6 million, properly above its estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million.
Regarding the night’s information, Thomas’s exuberant abstraction A Unbelievable Sundown (1970) bought for $3.9 million on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. Szapocznikow’s resin-and-granite sculpture Portret Wielokrotny (Dwukrotny) [Multiple Portrait (Double)], from 1967, additionally garnered speedy bidding, promoting for $907,200 and smashing its estimate of $150,000 to $200,000.
But it surely was the six minutes of bidding for Hendrick’s 1971 portrait of fellow artist Stanley Whitney that stole the night, because it was expected to break his current record. The final time a Hendricks work got here to public sale was in December 2020 the place it bought for $4 million. The Whitney portrait’s last value of $6.1 million (estimate $5 million–$7 million) solidly beat that file by greater than $2 million.
In a post-sale assertion, Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and modern artwork put a optimistic spin on the sale, saying that “Jerry Fineberg would have reveled on this night, which confirmed how far forward of the curve he was in his amassing evidenced by the multitude of world file costs set by artists, a lot of whom have by no means appeared in a night sale at Christie’s.”